CSEI Launches Jaltol

This free and open-source water accounting tool will ease the rural water security planning process

After months of planning, developing, finetuning and testing with early users, we finally launched Jaltol — a digital tool to ease water balance estimation — on November 30. An engaged audience of around 130 attended the virtual launch event, where speakers talked about rural water security and the potential of digital tools.

This blog post sums up some of the key points discussed during the event. Since participants raised a number of important questions about the practical use of Jaltol, we prepared a separate blog post documenting these concerns along with our responses.

Read | Answers to Questions on Jaltol

CSEI Director Veena Srinivasan kicked off the session with an overview of the crisis of water security in India and how considerable amounts of money is invested every year on rural water security, through government, CSR and philanthropic programmes. All these programmes depend on the creation of community water security plans.

Veena talked about how we reviewed over 25 water security plans to find two key gaps that impede effective planning and implementation of water security plans — the data gap and the capacity gap. Jaltol was developed to address both.

Watch this video for more context on why we need digital tools:

Funded by India Climate Collaborative and EdelGive Foundation, Jaltol was developed as part of CSEI’s Food Futures Initiative that aims to help boost water security and restore five million hectares of degraded agricultural land, thereby improving 150,000 livelihoods by 2030.

Anjali Neelakantan, head of the initiative, introduced the tool and detailed some early feedback. ‘The beauty of this tool is that it isn’t just useful for water balance estimation, most CSOs even found the available data layers useful for their groundwork.’

Then, Craig D’Souza, who led the technical development of the tool, held a short demonstration of some of Jaltol’s key features and gave step-by-step instructions on how you can use it.

Invited speakers Dr. Sashikumar N. and MS Raviprakash, from the Karnataka government’s Advanced Centre for Integrated Water Resources Management (ACIWRM) talked about the importance of micro-scale planning in preparing water budgets that can improve state efforts in rural water management. They also elaborated on a case study in water security planning carried out by ACIWRM at the Oorkunte Mittur panchayat in Kolar district.

Jeff Albert, Deputy Chief of the USAID-funded Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Partnerships for Learning and Sustainability (WASHPaLS) project, said that Jaltol was addressing an important gap in water resource management and service delivery in rural areas: ‘It’s very early days but we see this tool as having the potential to allow evidence-based planning to happen in earnest’.

These case studies on the possible applications of Jaltol were very useful in helping us chart a more effective way forward. Jeff added that Jaltol is focusing on an essential gap and building essential capacity.

‘Next step is to make sure that target users have the capacity, incentive and authority to act upon the information and the analysis that the tool enables.’

The launch event also included two valuable discussion segments where Harold Lockwood, Director of Aguaconsult, and Ujaval Gandhi, GIS expert and founder of Spatial Thoughts Academy, discussed some key questions around the tool.

Harold also stressed on capacity building and cautioned against regarding a piece of technology as a silver bullet. It is important to be cognisant of the fact that a digital tool, on its own, cannot make a difference in the messy political realities around water, he said.

‘As well as introducing these tools, we need to carefully understand the ecosystem where it’s introduced’.

Drawing from years of experience in institutional reform and service delivery arrangement in the rural sector, Harold also talked about how the governance of water was, by and large, carried out in a very siloed fashion. ‘Groups work in different silos and don’t talk to each other in an effective way… data sets from different agencies didn’t speak to each other. Jaltol can help bridge that gap and bring these parties together,’ he said.

Read | Numbers without narratives and narratives without numbers: We need data stories

The final speaker, GIS expert Ujaval Gandhi, talked about the benefits of open source softwares such as QGIS and detailed how the community can contribute to the development of Jaltol.

‘Why open source? The most important reason in the context of the problem we are trying to solve is that the life of the tool goes beyond what a single organisation can build.’

‘This tool is part of the community, available for any one to use, modify and update — this is critical because a tool like this should be open to ensure that it remains sustainable for a longer duration of time,’ said Ujaval.

To wrap up the session, Craig briefly explained how we are planning to build Jaltol version 2, incorporating new features based on the feedback we have gotten so far. From December 2021 onwards, we would love to have you partner with us so you can benefit in the following ways:

• Collaborate to build Jaltol V2: We are happy to announce that we can conduct Jaltol workshops for organisations where we can demo the tool to your teams and receive feedback on additional features that you will find useful. We can conduct a training session for your organisation.
• Participate in live meetings: We will conduct live meetings once a month where users (both current and prospective) can join and have their questions answered.
• Receive regular updates: Please sign up to receive regular production/feature updates as we work towards Jaltol V2.

You can watch the entire launch event here:

Our Rural Water blog series gives more context about why we developed such a tool:

Part 1: How do we make a dent in rural water security?

Part 2: Is data informing decisions in rural water security?

You will find all relevant resources about Jaltol on our website: https://www.csei.org/jaltol

This is just the start and we are keen on building strategic partnerships to develop and scale the Jaltol tool. If you are interested in partnering with us on this, please reach out at jaltol@atree.org.