Water Security

We visited Nadiyam, a coastal village in Tamil Nadu, to examine water supply under the Jal Jeevan Mission and the challenges in sustaining piped drinking water access in rural areas — Adarsh Dalavi and Partik Kumar India’s Jal Jeevan Mission seeks to provide safe and adequate drinking water to every rural household in the country by 2024. As of December 2022, 55% of rural households had received tap connections. …

Ekatvam Innovations, a for-profit social enterprise on a mission to build water resource management platform for rural India, offers a comprehensive platform for data collection, analysis, and decision-making. …

By collating secondary data and allowing for grassroots communities to input specific primary data, Jaltol can address the data and technical gap that impairs rural water planning. — Lakshmi Pranuti, Ashish Sinha, Craig Dsouza On a bright November morning in Dhodrobaru village in southern Jharkhand, around 45 villagers gathered for a tricky exercise — estimating crop water use in the region. …

By looking at the whole water system, from extreme weather to processing waste, researchers in the UK, Colombia, Ethiopia, India and Malaysia are finding ways to tackle risks to this precious resource, vital for all life on Earth. All countries need water to support their population and economy. Yet over…

Preparation of Water Security Plans is an important initial step in achieving rural water security. We examined 10 plans across aquifer types and executed by different organisations to understand what it contains and what’s missing. — The Niti Aayog, the Indian government’s apex policy planning unit, made a strong statement in a report it released in 2019 — ‘India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history and millions of lives and livelihoods are under threat’. …

Four key learnings from a SIWI seminar at World Water Week, 2022, which aimed to understand how enhanced ecosystem services can be valued, financed, and scaled. — The term Nature-based Solutions (NbS) refers to the sustainable management and use of natural features and processes to tackle socio-environmental challenges in general, and climate change in particular. These solutions are ‘inspired and supported by nature’, cost-effective, and simultaneously provide environmental, social, and economic benefits and help build resilience.

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. …

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…

By Michael Grande — A conflict over water is simmering in Central Asia. Places like the US have defined processes for resolving water conflicts, but the countries of Central Asia may lack some of these elements and should move to establish a negotiated peace to avoid a full-scale water war. Both groundwater and surface…