A Geospatial Governance Framework for Smart Villages using Rule-Based Spatial Decision Support for Soil and Water Resource Management

International Journal of Civil Engineering

© 2025 by SSRG - IJCE Journal

Volume 12 Issue 11

Year of Publication : 2025

Authors : Sangita Rajankar, Soni Chaturvedi, Yashshree Dhale, Vikramsingh Parihar

10.14445/23488352/IJCE-V12I11P116

How to Cite?

Sangita Rajankar, Soni Chaturvedi, Yashshree Dhale, Vikramsingh Parihar, "A Geospatial Governance Framework for Smart Villages using Rule-Based Spatial Decision Support for Soil and Water Resource Management," SSRG International Journal of Civil Engineering, vol. 12,  no. 11, pp. 211-228, 2025. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.14445/23488352/IJCE-V12I11P116

Abstract:

Sustainable rural development has always depended on the proper management of natural resources. Traditional tabular datasets often fail to capture spatial interrelationships, resulting in fragmented planning and inefficient outcomes. The solution lies in geospatial governance, which can help combine both spatial and non-spatial data to make comprehensive and evidence-based decisions. This paper suggests a proposal of a Geospatial Governance Decision Support Framework (GG-DSF) to be used in the Smart Village context based on the idea of soil and water conservation as the essential element of sustainability. The novelty of GG-DSF is that it combines Spatial Data Mining (SDM), GIS-based overlay analysis, and heuristic optimization to produce action plans, Water Resource Development Plans (WRDP), and Land Resource Development Plans (LRDP). The analysis of the Gondidigras village (Maharashtra, India) provides a detailed case study of the framework in terms of the transformation of multi-source data into location-specific groundwater recharge, afforestation, and agricultural improvement strategies. Quantitative performance demonstrates that there are measurable improvements, +24.3% in water storage efficiency, +24.4% in land utilization, and +31.6% reduction in redundancy, which results in a Composite Sustainability Index (CSI) of 0.82, leading to high resilience and long-term sustainability. GG-DSF is an open-source platform (PostGIS, GeoServer, Python) solution that offers a scalable, transparent, and policy-friendly platform capable of directly augmenting national schemes, such as PMKSY, MGNREGA, and Digital India, thereby enhancing data-driven governance and participatory rural development.

Keywords:

Geospatial governance, Geographic information system, Soil and water conservation, Spatial data mining, Sustainable rural development.

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