Identification of Suitable Dam Site in Tlawng Sub-Watershed using Analytic Hierarchy Process and GIS

Water management has become an important research area as the scarcity of water increases day-by-day around the world. Rain water harvesting is one of most efficient way of managing water resources which could be utilized for different purposes during the needy period such as drought, drinking water and irrigation. This paper presents a method for identification of suitable dam site using both Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (AHP) and GIS to establish the hydrological characteristics of suitable region for dam construction. This method considers six (6) criteria such as slope, size of catchment, geology, land use characteristics, proximity to settlement and proximity to river. Each criterion was assigned a weight depending on relative importance with other criteria. Thematic layers were then generated based on these criteria and overlaid in GIS environment to obtain layers identifying the suitable sites for dam construction.