RFP - Appointment of a GIS-consultant to work on a project on impact evaluation of the ‘Rejuvenating Watersheds for Agricultural Resilience through Innovative Development’ (REWARD) program.

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About the Organization

The Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) is a premier, national-level Institute for Postgraduate, Doctoral, and Mid-career/in-service education, training, research, and consulting in rural management. Founded in 1979, IRMA’s mission is to promote all-around sustainable rural development through professional management.

About the Proposal

IRMA is looking for a GIS-consultant to work on a project on impact evaluation of the ‘Rejuvenating Watersheds for Agricultural Resilience through Innovative Development’ (REWARD) program.

Multifaceted strategies that involve effective watershed management practices in drylands along with livelihood interventions, is an urgent call, given that half of India’s net sown area that supports 86% of poor households, is rainfed. In this regard, the ‘Rejuvenating Watersheds for Agricultural Resilience through Innovative Development’ (REWARD) is an innovative intervention which draw lessons from several interventions in the past involving watershed development like the Sujala-3 and redesigned to implement in a more synergistic approach. The REWARD project is part of the Watershed Development Component of the Prime Minister Krishi Sinchai Yojana (WDC-PMKSY) with its activities implemented using state’s own institutions and processes.

The project is formulated with an objective to strengthen institutional capacities at the national and state level for improved and effective watershed management and improving livelihoods of farmers through increased value proposition of production and linking to agricultural value chains. Such transformations would require agricultural practices to be driven by well informed decisions and adoption of sustainable climate resilient agriculture technologies. Strengthening institutions and ensuring a supportive policy for watershed development requires rejuvenation at all key levels. This includes enhancing the capacity of national, state, and community institutions and local government bodies, conservation efforts through science-based information and solutions for watershed management and scientific planning, and livelihood intervention of the people in these areas with appropriate advisories for agricultural practices and linking to value chains through FPOs and SHGs. It is additionally mediated by strengthening the monitoring and evaluation systems and leveraging extension systems.

The REWARD program includes three important intervention components: a) Strengthening and capacity building of institutions; b) Conservation (bio-physical) intervention; and c) Livelihood intervention. We discuss these in some detail below:

Strengthening Institutions and Capacity Building:

• Strengthening community institutions and local government bodies
• Enhanced institutional capacity for watershed management:
• Establishing a national centre of excellence (CoE) on watershed management:
• Supportive policy for watershed development:
• Strengthened monitoring and evaluation systems at national and state levels

Conservation (Bio-physical) Intervention

Scope of Work

• The consultant is responsible for linking farmers with their respective georeferenced land parcels/survey numbers. This involves linking administrative data on georeferenced cadastral maps of farmers’ associated survey number for the study area with farmers' names, survey numbers, and khata/hissa (if available) numbers.
• The consultant will support in generating parcel level georeferenced cadastral maps during baseline survey, and if required, on other round of surveys. Both the parcel level and survey number level cadastral maps will be used to overlay the cloud-free composite and DEM available on Google Earth Engine (GEE) to derive all by-products at various time intervals. These maps will be provided for the CAPI Survey before the listing exercise.
• The consultant will design and integrate the GIS components in the CAPI using “Survey Solutions/SurveyCTO” at each stage of the surveys: listings, baseline, midline, and endline.
• The consultant will support and participate in the piloting of the GIS component of the survey in the field that are designed as part of deliverable 3.
• The consultant will train the field enumerators for the GIS component of the survey in the field that are designed as part of deliverable 3.
• The consultant will be responsible for validating GIS related information (for example, High Frequency Checks) from the field during the survey periods.
• The consultant will map dynamic cropland mask and cultivated crop types for the project duration. This will be delivered once per agricultural season. Data collected during different surveys on crops grown by farmers, cropping patterns, etc. will be used to train and validate machine learning model(s) to predict crops grown by farmers. The consultant will also use this to identify suitable crops for farming.
• The consultant will evaluate Google Earth Engine’s inbuilt algorithms as well as other open-source tools to derive maximum accuracy of crop type mapping for all the seasons. The scripts and workflow will be shared for the best accuracy system. The consultant will be responsible for developing indices extraction programming scripts using the Google Earth Engine as well as other open-source systems, which can be run in GEE or workstation for processing satellite imageries. These scripts will be able to compute the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Leaf Area Index (LAI), soil moisture, and other indices. Various indices will be calculated based on satellite imagery availability and seasonality. This product will be delivered on a quarterly basis.
• The consultant will be responsible for linking the indices with land parcel-level information: Using the Surveyed data from the listing exercise all the indices like NDVI, LAI, and soil moisture will be linked with the farmers’ georeferenced fields/land parcel-level information. This product will be delivered on a quarterly basis.
• The consultant will create programming scripts and workflow In the end, the programming script documentation to re-run the complete analysis will be provided in either GEE Script or open-source script (R, Python, etc.) along with the data workflow documentation for scaling-up and replicability.

How to Apply

The offer should be sent through email to: IRMATENDER@IRMA.AC.IN on or before 27 th January,2023 along with the vendor registration form (see enclosure).

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Tags Food, Agriculture and Nutrition Livelihood Others