 Hello everyone, welcome to the NPTEL course on Remote Sensing and GIS for Rural Development. This is week 2 lecture 4. In the lecture 3, we looked at remote sensing and GIS as a tool for rural development in the sectors of water crop heat. We did say that we will also introduce it in the infrastructure theme. Since infrastructure can be broken into multiple sub-themes, we have kept it as a separate lecture. So, let us get into lecture 4 of week 2. This remote sensing has varied applications for rural development infrastructures. So, there are infrastructures that are really needed for rural development. In week 1, we have already given some snippets, some examples of how to use these infrastructures for rural development. In today's lecture, I will also reiterate some of these while we look at the examples. Let us say first housing. A good housing is needed to sustain rural development for a long term. If you look at the current climate change scenarios, especially floods, flash floods, houses are washed away and along the coastal regions, there is always a fear of losing the houses to incursion of seawater because sea level is rising if you look at Bangladesh and other places. So, you would see like big flood comes and along the coastal regions houses are washed away. So, housing becomes a very important aspect of rural development. Whether with climate or without climate, you do need a house to live, basic amenities, water food housing. So, water and food we discussed in the last lecture. In today's, we are discussing on the infrastructure and of the infrastructure, the most important housing. And unlike your cities where you can have alternate housing, it is not available in rural areas, especially tribal areas, areas along the forest borders, there is a need for better housing, excuse me. So, we will look at that aspect. For example, the rural development ministry or Ministry of Rural Development which I explained in the first week's lecture has already invested in multiple programs for building these rural houses. These are very unique because it is not along your major high maize, it is along not along your electric power grids or water lines because people are staying in a particular region where they have the field, agricultural field and or where the water is available for their livelihood, rural livelihood. They cannot commute, like they do not have a bus train like in Mumbai, you catch a train to go into the city and come out for work, it is not available. So, the best they could do is stay very close to their livelihood options, farming, forest, aquaculture, fish, cattle rearing, rearing is very important, they have to take it to different, different patches, the sheep, goat and cattle, I am talking across India, so all these are very important. So, what happens is the houses are somewhere along those lines and not along the major roads and major water supply for drinking or electricity. So, these houses are carefully done by the ministry, if you could see there is also a solar panel and there could be a water purification filter, but mostly these areas may have good water, like maybe they are using river water and boiling and drinking, but if the government has identified pollutants, the best thing to do is filters and lot of rural filters are being introduced for water drinking. So, these kind of housing schemes are available in the ministry. Next is schools, so once you have good houses for your livelihood options, the next generation, the children, the kids, they have to go to school, they have to get some knowledge from the schooling levels and for that school is needed. They cannot commute far away, nor can they take online classes like NPTML because of power issues or internet issues, etc. They can download the material and come and see, but not as easily as in a city, so schools are very, very important because they have been, the literacy rate is always less in rural villages compared to urban centres and one of the reasons is the accessibility to school is an issue. You cannot walk three hours to go to school, people have done that, lot of students still walk a lot of kilometres to go to school in rural villages. It is because schooling cannot also be catered to one person because there is incurred cost, but on the other hand, they should not be let out of the system, so what can be done? So mapping through rural sensing helps. These are very, very important schemes by the Mahatma Gandhi National Council of Rural Education which also ties up with the Ministry of Rural Development. Remember that hospitals, traditional medicine is still practised in some rural villages, however, there is always the need of hospitals, clinics, public health service. So India is very proud that during the COVID vaccination programme, villagers were also vaccinated and that was achieved through these rural hospitals. So the location and monitoring of these village hospitals, health care clinics or it is called by different names in different states because there is a state agency and a central agency. These rural health infrastructures have to be mapped so that the people load how much people come in and go can be accessed and how to supply medicine and other infrastructure can be mapped. So there is an example of putting houses in correct locations but not climatically correct locations so there has been moved. But schools and hospitals also in the past there has been put in locations where people did not use it because it is too far inaccessible and with other issues. These can be greatly avoided if it is mapped. The final thing that connects everything together is roads. So from house to school, if it is a good road is there, schools can be occupied. Again a house to hospitals if the road is good they can quickly go and get health care and most importantly roads also provide transportation of their produce. The livelihood options that they do could be crops, it could be your milk, dairy products, the aquaculture, cattle, whatever it is in terms of sheep, goat, chicken, poultry everything needs a transportation and that transportation is through national highways, state highways, district roads and rural roads. The green part, the rural roads is less documented because national highways it is very well documented even Google map picks it up. There are stores where the if you use it you pay so the