Munish Sood
Mandi
Indian Institute of Technology Mandi has launched WatershedAI, a free artificial intelligence-powered tool capable of generating detailed climate and water resource assessments for river basins across India within minutes.
Developed by the HIMPACT Lab (Himalayan Hydro climatology Impact Research Lab), the platform has been integrated into IIT Mandi’s INCLINE (Indian Climate Information Explorer) system. The tool combines hydrological modelling, deep learning and multilingual AI to produce publication-grade watershed reports in just three to eight minutes.
The institute said the platform is designed to support researchers, policymakers, students, government agencies and citizens by simplifying access to reliable climate and water intelligence, particularly for remote and ungauged regions where scientific data is often limited.
According to IIT Mandi, WatershedAI can generate assessments covering watershed morphology, drainage systems, soil characteristics, land use patterns, climate trends, drought history, extreme weather events and future water availability projections. The reports are backed by verified scientific datasets and original data sources.
Dr. Vivek Gupta, faculty member at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and head of the HIMPACT Lab, said the initiative aims to bridge the gap between advanced hydrological research and practical decision-making.
“Our goal with INCLINE has been to compress the gap between cutting-edge hydrological research and actual decision-making on the ground,” he said. “The WatershedAI feature integrates morphometric analysis, soil and land-use characterisation, observed and projected climate data, drought indices and a Dynamic Budyko v2 water-yield model into one coherent narrative.”
A key feature of the platform is its multilingual capability. WatershedAI delivers AI-generated reports in 19 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Odia, Urdu and Malayalam, along with English, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.
Mr. Siddik, PhD scholar at HIMPACT Lab and co-lead developer of the project, said the idea was to make scientific information accessible in local languages without compromising technical accuracy.
“We wanted a hydrologist in Tamil Nadu, a district planner in Himachal Pradesh and a student in Manipur to all be able to ask the same scientific question and receive answers in their own language,” he said.
The platform has also been optimised for users with limited internet connectivity. Mr. Piyush Panpaliya, a third-year BTech student at IIT Mandi and developer of the INCLINE web platform, said the team focused on ensuring the system worked smoothly across devices and under modest network conditions.
IIT Mandi stated that the initiative aligns with national priorities such as climate adaptation, Digital India and Jal Shakti missions by making climate intelligence more accessible, affordable and user-friendly.
