Sustainable watershed development of the Bandu village (India) watershed using advance geospatial techniques: A case study documenting the importance of Remote Sensing and GIS in developing nations

India being a developing nation lacks the presence of an effective system for the built environment. There is inefficiency in the resource management sector and lack of proper planning has resulted in misuse of resources on a very large scale. In a developing nation like India, the major constraint that had hindered the sustainable usage of resources was the unavailability of state of the art facilities and spatial data and the subsequent processing tools. With the expansion and growth of the nation in the industrial and research front, emphasis is being laid on utilizing resources in an efficient and orderly way and this journal elucidates the significance of spatial data and data processing tools to help create a sustainable built environment. The study of water resources at the watershed scale is widely adopted as an approach to manage, assess and simulate these important natural resources. Watershed studies conducted using a GIS platform have demonstrated that the spatial analysis capabilities of GIS hold the key to improved watershed modeling techniques. The analytical muscle of GIS, combined with readily available digital elevation data, can be used to automate the watershed modeling process and provide a visual representation of the watershed's response to existing conditions and proposed improvement scenarios. In this context the objective of the study is to document the role of GIS and Remote Sensing for the development of the Bandu Watershed, located in Eastern India, in the Paschimi Singhbhum District in the state of Jharkhand. To do so, a merged image from CARTOSAT-1 and LIS-4 Sensor (obtained from the directory at the Jharkhand Space Applications Centre, Government of India) was digitized using ArcGIS and a digital elevation model (DEM) was prepared which gave us the idea of the slope of the region. The subsequent drainage pattern was then chalked out and the Geological Planning Map or the final map was prepared integrating results from all the maps.