Groundwater monitoring yields encouraging results in Chikkaballapur villages

Villages in the arid northern parts of the Chikkaballapur district are seeing an improvement in the water table due to the increased involvement of the residents in protecting the commons, especially drains and grazing lands.

This has been possible thanks to the movement to measure the water table in the pre-and post-monsoon seasons.

The exercise, being spearheaded by India Observatory, Foundation of Ecological Security (FES) among the more than 100 non-profit organisations, seeks to create a water table map with granular data.

In Bagepalli, groundwater monitoring exercises began with 99 open wells in the pre-monsoon days of 2020. Over the last two years, the number of wells monitored has gone up to 177.

“This has improved location-specific granular data, which will in turn aid informed decision making at the village level for better usage and governance of water resources,” FES Senior Programme Manager Kiran Singh said. The agencies have adopted Groundwater Monitoring (GWM) Tool, a standard methodology for data collection to ensure data quality.

Speaking to DH, Kiran said, “The data uploaded to the portal is reviewed for errors. We have found a 5% error margin, which can be rectified. For us, groundwater data is one of the most important ways to show the impact of the work we do.”

All-India campaign

The organisations are now taking the movement to new places. In a first-of-its-kind volunteer-driven initiative, more than 5,500 individuals will measure the groundwater levels across the country to crowdsource data. The exercise will also spread awareness of the importance of the commons.

The Central Groundwater Board maps 15,000 wells across the country. While this provides a regional or district-level estimate of the groundwater levels, the lack of availability of the data at the village level makes it difficult to tailor the policies.

“If you measure the data year on year, we get a trend on how the community is using the water. A pattern will emerge and help to understand whether their usage, especially for agriculture, is sustainable or not,” she noted, citing the example of water-guzzling cash crops.

Sanjay Joshie, executive director of FES said that a campaign in six languages, including Kannada, Telugu, Marathi and Hindi, would be run to attract more participants in the GWM exercise.

“We hope that more people across the country join the campaign to generate sufficient data to improve decision making around the usage of groundwater, thereby creating water self-sufficiency at all levels,” he said in a statement.