As thirst for water grows, it’s time to harvest both water and data

At a time when the country is looking at harvesting every drop of water considering the increase in its requirement for various purposes, one of the important aspects of water conservation – data – is yet to gain attention of the stakeholders.

Sattva Knowledge Institute’s (SKI) recent study said combining ‘top-down’ open data with ‘bottom-up’ citizen science is a promising way forward to resolving water data gaps in India. Given the high cost for collection of high-resolution data, it is imperative today that water data collection become simplified, low-cost and community-centric.

It said collaborative action between the scientific community, corporations, farmers, local communities and governments has the potential to reduce the imminent water crisis in India today.

SKI conducted a landscape analysis of country’s open data platforms and spoke to experts in water conservation and water stewardship programming to understand the water data crisis.

Why water data?

On the need to focus on better access to data, the report said annual investment by Indian corporations in water conservation from 2016-17 to 2021-22 averaged ₹265 crore. In some cases, 50-60 per cent of total water conservation investment among corporations goes towards collecting water data to assess sub-basin and watershed level risks.

Data provides the foundation upon which stakeholders across industry, government and civil society can understand the geographical spread and scale of the crisis, and make critical decisions regarding water conservation efforts and for agriculture. Data collection for water is expensive and there is a heavy cost for coordinating the data across multiple sources, it said.

SKI analysed 13 platforms and decision support systems with open data for water risk assessment in India. Of them, five platforms had open data at a sub-basin, district or village-level.

Current scenario

The current ‘top-down’ open water data aggregates data at administrative level such as district-level rather than basin (drainage area of river) boundaries. Due to the trans-boundary nature of rivers, estimating the sub-basin and basin-level water crisis requires assumptions and models that experts often find unsatisfactory.

The study noted that critical data on the top zone of aquifers are missing. Data on groundwater tables, to measure how much recharge is in the top zone of the aquifer, as well as estimations of lateral recharge are both currently unavailable at the sub-basin level.

Referring to the unreported water consumption data, it said the lack of reporting of the ‘number of personal tube-wells or borewells owned’, particularly for large farmers and industries with unregistered borewells, leads to inaccurate calculation of total water consumption in a geographical area.

Quoting an interview with senior hydrologist, Biplob Chatterjee, it said data gaps often lead to a scenario of ‘planning for the lowest possible outcome’ focusing on interventions that do not restore the base flow of aquifers in the long run.

By focusing on interventions that lead to immediate water availability, measured through ‘meters cubed of water’ generated, the newly supplied water is immediately utilized for consumption in households and agriculture and overall water levels do not rise.

Citizen participation

Highlighting the need to map the ‘top-down’ open data platforms with ‘bottom-up’ citizen sourced data, SKI urged the need to focus on citizen science where data is collected directly from farmers and local communities.

Given the existing data sources often have gaps, the government and many academics and donors have started to work on gathering data directly from farmers or community members both to ‘ground-truth’ and to update understanding of the current scenario.

Referring to the nation-wide experiment in sourcing groundwater data from communities through a mobile application, it said the Jaldoot mobile app, developed jointly by the Ministry of Rural Development and Panachayti Raj in 2022 with data hosted on the National Water Informatics Centre (NWIC), is an experiment in collecting data on two-three open wells in every village across the country.

Mentioning another study on ground-truthing groundwater levels with farmer-sourced data, it said an interdisciplinary team of academics in a four-year study that started in May 2019, found that observation well data from certain districts in the Kaveri delta, derived from the Central Groundwater Board (CGWB) and Tamil Nadu Public Works Department-Water Resources Department, reported stable or increasing groundwater levels in areas where CGWB groundwater extraction data depicted overexploitation and semi-critical levels for the same districts.

To understand the discrepancy, with the support of land-owning farmers with borewells, engineers, farmers’ associations and local university students, the researchers collected data through a participatory data collection project for over 800 wells with several parameters.

Highlighting the discrepancy between government and farmer reported data, the study said: “Farmers are drilling to more than 10 times the depths that the government is measuring groundwater levels at. It seems, therefore, that the government monitors largely shallow wells, leaving unmonitored water levels at the depths to which farmers are drilling to or pumping from.”

The study noted that mapping the ‘top-down’ open data platforms with ‘bottom-up’ citizen sourced data has the potential to deliver benefits both to decision-makers such as corporations and the government and water users. There are two ways that data flows, either to farmers or from farmers, it said.

Published on April 16, 2025