Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

@article{188600,
        author = {Dravya Shah},
        title = {Design and Development of a Low-Cost IoT-Based Smart Water Management System for Climate-Vulnerable Agricultural Zones},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2025},
        volume = {12},
        number = {7},
        pages = {3113-3125},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=188600},
        abstract = {Climate-vulnerable agricultural zones face increasingly erratic rainfall, rising temperatures and chronic water stress, all of which threaten yields and farmer livelihoods. Irrigated agriculture already accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, so any adaptation strategy has to use water far more efficiently than traditional “flood and forget” irrigation. Smart irrigation systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) have demonstrated significant potential to optimize water use in real time, often achieving double-digit improvements in water-use efficiency. This paper presents the design and development of a low-cost IoT-based smart water management system tailored for climate-vulnerable smallholder farms. The proposed system uses an ESP32 microcontroller as the core controller, interfaced with a DHT11 temperature–humidity sensor, an air-quality (AQI) sensor, a rain sensor and a soil-moisture sensor. Sensor data are transmitted over Wi-Fi to a cloud backend, where they are stored and visualized through a web-based user interface that can be accessed globally. An automated control algorithm uses soil-moisture and microclimate conditions, together with rain detection, to drive a relay-controlled water-pump irrigation system along with that we have a provision to control the sunlight using the DC motor. The system is intended to respond adaptively to short or failed rainfall events while avoiding unnecessary irrigation that can cause runoff, erosion and nutrient leaching. We position the design against current literature on IoT-enabled smart irrigation, highlight low-cost hardware and open-source software choices, and propose an evaluation plan focused on water-use efficiency, system reliability and suitability for fragile agro-ecosystems. Rather than presenting fabricated field data, this work emphasizes architecture, control logic and deployment considerations for real-world implementation. The system aims to provide a practical, affordable building block for climate adaptation in agriculture, particularly for small farms facing high climate and economic vulnerability.},
        keywords = {Internet of Things (IoT), smart irrigation, ESP32, soil moisture, climate change adaptation, low-cost agriculture, cloud monitoring},
        month = {December},
        }