 Welcome to the NPTEL course on Rural Water Resource Management. This is Professor Penanchin Asami from IIT Bombay. I am with Center for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas. It is a very unique department for rural regions and development. India is an agrarian nation. Everyone knows that most of the livelihood for Indian population is dependent on agriculture, even though we have a lot of innovations and technologies. So, it is very important to understand the concerns for rural India. Also, the population of India is ever increasing. With increase of population, there is a more demand for food production which again comes back to rural India because they have to produce the food necessary for the growing population. In those circumstances, managing the water resource becomes of utmost importance. This is because for agriculture, water is one of the key resource. On that note, this course has been developed with lot of field insights to understand rural water resource management. The course is also on a track to sensitize people, those who are taking the course. On what are their issues in rural water resources and how can you manage them better? This course also looks into groundwater which is one of the most important resource under the water for agriculture water management because not always rainfall can be used for your crops, groundwater is also needed. The course starts with an introduction of the hydrological cycle and multiple parameters that go into understanding the hydrological cycle in a rural setting. We have hydrological cycles for different areas but we will focus mostly on rural regions. Then the course would jump into some briefs and more discussions on particular aspects of rural water issues. And following up, we would go in and look at some materials that would cover the necessary water resource management tools. We will also look into natural versus constructed water resource management techniques and methods and these would help eventually for better rural water resource management. The course content is mostly taken from field notebooks, some textbooks which are given in the webpage and also lot of literature which has been published widely. We also would be taking learnings and understanding from the NGO stakeholders and government agencies in form of reports and books. On top of it, we will also take understandings from my field work experience. This course is very important for water resource managers, those who want to look into long-term sustainability of water, civil engineers, earth scientists and growing citizens of India who are interested in water management. I welcome you all for this course. Thank you.