New Delhi,  The principal scientific advisor to the government of India, Vijay Raghavan, on Monday inaugurated a new water management and policy centre, AquaMAP, at IIT Madras that will focus on improving the agricultural water use efficiency.

AquaMAP is a national water centre and IIT Madras is collaborating with IIT Dharwad around the broad theme of 'Data Science for Water Security and Agriculture Sustenance'.

"The world faces the consequences of climate change and the pressure on biodiversity. Thus, renewing our air, water and land and pressing sustainable development becomes important. Water consumption in the agriculture sector is the maximum among all the needs, and therefore focus on improving the agricultural water use efficiency is one of the major focuses of AquaMAP," Raghavan said.

AquaMAP aims at providing solutions for complex and challenging water problems by designing and evolving smart and optimal water management practices and implementing them in the field, at different locations across the country, as a scalable model by leveraging the best practices in management and innovative technologies.

The key activities of AquaMAP would include field (in villages and towns) implementation of water technologies and management practices; identifying grand challenges in water/wastewater management for focused attention and setting up of a state-of-the-art hydro-informatics laboratory.

The other activities would include water and soil quality analysis by creation of a digital twin of the village for environmental management; waste management for clean and healthy village and automatic control of rural water supply schemes.