West Bengal Mandates Leads Connect for Assessment & Demarcation of Flood Prone Areas

Noida-based Agri-tech company, Leads Connect Services has successfully bagged the prestigious project from Irrigation & Waterways Department, West Bengal for the assessment and demarcation of flood-prone areas of the state of West Bengal using temporal satellite imageries to develop year-wise flood inundation maps from historical available data and images.

In addition, the objective of the project is also to determine district-wise flood-prone area maps corresponding to different flood return periods.  The project will be conducted in 23 districts of the state - Howrah, Nadia, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Praganas, etc. for a duration of 6 months, starting from April 2022.

On bagging the new project, Navneet Ravikar, Chairman & Managing Director, Leads Connect Services said, “the organization is excited and fully prepared to deliver the project for Assessment & Demarcation of Flood Prone Areas of the state of West Bengal. The state is the lowermost riparian State of the Ganga-Brahmaputra basins has both Inter-State catchment areas (of 57,624 sq. Kms.) & International catchment areas (of 34,252 sq. Kms.), thus has no control over the influx from the upper catchment areas. The outfall tidal conditions often make the situation worse and riverbank erosion, coastal erosion, waterlogging, tidal inundation, cyclones/depressions are common phenomena of the State.”

“As the monsoon rainfall normally starts from June and ends in October, the districts in the southern parts of the State experience heavy precipitation, particularly in the months of September and October. Consequently, upon the development of low pressure/depressions in the Bay of Bengal during this period, major floods have been noticed to have occurred during this crucial period in 1978, 1984, 1991, 2000, etc. Through this assessment project, we intend to make indicative flood-prone area maps so that the situation in future doesn’t get worse and proactive measures can be taken”.

He further said that “the company is not only focussed on Agritech but has been deeply involved in rigorous research and development activities on climate change and disaster management. He emphasized the need for full-fledged and core research and development activities on various aspects of the earth system spanning from agriculture, climate change, hazard analytics to disaster management. Such a comprehensive assessment of the earth system may be helpful in understanding the impact of one component on another. This understanding may help in developing sustainable frameworks for the future.”

Prior to bagging this project, the organization has worked with nodal agencies such as Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNCFC), Agriculture Insurance Company (AIC), and NABARD Consultancy Services (NABCONS) for research-based projects related to yield estimation, crop cutting experiments (CCE) and mapping agricultural infrastructures respectively.

Currently, Leads Connect is engaged in delivering projects in more than 100 districts of India and has a Pan-India presence backed by a comprehensive presence of a field team and a well-equipped research lab. The research lab of the company comprises interdisciplinary skill sets, and expertise spanning from Agriculture, Remote Sensing–GIS, Numerical Modelling, Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence.