Digital transformation of Irrigation projects

The lift irrigation (LI) system forms an integral part of the agricultural services provided by the government. LI department is responsible for managing the critical activities such as establishment of the system for lifting of the river waters, borewell for underground water lifting, and providing irrigation assistance and maintenance services to the farmers. In doing so, they LI department encounters a lot of problems such as improper management services, compliant from the farmers and lack of remote maintenance services. Additionally, there is a pressure from the government agencies and the central departments to meet the farmer requirements and need by providing proper public service. Also, the LI department struggles with lot of technical issues related to projects such as transmission loss, voltage fluctuation, un-uniform discharge of water at the tail end, maintenance of pipelines, improper process parameters leading to lesser performance and productivity. Hence, it is high time the engineers and policymakers should start thinking and focusing in finding out directions to tackle these problems and targeting on productivity improvement for improving the public utility services for the farmers. One potential way to deal with the issue is the digital transformations of the irrigation system.

The digital transformations refer to the application of the emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, big data analytics and cyber physical interface to the system giving rise to an integrated, transparent, responsive, and resilient system that can respond to uncertainties and market disruptions. This phenomenon is referred as Industry 4.0. The Industry 4.0 prime focus is to make the industries more resilient and responsive through digital transformations of the businesses. The principles of digital transformations can be put into the LI systems for augmenting the performance of the process parameters. Figure 1 summarizes the various dimensions of the digital transformations that a LI system can achieve due to deployment of disruptive technologies.

Figure 1 Digital Transformation dimensions for LI systems.

The dimensions of the digital transformations ensure the end-to-end connectivity amongst the resources such as pipes, motors, and power supply systems enabling real-time monitoring of the process parameters. For Instance, the use of IoT based sensors embedded on the LI system can help monitor the performance of the pump and motor. Also, the performance of the pipe, leakage if there or discharge rate can be easily traced and visualized using the digital twin in a virtualized interface. The digital twin refers to the digital representation of the physical LI system and is responsible for visualization, monitoring, and control. The data acquired from the LI system can be subjected to analytics to take certain actionable insight from them. For Instance, the descriptive analytics of the discharge rate and the rpm of the impeller will show the rate at which the water is pumped for a period of time. Any deviation in the reading from the required position can be traced to find out the operational down time. This in turn will easily help mangers to take required corrective measures and repair in the pump. Hence, it helps enhance the maintenance of the LI system. Another critical aspect of the LI system is the intelligence and autonomy of the system. The LI system should be programmed to be self-reliant to detect any potential anomaly and take requisite corrective measures to address the problem without any human intervention. Consequently, it is evident from the aforesaid description that the applications of the disruptive technologies will augment the performance of the LI system.

All of these explanations and discussion on the applications of the digital transformation on LI system show that it is an evident requirement rather than being a technological hype. The policy makers and the consultants should start thinking about making adequate policies and detailed plan to adopt the digital transformation initiatives in the LI systems.