quality is monitored, the accuracy of the map of the roads are all monitored. Then when you come to state highways some state governments do monitor it very well as per national standards but also depending on the budgets there are different status of state highways. District roads comes under the local governments, panchayats and municipalities whereas the rural roads come under the local governments and mostly the panchayats. If the rural is contributing to a municipality it does 50-50% but mostly the panchayats, grand panchayats they take care of it. They don't have the capacity to put it as a map. So for example if you use your right services or Google maps to go to these villages it will be named as unnamed road. But if you go to the village there is a name for the road. There is a specific name but it will be on the map as unnamed road and sometimes the road is not officially on the map but when you go there there is a road. Okay it may be going through a public property or a private property like public as in school grounds it will go through or in a private it will go through a particular person's land. The land owner was generous that people can use it they don't care maybe it's a barren land so they didn't they didn't do much. It's not a official road which means like paved road or cement or a tar road it is just a barren land. However if we map these school children can go to school fast because school in rural is not as cumbersome or cannot be as loaded as in urban cities because after school the children have to come back and work in the village farms. So my father would still after college in school go to his farm and pick vegetables put water apply irrigation water for the field and all it takes considerable time. So when I in my leave days I used to experience that when I go in summer and holidays I do the manual labor it is painstaking so understanding that the load the curriculum and the timing of the school is limited after school maybe after lunch they will come back play and then take part in the family's agricultural activities. In some cases or most cases they wake up very very early in the morning help the parents in the field and then get ready to go to school. There are a lot of dropouts because of the rural conditions they have to support the family so they may be dropping out of school to take care of the farmland. However if the school connectivity is good then children can come back to school faster learn and then go back if needed to help the farms. The priorities are like that correct they have to run the farm so education is good but at the end of the day they still have to help their parents. So connectivity is not only in the roads but also your communication devices. The government has put a lot of emphasis and budgets on giving advisories to farmers using the agricultural universities KVK's and IMD kind of advisories. However if the rural house does not have cell phone connectivity then the advisory that comes to the phone is delayed. Let's say for a coastal community the advisories do not go to the sea because there is a flood brewing there is a big flood coming. However if the advisory is not received in time and the fisherman goes into the sea there are high chances that they will be caught up in the cyclone storm etc. So this connectivity is very important for their livelihood also for their schools and this Covid last two years has clearly indicated that when there was a big lockdown schools had to still continue and they continued using good connectivity. Suppose in lockdown there was no cell phone networks how would the classes been run even IIT we did all of the classes in online mode right because we could not have students in campus doing the peak lockdown so exams were conducted online. So all this requires high bandwidth or at least good quality bandwidth which is not available in rural entities. Think about this if there is a connection given and there's a big population feeding on to a connection the cost of the connection comes down per person okay because to set up a tower and give connection there is a cost let's say 5000 rupees 10 people will share it it's 500 per person but in a rural village there will be only two for that particular area coverage and they cannot afford 2500. So affordability of the good connection is also there and that is where there is a government connectivity given to rural villages and that has to be also mapped. So these are the key infrastructures there's multiple more but as the government has indicated I am pulling it out from their reports these are very very important for rural development. So now let's see how the number of internet users in India has increased in millions and it is a good linear curve right every year you do see increase and most of them are from urban centers however the rural entities are also catching up they are coming to get good education through internet services and also for leisure you can see a lot of apps being used video apps they show the videos of dancing songs culture cooking from villages have been taken in a phone and then they broadcast on an app since we cannot promote an app I'm not saying the name but you know which which apps are used for sharing of videos and stuff. So this is very important to understand that that has also become a livelihood for them and for that livelihood there is a need for good connectivity. Let's say how the government has been using GIS and remote sensing for specific purpose of housing status and geoditing. So there is this website dashboard if you go on to the Ministry of Rural Development you can look at how many houses through the government scheme people have been registered how many of them have been built and geotag geotag means at a particular location the house presence is confirmed using a picture and with the geo coordinates which is that location let's say an address a geology GIS address and that address is put in the database and that is the dashboard that comes up. So now the government officer can see how many of rural population have requested these housing schemes under the housing scheme how many houses have been requested how many have been built and then geotag this eliminates the corruption this eliminates the middlemen who try to trick the villagers by saying that okay I'll get you the house whether they don't get the house. So