5-Environmental Flow Assessment using Various Techniques in a Typical River Basin of India.

Abstract

Environmental flows are extremely essential to protect and maintain the environment, ecology, river morphology, aquatic life, pollution, and water transfer among surface water and groundwater. Zeroflow in some of the river reaches due to construction of water storage structures, hydropower generation and other uses have created numerous problems in river basins. In the present work various information and data have been collected to estimate environmental flows at different location of River Brahmani using different commonly used methods. Further, a modified approach has been evolved considering environmental flows required for different losses (seepage and evaporation) in addition to flow requirement for various purposes. The results obtained are very encouraging and the estimated environmental flows can be maintained with very small percentage of mean annual flow. It has been observed that the environmental flows in a river basin has very high socio-economic values with no revenue losses and the same amount of water should flow through out the year as unrestricted flow (Aviral Dhara) in the river system.