Geospatial tech is the key to building a water-secure India: Shubo Biswas, founder, GreenGood Labs | Technology News

An engineering graduate from the National Institute of Technology, Durgarpur, Shubo also has an MS in Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering from the University of Windsor.

Shubo spoke to indianexpress.com on new trends in geospatial analytics, the impact that it has had, and how advanced water analytics using geospatial tech is key for building a water-secure India. Edited excerpts:

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What are the areas/themes where geospatial analytics tech has been used for generating substantial social impact?

Shubo Biswas: First is with managing agriculture, in monitoring areas like the spread of greenery, the density of crops, the yield of the crops, biomass and vegetation, and other aspects related to the health of the agriculture sector. It can also track themes like carbon sequestration. Secondly, it is with regard to weather predictions. We can track cloud movement patterns, wind patterns, rainfall, temperature, surface temperature, and make decisions based on the same. This is also an area where the India Meteorological Department has been a pioneer in using tech solutions, and it is quite a mature sector.

GreenGood Labs focuses on water analytics, where one can track water availability, flow, and siltation of different kinds of water assets, from lakes, rivers, and ponds. We have developed a suite of tools that allow us to track and manage water assets across the surface of the planet. So it’s not just water bodies that we analyse per se, but the water bodies and streams that connect to the water bodies, the whole watershed, and the water ecosystem.

The final use case is the use of geospatial tech in tracking climate change and disasters, whether it be monitoring floods, droughts, or earthquakes. We have a large number of cases where this tech has even predicted droughts much before they occur. These are based on water flows and water basin health.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What are the new trends/innovations in geospatial analytics?

Shubo Biswas: Earlier, we used to collect large amounts of data, and the focus was on photos or images. Now, data collection has moved from the visible spectrum into the invisible spectrum and to the data in the infrared and ultraviolet spectra.

Some significant changes are happening in this industry. We have more satellites collecting more data. Secondly, they are collecting higher-resolution data, helping researchers interpret more from each photo. Thirdly, the spectrum has moved from the visible spectrum to the invisible spectrum to what we now call hyperspectral imaging.

And finally, we are using machine learning and AI to analyse the data in depth and come up with valuable insights, and that too on a near real-time basis.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: You talk about the growing role of analytics and geospatial tech in managing water resources. Can you explain?

Shubo Biswas: In India alone, there are 3.2 million water bodies, both big and small, and only 10 per cent of them are being tracked. Until last year, the country did not have a precise number of water bodies. GreenGood Labs came up with the statistic. It is not that the situation is better in the developed economies. Even in the United States, the figure of waterbodies being tracked is still around 10 per cent. Whatever the tracking mechanisms that we have, the manual tracking mechanism, or the gauges, are a bit crude but practical and reliable. Leave alone that it would track only a few parameters compared to what we could do with geospatial tech, it is quite expensive to install and maintain them. To install such gauges across all our water bodies, it might cost around Rs 1.3 lakh crore, and we need to maintain them year on year. Geospatial tech can do it much better and track more parameters with a fraction of the cost. The efficiencies and cost benefits are very compelling.

What Indian policymakers require is real-time data of water bodies and the water ecosystem, so that data-driven decisions can be taken. This is what source-security and empowerment of decentralised local water management committees as part of the Jal Jeevan Mission is about. We need to study our water bodies in depth. We need to study underwater topography and silt formation for better decisions. For example, there are around 40,000 water bodies in Maharashtra, and the government has plans to desilt the water bodies regularly. How will they decide what water bodies to desilt first or what to avoid? There is no data from these manual gauges. It is only with geospatial tech that we could reach such decisions.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us briefly about what GreenGood Labs does?

Shubo Biswas: We have a philosophy that our products or apps should be so simple to use that we do not produce user manuals. We want them to be intuitive to use.

We have a Water Assets Remote Management app (WARM) which helps users monitor the water assets that they have, whether it be rivers, lakes, ponds, or tanks, and use geospatial tech to monitor them and glean insights from this data. This data is near real-time, and the analytics platform we have built on the data helps national and state governments, local bodies, communities, and even active citizens to monitor and understand water flows and a host of other issues. Some of this data has been collected for the past 10-20 years, so we can use our tool to go back in time to see how the water body has evolved over the years.

