Managing river basins with thinking machines

This paper analyzes the onset of cybernetic revolutions such as smart infrastructures, agricultural robotics and information automation for the management of water resources. Large basins such as those of the rivers Indus, Ganges, Amazon, Brahmaputra, Nile and Mekong constitute the backbone of agrarian and developing economies. Such river basins are extremely complex systems of systems. The complexity is not only due to the intricate interplay of physical elements but also because of human behavior at multiple levels. Interacting components of these systems are prone to many types of uncertainties and variability, such as climate change impacts and demographic changes. It is increasingly being realized that many of the technical and institutional challenges of governance are really problems of scales, such as the inability to monitor and maintain geographically extensive infrastructures; the inability to collect information, reconfigure and react within short time spans and the inability to scale-up human expertise across institutions. The author shares experiences of research, development and field work in robotics and cyber physical systems for water management in the Indus basin as case studies to develop a general philosophy of scaling-up solutions to solve the various governance challenges. Thus we outline the promise of a smart water grid -- an internet inspired, tightly connected cyber-physical-social network of data collection systems, automated responder units, and decision support systems to address challenges in transparency, equity, devolution and variability in the basin.