Priyanka Khaitan
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read
Credit: http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/tamil-nadu/2017/jan/04/stats-collectors-get-to-work-as-drought-stares-tamil-nadu-in-the-face-1555988.html

Working in the heart of Silicon Valley, it’s considered ‘just another day’ when an automaker introduces autopilot to self-park in a compressed space or when an internet giant sends balloons to operate in stratospheric conditions to beam internet to remote rural areas. These audacious technological innovations are assumed and presumed. If not in Silicon Valley, where the per capita intellect is among the highest in the world, then where else?

What is bewildering is all the efforts being made to connect the world digitally. The numbers speak for themselves and are pretty alarming. Almost 1 out of 2 among the global population now have internet. 1 in 4 has an account of Facebook. Whilst there are enormous efforts to bring people online, in our digital day and age, 1 in 7 still have no access to electricity, no access to clean drinking water — the basic necessities that some of us have come to take for granted. This gap represents one of the biggest technological challenges of our age.

Few days ago I visited a farm in a small village half way between Bangalore and Chennai in southern India. It was an expansive land growing coconut and coffee intertwined with nutmeg. There had been no rain and the farmers were fighting the worst drought in 143 years. Water was scarce and faces worried. A ‘diviner’ was called upon to survey the area and recommend where to drill borewells for water. It was no ordinary land surveillance. The diviner had a coconut in his hand and walked around the land until the coconut trembled and fell. And where it fell was where the borewell was drilled. But no water in sight.

15,000 kilometers away from India, in a small town in the interiors of Brazil, a farmer drills artesian wells from 40 to 130 meters deep. How he finds water is very simple — hold the wooden fork of a peach tree with the palms up. If the fork turns 180 degrees, there must be water. Although this technique has never failed him, many have had failed attempts. He commented that not all are blessed — among his 2 children, only one has the innate sense to detect radiations from moving water. It’s the instinct and intuition of a select few, passed on through generations, that many rely on around the global farming community.

In my quest to understand what research is being done to find sub-surface water, I visited the Geophysics department at Stanford. “Understanding Earth, Benefitting Society” was the motto. I asked Meredith Goebel, a graduate student, while we are witnessing the fourth industrial revolution emerge, why is there no science backing the discovery of the most precious resource? Meredith, who is working with electrical resistivity tomography to address problems associated with saltwater intrusion into coastal groundwater aquifers, explained how you detect and pump out ground water is analogous to the flourishing oil and gas industry exploring and drilling oil wells. There are all sorts of geophysical methods available for imaging water by measuring resistivity or other property such as seismic property, acoustic property either through systems on the ground or airborne. The technology itself is widely available but how effective it is for ground water, is still being tested for few spots in the US. Countries like Denmark have been using technology to map out their groundwater for the entire nation. Worldwide, given how much we need our water and how scarce water resource is, adoption is slow as people have their ways of doing things and are wary of new technologies.

Today, seismic imaging technology helps the likes of BP, Chevron and others with the exploration and discovery of oil and gas. While one industry is tech heavy universally, the other in some parts of the internet world is driven primarily by instinct. The key question then becomes how can we take the advancements in technologies such as seismic imaging and make it widely applicable, adaptable, affordable, available and accessible to all. This in my view will be the real test of technology. With water in the wells, farmers can irrigate their farms and produce a healthy harvest. The 40 billion hours a year that women walk in Africa alone in quest of water can be redirected to earning a livelihood. It has a positive effect that reverberates throughout the global economy.

I am not saying mapping the aquifers to find new sub-surface water is sufficient — this is just a seedling. Our needs are not finite and demands growing. Soon the aquifers will be at the brink of exhaustion. It’s a vicious cycle that intrinsically impacts us all. While we help our farmers tap into new sources of water, conserving water and enforcing it is as crucial and we have to strike a balance between extraction and recharge. You may ask what is it we can do. It all starts with generating an awakening, an awareness among our communities…by bringing together like minded people to re-imagine our future.

Even a tiny trickle of water will make our lives fuller..

Priyanka Khaitan

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