Urban Rooftop Rainwater Harvesting Potential Mapper for City Planners

Objective: To enable municipal authorities to identify, analyze, and visualize the rainwater harvesting potential of urban rooftops using geospatial and public datasets.

Urban Indian municipalities face significant challenges in ensuring sustainable water supply and managing urban flooding, driven by rapid development and limited water resources. Many city rooftops remain underutilized for rainwater harvesting, and planners lack efficient, data-driven tools to assess and promote rooftop rainwater harvesting at scale. This problem directly maps to SDG 6 (Clean Water & Sanitation) and is relevant to departments overseeing urban development, water resources, and city planning.

The proposed solution is a digital platform that maps, analyzes, and visualizes the rainwater harvesting potential of urban rooftops using satellite imagery, open geospatial datasets, rainfall data, and municipal building records. The platform will help authorities and citizens identify high-potential buildings, estimate water yield, and recommend harvesting designs based on location, roof area, and rainfall characteristics.

Key features include rooftop detection using computer vision (satellite and aerial imagery), rainfall and roof area calculation, interactive city heatmaps, downloadable reports for planners, and a pilot-ready web dashboard with simulated field validation. The working prototype will process real city data, generate actionable rooftop-level insights, and provide a user-friendly interface for planners and stakeholders.

The tool aims to increase rainwater harvesting adoption, reduce urban flooding risk, and support informed decision-making at ward and city levels. Impact will be measured by the number of high-potential rooftops identified, pilot adoption metrics, and improved municipal water planning. The solution is scalable to other cities and supports integration with national urban water missions.