We also have the visual watershed planning tool, which analyses the whole watershed and provides insights using geospatial data. It monitors the weather, soil, and water. We use this for holistic watershed design.

During cyclone Amphan, which hit West Bengal, Odisha and Assam around five years ago, we were the first ones to publish the flood maps that showed how the disaster relief forces could respond. We could identify all the communities that were impacted, for the disaster relief could be directed in an appropriate way.

We work in two ways. On one hand, there are a larger number of satellites that are already collecting some amount of data and which are spread across multiple databases and in various formats. We build an analytical lens and a platform to analyse the data for the governments and the farming community. Then there are those users or stakeholders who come to us for extremely granular data on waterbodies, and then we work with various satellite companies to explore their proprietary datasets or collect fresh data and come up with solutions for our users.

I am a systems engineer, and I used to build airplanes in my earlier avatar. I want to bring the precision and accuracy that we use in aerospace manufacturing to rural development and water management.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Where are your products being used, and what have been your learnings in using them?

Shubo Biswas: We are working with the agencies in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Assam on using tech to understand the watershed systems that are the most degraded, and put time and resources on that front. In Maharashtra, we have been working with nonprofits on the desilting of water bodies. You must understand that our solutions are unique in the sense that they provide information on siltation of water bodies, whether it be dams or reservoirs. The normal way to do that would be to take a guesstimate or wait till the water dries up to get an accurate picture. Now, geospatial tech has advanced so much that we can analyse siltation levels fairly accurately, and this helps the government to decide where and when to do de-siltation activities. Otherwise, it is merely shooting in the dark. A lot of money gets wasted. Our tools do a 3D modelling of water bodies, so that we can find where and how siltation is happening and fight it.

In Tamil Nadu, we are working on the restoration of water tanks and reservoirs, and in Rajasthan, we are working on where to locate farm ponds, to be of use to farmers. We are also collaborating nationally with the Jal Jeevan Mission in India on various projects.

We are active globally too, doing water analysis projects in Uganda, Spain, Guyana, Thailand, and the United States.

We had used our tech to predict the drought in the Latur district of Maharashtra last year. This was based on an analysis of the water availability, water flows, health of the water ecosystem in the district and other factors.

During last year’s water scarcity in Bengaluru, we had our WARM app running, which could provide information on the availability of water in nearby waterbodies. This helped citizens and communities plan their water requirements in a sensible manner and reduced a sense of panic among citizens, and such information availability helped reduce overcharging by water tanker operators.

Apart from grassroots farmer organisations and governments at the national, state, and local levels, there could also be various potential end users of our products. They could be from the finance and insurance sectors or businesses tied to water. For example, even development banks which are giving agricultural loans would need access to water analytics. Crop insurance, home insurance – all of them would need to analyse past disaster data.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: As a former global CTO of Deshpande Foundation, tell us about your tech for good interventions?

Shubo Biswas: The Deshpande Foundation, working in Karnataka, Telangana, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra, was working to build farm ponds for farmers to tide them over the water crisis in the regions. The target was to build around 3000-4000 farm ponds every year. My work was to provide tech backend, analysing the watershed for optimal location of interventions, tracking logistics, workers, vehicles, payments, and such. It was a very fulfilling experience, and it gave me a lot of insight into the problems of the farming community and how tech could be of help to them.

We also helped set up the Rural Transformation Technology Center at Hubli in Karnataka. This was a one-of-a-kind command and control centre, with the latest geospatial technologies to identify, plan, implement, and monitor large-scale rural development projects.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: How do geospatial analytics and AI work together?

Shubo Biswas: With machine learning and AI, one could get analytics done at speed and scale in an unimaginable way. It need not be like searching for a needle in a haystack. It is much more doable, and the insights with enormous amounts of data are way better.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Which areas do geospatial startups normally work on?

Shubo Biswas: We find that a lot of geospatial startups are working in the field of agriculture, monitoring cropping patterns, and leading to the monitoring of agri produce. There are some in the field of water analytics like us, but not many who work with grassroots organisations trying to provide real-time information for both governments and communities to use such data in a better manner.