Year in Review: 10 Things We Didn’t Expect to Learn
Unexpected twists and turns come up often in the course of our work. We document some counterintuitive learnings from 2022 in this blog post.
Anjali Neelakantan, Anjana Balakrishnan, Anu Sridharan, Sandeep Hanchanale and Shreya Nath
In December 2021, we polled the entire CSEI team and collated some of the learnings that took us by surprise. This exercise was so enlightening that we decided to do this all over again in 2022.
1. The political economy of wastewater
Bengaluru is at an elevation of 900 feet above mean sea level. A large portion of our drinking water cost (and embedded carbon) involves pumping water from far away sources. It would make sense therefore to reduce our freshwater consumption by safely treating wastewater, saving money and reducing our carbon footprint at least for non potable uses like parks, medians and cooling towers.
Read | As Bengaluru floods again, here’s why it is important to map the flow of water through cities
But not everyone is enthusiastic about this because Bengaluru has also become a ‘supplier’ of wastewater to parched rural districts. Why wouldn’t we just send them freshwater instead of pumping all that water uphill first? That’s where the Cauvery Tribunal comes in. It stipulates that the Cauvery allocation is for urban uses; not agriculture. So, legally, the only way to get water to farmers is through our kidneys — an unexpected consequence of how inter-state politics work is that there is a disincentive to reuse wastewater within the city.
2. Inconsistent wastewater regulations lead to waste
Treated wastewater usage for landscape irrigation is advocated by the National Green Tribunal and the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board reports usage ‘by horticulture departments….and in gardening etc.’ Ironically, policies intended to incentivise wastewater reuse within Bengaluru have the opposite effects because of institutional silos.
Many of Bengaluru’s apartments have surplus treated wastewater. But usage of treated wastewater from apartments for greening ‘outside the fence’ is not supported by the ZLD regulation which mandates 100% reuse within the apartment fence, a regulation that is well known to be impossible to comply with.
As a result, the treated wastewater is illegally discharged into stormwater drains which flow into lakes where it mixes with untreated wastewater and is rendered unusable. This is not only a waste of resources, but also a missed opportunity, especially since parks and medians, which are often located within a few 100 feet from these apartments, continue to rely on rapidly dwindling groundwater.
3. Lakes are not seen as potential sources of drinking water, even when groundwater is scarce.
Chintamani, a town near Bengaluru we work in, is highly reliant on groundwater as their sole source of drinking water like many other towns in peninsular India. This approach is sub-optimal.
Currently, nearly 100 borewells with depths ranging from 500 to 1500 feet contribute drinking water to the town. Although municipal supply was predictable (once in 7 or 8 days) this year thanks to above average rainfall, the town nonetheless spends a considerable portion of its water supply budget on pumping. In previous drought years, many borewells failed and the town had to buy tanker water.
Realising the need for an integrated urban water management approach, we began characterising water bodies and stormwater and wastewater flows across the town. Preliminary findings suggest at least one lake located at the north of the city could be cleaned up and used to augment municipal supply, catering to 40–50% of their annual water demand. But surprisingly local water bodies do not feature in a significant way, in the municipal water supply planning.
4. Farmers know how to restore degraded agricultural land, but they need help accessing government programmes.
As we began working in the dry, aspirational districts of Raichur, we encountered large-scale land degradation and extreme poverty. Satellite imagery showed that much of the land in the region lay barren. Our initial hypothesis was that the most important role we could play was addressing the knowledge gap in farmers’ understanding on how to restore degraded lands. We also assumed that perhaps farming was no longer of interest as farmers preferred to migrate in search of a better life.
We soon realised that money, not knowledge, was the barrier and most farmers, in fact, want to stay back in their communities. In this region, migration was almost entirely distress migration (push) not aspirational (pull). And while regeneration of degraded lands is remunerative in the long run, farmers cannot finance the transition. They need to make a living in the short term to survive. What farmers wanted from us was help in accessing policies/programmes suitable for rainfed farmers that would allow them to restore their land and earn an income during the transition period.
5. From giving up a lost battle to choosing winnable battle(s)
The ‘Future of the Forests’ workshop was conducted in collaboration with Biodiversity Collaborative to build consensus on tackling the lantana invasion. Based on the divergent perspectives that emerged during our pre-interviews, we believed that consensus building would be difficult.