here farmers and rural villagers can go to these banks get the money build the house and they have to show when the inspection comes how the house is ready and how it looks like once it's approved it gets geotag and goes into the system the next is housing sanction how many houses have been sanctioned and houses completed because the budget is not released as a lump sum they'll give 50 percent first and then you have been built and once you show some progress and the geotag is done the next 20 30 percent and then the last 20 percent this is to avoid also people using this money for livelihood options there has been cases where people took the money invested in agriculture or invested in their children's marriage higher education bought a bike something right but that was not the reason for the scheme the scheme is to provide housing so the government said how do I manage this kind of illegal activities for that this geotagging GIS based remote sensing based helps basically at a location the villager has registered for a house and they have been sanctioned so the blue and the pink money has been given so now has the site the area where the person is being is building the house has it been geotag or put it in the GIS database if it is green if it has been put in the geo database then you can easily use satellite to look down on that particular point and see if the house is made sometimes there is a tree covering those are very less number of outliers we can remove but most of the time the houses can be seen because 10 by 10 meter resolution is a pixel right 10 by 10 and 10 by 10 definitely you will get a house bigger than that so if you look at when the beneficiary was registered let's say 2010 the beneficiary registered the site was geotag 2010 the money was given 2011 and the house claims to be built in 2015 okay so five years 2010 to 2015 this database has been populated now I can run the remote sensing data before that let's say 2008 2007 I can look at that specific location and I will not find a house and now I can take a data from 2016 and if I find a house they have completed it this we can do with zero cost only the manpower for the person who's doing this salary is enough but think about going to the ground and checking each and every house that is very expensive time consuming and there are places where people will wrongly enter the details there could be a lot of data massaging so to avoid all of that we will say that no we will we can use remote sensing so I have given you a clear example how remote sensing and GIS can aid here it can also aid in the other infrastructures that we have discussed so one is the housing yes it can look at the beneficiaries the schemes etc and it can also look at where you can build the house for example if at 2010 data remote sensing data shows floods and 2015 they're building the house in that area or proposing to build then we can warn the government saying that no as per the data this land has been flooded so please don't build why would the people not know this because they tend to forget okay so exact locations where the flood happened how thick the water came they will not know but remote sensing captures it how the extent of the flood why the flood happened is it a normal flood or a 100 year flood everything is documented let's see how remote sensing can be used for rural schools mapping of schools can improve efficiency of resources when I say resources it includes the infrastructure to build the schools like the money that is invested to build the schools and also the manpower that is supplied to these schools teachers captakers books which are other resources that are given food nutrition packets water electricity computers people to rural villages you do see computers with internet right all these resources can be mapped and used effectively let's take an example from the jargon stick this report by the government says that several Punjais in jargon had too many schools then needed every school had a budget as I said a headmaster teacher but if there's no students coming and too many then the population that is needing it is a waste of the budget and the budget is taxpayers money correct so you could see how they have used GIS to identify the population and within one kilometer how many schools are there let's say in a radius in a circle here for two schools here and that radius is within two kilometers okay or one kilometer one kilometer people do drop in cycles and and motorbikes if it's too long they won't do it right if there are two schools and the population is right in the center and the schools are on opposite direction then the kid can go down or up maybe 100 meters difference that's it but it is a waste because for that small hamlet you don't need two schools one school is now and that is what they found they found that they did not need so many schools and some schools were in excess so they merged the schools which means the teachers were asked to go to that school and then the budget that was given here food and everything was given to the other school this land was used for other resources but the infrastructure is almost doubled so now students have two computers correct instead of one one at each corner now in one school two computers they can use it well and teachers and others to run more classes so this is a case of jargon where there is excess schools but mostly it is the other way around you will find places where there's no schools but the population exists the government may not be tracking the population as I said if there is a nomadic population which means the villagers the rural people travel from one place to the other because they are taking the cattle taking the sheep they also need to be counted in the system so the best way is to introduce new schools and that is also mapped so if you could see here you can also map the schools as per the government agency so here you have DOE schools department of education schools how many numbers schools with less than 60 m role which is not that beneficial for the government candidates identified propose new learning centers in-depth classes skill development and then they consolidate so you can do all these exercises in a GIS remote sensing based environment also please don't forget that schools are also a place where the children get midday meals it is a very very important scheme