Can drones improve infrastructure management and monitoring in rural India?
LOCATION | India
SECTOR | Infrastructure
TECH | UAVs
TIMELINE | May 2017 - March 2019
PARTNER | Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
The Challenge
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) targets nearly 50 million of the poorest people in rural India — providing a basic safety net and promoting long term poverty reduction through improved infrastructure, primarily linked with water management and agriculture.
The MGNREGS currently faces three challenges:
Measuring the impact of MGNREGS infrastructure on the poorest people to inform technical and policy reforms;
Monitoring the progress and quality of the works to ensure effective use of public money;
Applying accurate data to improve planning and designing of infrastructure.
The Idea
One of the basic requirements of all water related infrastructure projects is high resolution topographic information to derive all terrain parameters. Drones can provide topographic data at a resolution of less than 50 cm at a very low cost in addition to the high resolution images of the project area with very limited ground visits particularly to inaccessible areas. This pilot aimed implement drones to capture precise characteristics of rural land, including catchment area, land use pattern, soil type, water bodies, human settlements and quality of existing infrastructure. These precise measurements would have aided in government officials' regional planning and monitoring, even in the most inaccessible areas.
What we learned
Much of the pilot’s progress came from collaborations with other FCDO-funded programs. We worked closely with FCDO’s Infrastructure for Climate Resilient Growth programme, which helped us the site for the pilot, provided access to local government stakeholders in rural areas and facilitated contact with senior-level officials to explore how to scale.
It is challenging to have accurate insight into pilot activities while being based in the UK. It was only upon traveling to India, following a period of non-transparency by the supplier, that we learned the supplier was not performing as expected. Possible solutions include more travel by the FT team or engagement of a local resource to audit the project.
What happened next?
Due to the poor performance of the supplier engaged on the pilot, stakeholders did not feel it appropriate to propose the wider application of the technology across the programme and the pilot was discontinued.
Read more
Read the pilot’s story — “Drones for planning rural infrastructure: an innovative approach”