Mangaluru taluk of Dakshina Kannada district, which has 55 village panchayats, has a good network of banking and other financial institutions/infrastructure. When it comes to water management, the taluk has given more importance to drilling borewells than building sustainable rainwater harvesting infrastructure.

These are some of the observations of the area profile prepared by Dakshina Kannada Zilla Panchayat (DKZP) under the Bhuvan Panchayat project of the Indian Space Research Organisation. Mangaluru was the first taluk in Karnataka to be part of the spatial mapping project.

DKZP, in association with ISRO and Moodbidri, Mangaluru-based Alva’s Institute of Engineering and Technology, had taken up the spatial mapping of physical assets in the village panchayats of Mangaluru taluk. Addressing newspersons in Mangaluru on Saturday, Vivek Alva, Trustee, Alva’s Education Trust, said the asset mapping of 55 panchayats was carried out by 55 faculty members and 330 students of education institutions under the Trust, for a period of 25 days.

MR Ravi, Chief Executive Officer, DKZP, said the panchayats have 111 bank branches, 24 credit cooperative societies and 78 ATMs. In spite of such a network, villages such as Valpadi, Iruvail and Kinya in the taluk, do not have enough ATMs.

He said the villages in the taluk have 277 dug and bore-wells, 17 lakes, 105 tanks and ponds, 19 check dams and 114 overhead tanks. However, only two rainwater harvesting structures were found in the 55 villages. There is a great need to focus on rainwater harvesting in the taluk for better water management, he said.

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