by the government Tamil Nadu has shown one of the first states to introduce this they have shown tremendous update of this program and the nutrition value nutrition data shows high positivity because of the scheme they have also introduced the egg scheme in the in the lunch very very long time ago right and this helped a lot of kids to come to school because just for that food they were working in the farms I told you the previous example also they have to work in the farms but right now they are getting good food and also nutritious food and then studying so they come they're not given just to come eat and go they have to attend school and take this and my father is the same thing so he he went to school only for lunch that was the enticing part which means all the small kids they would go very happy to school because they're going to get a one meal for that day one good meal morning they'll skip normally dinner is very very small things they had but didn't lunch was good so my father would go there but eventually because they sit in school and here and learn they pick up education so my father was a PhD but this school this rural school is still where he started so I'm so proud that this is is very very important nutrition and education are given both in rural schools you don't find that in city schools city people do have money so they bring their own different boxes or you have to pay very very excess fees for lunch but this is free covered by the government the next is hospitals so remote sensing can help in setting up new hospitals as I said population are moving the same examples just now remove the schools and put hospitals for a population you should know how much hospitals are needed for example if 30 people you cannot have a 10 bed hospital you have to have more right if many many villages are there understanding diseases and mapping reasons so this comes very interestingly and very importantly in locations where there is high diseases and if it is mapped for example there are regions where dengue is high malaria is high kerala border western guards where there's tremendous amount of rainfall water stagnation there is malaria so if you do not have enough malaria care centers health centers then people are subjected to this disease and a lot of deaths are happening so for this there is importance of identifying the locations and mapping the disease and with the maps propose new hospitals also these maps can help in giving supplies how much load of supplies do you need and aids aids as in funds to put infrastructures oxygen etc in fact there are governments which have put these kind of dashboards how many opeds how many beds how many of them are occupied so these kind of dashboards can be done on a computer screen because there is a GIS bank running where it has a location the intake of patients the supply of medicines etc even the blood bank and how much liters of blood are stored all are documented and also it creates new schemes like this so there are not for-profit hospitals also as for the Nithya Yogs report and the key statement that this book also makes is that there is a need for mapping locations hotspots where you can put these hospitals again the hospitals need power supply need water supply so this can be mapped on a GIS some remote sensing data can be used but GIS is very very key the last for today is your mobility with data I've already explained in the first two slides that mobility gives you more resources both in and out so in is farmers get fertilizers pesticides books educational materials and then medicines supplies etc but also more more important the flux is more on the other side so farmers give the food for the entire nation clothing cotton everything goes right so that resources have to go through a good mobility the mobility also helps us in tracking the markets and storage where the market demand is high for example if there's a big export of onions which we do a lot right there's a big price for onions outside so there is good need of farmers to grow extra onions and then send it to ports like Chennai, Mumbai, Polkata and from there there are sent in storage containers to other parts of the world so this needs understanding of markets and storage support an age I've mentioned so all this needs connecting rural to cities vice versa cities to rural or rural to cities both have same same road you don't put one road right so both ways the government has understood this invest India is part of the government and they have said that more and more roads will be introduced in the Pradhan, Mandri, Gram, Sadhak, Yojana, PM, GSY, Phase 3 where it focuses on enhancing new India's rural road connectivity they vision India to be growing along with rural so in the past maybe rural entities were not growing as much and that happens a lot you could see cities growing faster rural stays the same the wage the health the resources water all is the same for the 10 years but now the government is taking notice that it is not correct to grow one part and then suffer the other part so to make that happen it is more rural connectivity and with the IOs white papers have come up books have come up on transforming India's mobility you could see down it includes everything from small scale buses planes trains and also the EV sector electric vehicles are going to come big in India but you need to know where to put the recharge stations how the roads are good enough because these EV vehicles electric vehicles do not have long range for a particular price right so to support that they have to be recharged quite often 200 kilometers 140 kilometers and for that there should be recharge stations and a lot of data is needed for this assessing the need for connecting people improving passenger transportation is needed and that has been done through data sometimes we don't have good observed data and in those cases remote sensing and GIS helps you could see how the roads are mapped I've discussed that in the previous lectures roads channels are mapped and from there we can do more mapping with this I would like to conclude today's lecture and this book also gives a very good indicator of the vision of New India and how to look at agricultural rural development inside a lot of the concepts that I discussed on GIS remote sensing have been discussed with this I will see you in the next class thank you