Improving Climate Change Resilience in West Bengal, India

The Damodar Valley Command Area (DVCA) is historically flood-prone area, it lacks the infrastructure to protect against recurrent flooding, on average, 33,500 hectares of the cropped area and 461,000 people are affected annually due to recurrent flooding in the area.

West Bengal Major Irrigation and Flood Management Project aims to improve irrigation service delivery, strengthen flood risk management and improve climate change resilience in the project area. It is intended to benefit about 2.7 million farmers from five districts of West Bengal.

Due to degradation of infrastructure, inadequate irrigation management, poor quality of service delivery and inefficient irrigation farmers in the area are forced to extract groundwater, which increases the costs of cultivation.

Coming out top with the highest ranked technical proposal, Tractebel takes on the Project Management Consultancy contract for the complete rehabilitation, modernisation and management upgrade of the Damodar Valley Command Area (DVCA) irrigation and flood management scheme in West Bengal.  

The Tractebel team will address: 

• Preparation of bidding documents for multiple packages; 
• Procurement and Contract Management support; 
• Project Management and Construction Supervision, 
• Development of irrigation management with MIS & Web-GIS dashboard performance monitoring, SCADA, performance based canal operation, ground water aquifer management and capacity building; 
• Sustainable environmental and social safeguard management 

Essentially everything required to rehabilitate 2780 km of irrigation canals, fortify 98.5 km of flood embankments, de-silt 105 km of river and canals and remodel 81 drainage sluices and much more over the upcoming years.

For more information about this project 
Contact Dr. Jha Akhilesh at akhilesh.jha@tractebel.engie.com