Drought occurrence in Different River Basins of India and blockchain technology based framework for disaster management

Abstract

Drought assessment is crucial to mitigate its adverse impact, especially in India, where risk is more due to an increase in population and climate change. However, most of the studies deal with one or a couple of droughts and lack the interrelationship between all major drought types. The study investigates the spatio-temporal distribution of multiple drought types, individually and concurrently in India. Further drought trend analysis is performed based on their mean duration, mean spatial extent, and frequency. Moreover, the drought evolution process which explains the evolution of drought type into another type is also examined. Finally, a blockchain-based framework is proposed to improve the current drought risk management system to facilitate the drought fatalities to get their help and aid as soon as possible. Results demonstrate that hydrological and soil moisture droughts are observed to be more influential as compared to the other two drought types in most of the river basins of India. Further, it was found that 82% of concurrent droughts involve soil moisture drought in 16 out of 25 river basins. The present study facilitates a novel method to investigate drought from several perspectives over India, thus helps to provide important information for drought mitigation and adaptation strategies. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd