The Punjab Water Regulation & Development Authority (PWRDA) takes a significant leap forward in its mission to manage and regulate ground water usage in the state. On September 6, 2023, PWRDA launched its much-awaited Online Permission Portal, a groundbreaking initiative designed and developed by the NIC Punjab under the visionary leadership of Sh. Vivek Verma, DDG and SIO Punjab. The online portal not only simplifies the application process but also contributes to greater transparency and efficiency within the department.

The Punjab Water Regulation and Development Authority (PWRDA) established in the year of 2020 with an aim to manage and regulate ground water usage in the state of Punjab to achieve sustainable management of groundwater balanced with the requirements of the livelihoods of people in the State. The conservation of water is to be mandated for all users of groundwater by encouraging them to undertake, at their own cost, water conservation measures that will help to achieve the set target for conservation for each zone in the state.

As per the requirement received from PWRDA, NIC Punjab has designed, developed and deployed the Web Portal, Web Application and Mobile Apps for the department for obtaining permissions for Groundwater Extraction, operating Drilling Rigs and Water Tanker in Punjab under the Punjab Ground Water Extraction and Conservation Directions 2023. No User shall extract groundwater or conduct any activity connected therewith without obtaining permission of the authority except for drinking and domestic usage, exclusive usage in agriculture, use in a place of worship, drinking and domestic water supply scheme of Government, use by an establishment of the Military or of the Central Paramilitary Forces,          an Urban Local Body, Panchayati Raj Institution, Cantonment Board, Improvement Trust or Area Development Authority and a unit extracting not more than 300 cubic meters of groundwater per month.

The portal will automate the process to provide NOC to the applicants of commercial units for extraction of ground water and its related permissions. Also the user department will then process the application as per their business rules and grant NOC to all the commercial units. With this system the application processing time will be reduced and system will bring more transparency in the department. Also Web Portal provides organization information and its applications/services. This is complete work flow based application which under goes scrutiny at three level before granting permission to the applicant. The workflow is fully customizable through Admin User. The application has been integrated with various APIs like PSPCL (Punjab State Power Corporation Ltd.), PPCB (Punjab Pollution Control Board) and Business First for the ease of applicants and as per the requirement of the application. Bharat Maps has been used for pictorial representation of units on the map.

The Web Portal and Web Application have been designed and developed using Open Source technologies and have been deployed in State Data Centre and is accessible at https://pwrda.punjab.gov.in. The Web Portal is complete Content Management System (CMS) and has been developed to provide the utility of dynamically managing the contents of portal.

On this occasion Sh. Surjit Singh, Scientist-F and HoD Div5, Sh. Dinesh Sharma, Scientist-F and Ms Parminder Kaur, Scientist-E were also present.