Hyderabad is confronting huge challenge of disappearing water bodies owing to climate change and over utilization. The ever growing demand for domestic needs, industrial use and irrigational requirements have brought a burgeoning pressure on Hyderabad water sources. Shrinking water sources have a substantial impact on local population as the communities switch over to different occupations owing to water availability. Set in this backdrop the project sought to develop a methodology for creating a data base for water bodies of Hyderabad that captures the satellite imagery information along with field level analyses of sources of degradation of water bodies as well as their inter connecting channels.

“It has been demonstrated that, these tanks are not isolated entities, but often found in clusters forming part of a hydrologically integrated system known as a ‘cascade’”( Panabokke, 2002, Bandara 2010).These cascade of tanks locally known as Kuntas, chreruvus, etc are systematically organized within a micro-(or meso-) catchment of the dry zone landscape, storing, conveying and utilizing water from an ephemeral rivulet’( Bandara 1985, Kulkarni and Mahajan 2007). The backbone of this ecosystem was its ability to store the rainfall water within the system for the benefit of the whole system. Unlike in modern irrigation systems, which are focused on supplying the crop water requirement for the root-zone, this ancient "hydraulic system" of Hyderabad was focused on the water requirement of the entire ecosystem.