New Jaltol Partnership to Shed Light on Jharkhand’s Water Availability
CSEI signed an MoU with WASSAN, an extensive network of CSOs working on participatory watershed programmes in 11 states.
Pranuti Choppakatla and Craig D’Souza
Many parts of Jharkhand face severe water scarcity during the summer months. Just this year, as early as the first week of April, there were reports of wells and taps running dry in the state capital of Ranchi. Even during the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020, residents were quoted as saying, ‘The fear of water shortage is much bigger than coronavirus’.
Unlike states such as Rajasthan, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and others, Jharkhand does not appear on the Central Ground Water Board map of India’s most overexploited or critical blocks. However as economic development ramps up, many parts of the state are witnessing water scarcity in the form of water bodies drying up.
There is an urgent need for measures such as water budgeting, that take into account trends in the region’s water availability, and domestic and crop water requirements so that the state doesn’t follow in the footsteps of many of the country’s worst exploited groundwater regions.
Such a technical exercise can be aided with digital tools like Jaltol, launched by CSEI last year. But crucial to the effectiveness of a tool like Jaltol is partnerships with organisations that have experience in implementing watershed management projects. Thus, to enable scientifically-informed water security planning in Jharkhand, CSEI has signed an Memorandum of Understanding with one of the largest networks of CSOs in the country working in this sector — the Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN).
How this collaboration helps
WASSAN focuses on supporting farming communities in rainfed drylands through participatory processes that strengthen natural resource management. To fulfil this vision, management of water resources is one of the central pillars of WASSAN’s work, alongside other areas such as revival of millets, crop diversification, agroforestry, as well as improved rural WASH infrastructure and public support systems.
Read | CSEI Explainer: Crop Water Requirement
In the last few years WASSAN has taken their approach to parts of the country not normally thought of as water scarce such as Jharkhand and Odisha. These places are nevertheless seeing the impacts of rapid development at the expense of groundwater resources. In both states, WASSAN has partnered with organisations such as ACWADAM, to conduct training sessions on participatory groundwater management. Their annual report says, ‘the programme covering nearly 2000 acres in 4 pilot villages, envisages building capacities of the community to measure, monitor groundwater and develop participatory aquifer mapping to arrive at decisions on water management at community level.’
WASSAN has also facilitated crop water budgeting exercises in some of the villages. This is where Jaltol and CSEI’s expertise come in. Developing even a reasonably precise estimate of water availability and demand isn’t a trivial task, especially given the complexities of the hydrological cycle. Jaltol aims to address this capacity gap by making it convenient for WASSAN field staff to rapidly generate prospective water budgets that are specific to each village they work in across the state. Knowing that the water budgets they develop rest on firm assumptions helps them focus on equally-important aspects of their work such as improving community participation in debating these budgets.
How it works
Jaltol’s usefulness lies in its ability to generate water budgets for prospective areas where no field level data exists. However, in regions where data does exist, WASSAN’s staff can enter this local data which supersedes satellite-derived estimates available in Jaltol.
In the following graphic, for example, field staff will be able to enter information on the crops grown in the concerned village and change the combination until the cropping patterns match water availability to demand. The tool would show how sowing less water-intensive crops can help mitigate drought risk.
Next steps
Over the next three months, as Jharkhand enters the rabi cropping season, WASSAN and CSEI will collaborate to hone the accuracy of these water budgets with locally-collected ground truth data including groundwater levels, surface water depths and existing cropping patterns. CSEI staff will also train WASSAN’s field staff to use the tool. In this process of co-creation, feedback obtained from real world usage of the water budgets will be used to iteratively improve the usefulness and accuracy of the tool.
Edited by Kaavya Kumar
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