Abstract
The Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) lacks a system for measuring canal inflows, storages, and outflows that is trusted by all parties, transparent, and accessible. An earlier attempt for telemetering flows in the IBIS did not deliver. There is now renewed interest in revisiting telemetry in Pakistan’s IBIS at both national and provincial scales. These investments are typically approached with an emphasis on hardware procurement contracts. This paper describes the experience from field installations of flow measurement instruments and communication technology to make the case that canal flows can be measured at high frequency and displayed remotely to the stakeholders with minimal loss of data and lag time between measurement and display. The authors advocate rolling out the telemetry system across IBIS as a data as a service (DaaS) contract rather than as a hardware procurement contract. This research addresses a key issue of how such a DaaS contract can assure data quality, which is often a concern with such contracts. The research findings inform future telemetry investment decisions in large-scale irrigation systems, particularly the IBIS.
Highlights
Pakistan hosts the world’s sixth largest population, estimated at 207.7 million according to the 2017 census [1]
This paper presents the experience of a pilot study instrumenting canals in the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) to demonstrate technological choices and, more importantly, how the quality of acquired data can be ensured, when data are supplied as a service
Data transmission from all canal locations was scheduled three times each day at 0745, 1145, and 1545, Pakistan Standard Time. This means that all transmissions were made during daylight hours, and the datalogger was programmed such that the system does not attempt to transmit data if the battery voltage is below a threshold value
Summary
Pakistan hosts the world’s sixth largest population, estimated at 207.7 million according to the 2017 census [1]. The country consists of four provinces which share water from the Indus Basin Irrigation. The IBIS is the backbone of Pakistan’s agricultural economy. The agriculture sector, including crops, livestock, fisheries, and forestry, contributed 18.5 percent to the GDP in 2018–2019 and is a source of livelihood for 38.5 percent of the nation’s total labor force [2]. The IBIS is a large, complex system of hydraulic infrastructure that has been developed incrementally over many decades and represents an estimated US$300 billion in investment [3]. It consists of 2 large reservoirs, 16 barrages,
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