Doctoral Training Network on Intelligent River Basins

River basins around the world, and especially in the global South, face acute sustainability challenges across their water, climate, and agriculture sectors—issues that demand integrated, systems-level thinking. However, geopolitical constraints, including tightening travel restrictions, are limiting access for students at world-class training institutes in the developed world. Simultaneously, institutions in the global South struggle to offer interdisciplinary, research-intensive graduate programs. This gap hampers the emergence of scientific leaders capable of harnessing AI, data science, and experiential learning to address national and regional priorities. The Intelligent River Basins (DTN) aims to cultivate a new generation of systems leaders who can drive transformation across critical sectors, ensuring long-term resilience and self-reliance in the Indus basin region. By such capacity building, organizations and industry can meet the demand of highly-skilled scientific and technical workforce at a time of high-priority investments on water infrastructure,  digital transformation of the agricultural sector**,** innovations in water demand management, industry’s increasing commitments to circular economy principles and urgent response to climate change in areas of cryosphere monitoring, early warning systems, climate finance and climate reporting.

Mission Statement: DTN on Intelligent River Basins will bring together academics across institutes, practitioners in government and non-government organizations, and collaborators from across the world to train a new highly-qualified workforce to tackle the most pressing sustainability challenges faced by river basins using advances in AI, IoT, robotics, systems analysis and space sciences to spark a national Agri Tech industry, facilitate climate action and secure water security for future generations.

Focus Areas: Intelligent River Basins DTN will concentrate on three areas:

1. Hydro-informatics: water resources planning, accounting, and conservation to enhance Water Security   

2. Climate Analytics: monitoring, modelling & reporting to facilitate Climate Adaptation & Mitigation

3. Agriculture 4.0 (ICT-driven on-farm and value-chain innovations in water technologies to enhance Food Security)