The Groundwater Monitoring Campaign - Napo Jal Bachao Kal aims to map at least 1 well in each village of India. The plan is simple: measure the wells and upload the data via the Groundwater Monitoring Tool (GWMT) to understand the status of our groundwater resources and make informed decisions for its better usage, governance and management.
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To ensure the availability of good quality, granular, location-specific data on groundwater, the campaign aims to measure well water levels across India and facilitate a robust understanding of its current situation- thus aiding better management and governance at all levels.
Since 2020, thousands of people across the country are measuring the water level of wells, twice a year. Over the course of the last four years, eight consecutive seasons, and 248000+ open well monitoring instances, we have monitored over 60,000 distinct wells in 14 states and, with the assistance of over 12,500 registered tool users and 120+ NGO partners, have touched over 20,000 villages.
Last year, 3600+individuals participated independently or with 100+ NGOs across India to measure 36,000+ wells before and after the monsoons. This time, our goal is to map at least 50,000 wells.
Sustainable management of our water resources, especially groundwater, requires each and everyone of us to work together. Come, become a Water Champion and measure the water levels in your region to understand this precious resource better.
After all, it's only what gets measured that gets managed.
The collated data will add to the rapidly growing database on the Groundwater Monitoring Portal, an open-access web platform, which is then used to generate visualisations of India’s water levels.
The data can be downloaded in an excel sheet for the village, block, state and national levels. The platform also allows users to visualise and download the data in the form of maps for easy comprehension.
This good quality, granular data improves access to information regarding groundwater status for all stakeholders, especially rural communities, aiding in informed decision making and facilitating the movement towards sustainable water usage. For instance, the data collected is able to point to “over-exploited” districts that are in dire need of assistance before full-scale drought potentially sets in. Data like this can be used to make local -level decisions as well as to inform policy and programmatic action around groundwater.
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The India Observatory, led by Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), is a collaborative action-oriented tech initiative. It aims to demystify and present comprehensive information on India’s social, ecological and economic parameters on a single spatial and temporal platform.