Surprisingly, when the group met in person, there was a clear shift in focus from searching for what we don’t know to building on what we already know. Both the structure of the workshop and the consensus on the need to address the lantana problem contributed to this shift.
The issue of lantana invasion had been termed as a ‘lost battle’ by many ecologists. Instead, the workshop showed that careful selection of restoration sites would be key to picking ‘winnable battles’. The principle of choosing winnable battles and preventing further spread, went against the prevailing belief that areas with the most severe degradation need to be addressed first.
6. The consequences of free electricity to farmers on drinking water security
Groundwater in peninsular India is declining, driven primarily by irrigated agriculture. Farmers over-abstract beyond what is sustainable because electricity is free. Reversing electricity subsidies is politically challenging because access to irrigation is the single biggest determinant of farmer income and farmers are an important voting block.
But we were surprised to observe the unintended consequence on drinking water security; not only do urban and rural water providers have to repeatedly invest capital in replacing defunct borewells, but just one line item: the cost of electricity to pump drinking water often exceeded all sources of revenue including tax collections and disbursements to municipalities and Gram Panchayats from the central and state governments.
7. Agricultural lock-ins prevent farmers from transitioning to more sustainable groundwater use.
India’s farmers are stuck: both groundwater levels and farmer incomes are falling. We need to enable farmers to make choices that improve their income and cut down on their demand for water. We developed an agent-based model for solar irrigation to understand the possibilities for sustainable transitions for farmers.
Economic modeling showed us that with the introduction of solar irrigation, with net metering and feed in tariffs, win-wins were possible. I.e., farmers would switch to low water using crops, pumping less groundwater and/or sell the energy back to the grid to earn a higher income.
However, our field interviews painted a different picture. In all of our case studies, we found the existence of strong lock-ins that prevent farmers from shifting away from the status quo cultivation practices. To break-these, we need to set up incentives, policies, technologies and institutions to steer the entire agricultural sector towards a low water economy.
8. In engaging communities on water budgets trust matters more than accuracy
Civil society organisations (CSOs) often seek to increase awareness about demand side measures for water conservation, by engaging communities in discussions around water budgets. These processes often involve intensive data collection. While water budgets are easier to construct using secondary data from distant sources, communities tend to trust and engage with the conversation more if its foundation is data and narratives sourced from within. This has given us food for thought in the development of the Jaltol tool. How can we still make the work of CSOs easier while not ignoring the tradeoff between trust and convenience?
9. Community is in the detail
As an ecosystem builder, aligning actors to build consensus is our superpower. In September this year, we organised a multi-stakeholder workshop on challenges and opportunities in wastewater in Bengaluru. This event brought together a diverse group that works around wastewater but had not met before. It taught us that holding space for these difficult conversations is an important role the community needs us to play. This event received a fair bit of media attention. You can read about it here, here and here.
This convening led us to a major discovery. Our value as a partner is tied to our ability to amplify our partners using communication services. Often partner organisations lack resources–time, people and money–to execute a communication plan. Their most common needs are in creating brochures, media articles or even presentations. Recently, we created communication collateral for the Alliance for Reversing Ecosystem Service Threats (AREST) project as they got ready to participate in the COP27 Summit).
10. What we need is interoperability across diverse platforms
Early on we recognised that the absence of publicly available data was a barrier to solving many socio-environmental problems. Our initial instinct was to build a platform to collate these. But we quickly realised that much of this data already exists but in a fragmented way. Also, nobody wants yet another platform.
Working in collaboration with Rainmatter Foundation we identified three gaps:
- There are different types of data: Our initial focus was geospatial data. But a bigger gap was scientific data on bioresources. For example, what wild edible species grow in different places, how much water would specific trees require during the first few years etc.
- Existing platforms must talk to each other: There are a multitude of amazing platforms out there, but it is unlikely that a single one will have all the data a CSO needs. Therefore, interoperability between platforms seems to be the key.
- Communities need to be able to discover resources and services: Discoverability is a huge problem, and something that many CSOs underestimate how hard it is to do. In the for-profit space, marketing often has the largest spend. In contrast, in the non-profit world, it’s usually the smallest line item. So, it’s no wonder that most people don’t know what other organisations are doing. There is an urgent need for services directories that help non-profits discover existing service providers instead of building them from scratch.
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