FES Joins Jaltol as a Co-Creator
Jaltol will provide knowledge support for water security planning
CSEI-ATREE signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) on May 10, onboarding them as a co-creator of Jaltol — the water accounting digital tool we developed.
Through this partnership, CSEI will provide FES with knowledge support for water security planning. Jaltol will enable FES to estimate crop-specific evapotranspiration (ET) rates and irrigation water requirements, according to methods developed by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). FES will also be able to view long-term trends for each water budget component (like evapotranspiration, rainfall, changes in groundwater and surface water levels).
Read | The Vision for Jaltol
Considering a big part of FES’s work with rural communities involves preparing water budgets, a tool like Jaltol could prove to be immensely useful. We will specifically be working with them to estimate water budgets in Karnataka, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.
As a co-creator, FES will provide inputs and list requirements that CSEI will incorporate into Jaltol and thus make it more useful for civil society organisations planning watershed interventions like FES. They will also share primary data on planned cropping patterns as part of their crop water budgeting projects. This will enrich Jaltol and enable it to make more accurate estimates.
FES focuses on ecological restoration and conservation in India through the collective efforts of village communities. They are working on restoring over 11 million acres of common land in over 36,000 villages across the country. For CSEI, the advantage of partnering with such an institution is the ability to be able to learn from their invaluable experiences on the ground as well as understand how we can take Jaltol to scale.
India is facing a looming water crisis
An estimated 54% of the country is under high water stress. Groundwater is either over-exploited, critical or semi-critical in 36% of blocks in India, according to the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB). The water crisis has a direct impact on farmer income. To manage existing water sources sustainably and to address falling farmer incomes, India has already spent Rs. 32,000 crores between 2017 and 2018 on water security interventions.
Read | Why We Need Data Stories and Digital Tools To Achieve Rural Water Security
The foundation of all such rural water security government programmes — like Atal Bhujal Yojana and Jal Jeevan Mission — is a water security plan. After reviewing around 25 such water security plans, we’ve understood that water balance estimation is a critical part of preparing these plans. It is also very time consuming. This prompted us to come up with a digital tool called Jaltol, the first version of which we launched in November 2021.
Water accounting made easy
Jaltol is a free, open-source water accounting tool that makes water balance estimation easy in grassroots communities. With the Jaltol plugin, decision makers in the rural water security planning process can get data on their watershed and estimate the water budget at the click of a button. It allows them to make more informed decisions about water management in their panchayat. The plugin uses remote sensing data — rainfall, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, surface water/groundwater storage, land use/land cover — together on one platform in an easy-to-use format, making water accounting easy.
We are now in the second phase of development where we intend to co-create the tool with a few civil society organisations (CSOs) working in the rural water sector.
In Jaltol v1, we used publicly available data-sets and remote-sensing data. In version 2, we will validate these against primary data from the CSOs we collaborate with by creating use cases. This will help fine tune the tool for more accurate results.
On the development front, the focus is on new functionalities based on the requirements of our co-creators and structuring the existing code to be on par with open-source standards. We’ve updated the tool by using aquifer maps for accurate depiction of ground water data. Going forward, we want to improve the accuracy of the computed water balance using alternate datasets, make the most recent datasets within Jaltol accessible and show long-term trends.
Read | Aquifer Maps Add Accuracy to Jaltol
Right from the beginning, Jaltol has been co-created with communities working on the ground. Back in September 2021, we piloted Jaltol with early users to receive their feedback on the usefulness of the tool. The current development plan is actively incorporating feature requests from those feedback sessions.
Alongside Jaltol tool development, our goal for the first two quarters of 2022, is to onboard five CSOs as co-creators the tool. We are in initial talks with four of these organisations.
If you are a CSO interested in using Jaltol or would like to onboard as co-creators, fill up this questionnaire. Or write to us at jaltol@atree.org.
Edited by Anjana Balakrishnan
