Dhaval Joshi’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

The book brings together a range of leading scholars and practitioners to compile an international account of water allocation policies supporting a transition to sustainable water use in regions where agriculture is the dominant water use. In Section 1, the collection canvasses five key crosscutting issues shaping the challenge of sustainable water allocation policy, such as legal and economic perspectives, the role of politics, the contributions of engineering and technology, the setting of environmental flows, and the importance of indigenous rights. Section 2 presents 16 national, state and transboundary case studies of water allocation policy, covering cases from Europe, the Americas, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific region. These case studies highlight novel and innovative elements of water allocation regimes, which respond to the cross-cutting issues addressed in Section 1, as well as local challenges and social and environmental imperatives. The book provides a comprehensive account of water allocation in a range of international settings and provides a reference point for practitioners and scholars worldwide wishing to draw on the latest advances on how to design and implement sustainable water allocation systems. ISBN: 9781789062779 (print) ISBN: 9781789062786 (eBook) ISBN: 9781789062793 (ePUB)

This document describes ACWADAM's unique journey that started parallel to the story of groundwater in India. The document begins by charting the story of India's groundwater trajectory, from the green revolution to the present day situation, the challenges emerging as an outcome of this dependency and ACWADAMs parallel journey in its quest to find sustainable solutions to this crisis.

Groundwater is accessed by those living in mountains as well as those living close to the sea shore. It holds equal importance in terms of freshwater availability even in the most vulnerable areas. As we face the consequences of climate change across the globe, in the form of rising sea water levels, the freshwater availability becomes a crucial resource to support life and livelihood, especially in the coastal areas. The impact of the sea water level rise on the coastal aquifer is in the form of saline water intrusion. In addition to the natural dynamics, the saline water intrusion is also highly affected by uncontrolled groundwater abstraction from the coastal aquifers, that directly affects the freshwater availability in the villages located on the coastline. The groundwater abstraction in the coastline villages is mainly to meet drinking & domestic water demand and to support local economy. The local economy here is mainly supported by non-agricultural activities such as fisheries and tourism. Coastal areas are world’s popular tourist destinations. The triad of sun, sea and sand are the aesthetic expressions of this ecosystem that attract public towards coastal areas. The development of tourism is often at the expense of natural resources. The consumption of natural resources gives an indication of the impact such tourism has on an already vulnerable ecosystem, especially in the context of coastal areas. Access to fresh water becomes a priority in promoting and sustaining coastal tourism. On the other hand, sustainability is about maintaining the health of ‘coastal ecosystem goods and services’ required for the continued well-being of the ecosystem and its components, including human beings. Tourism and allied occupations are the only sources of income in some villages along the coastline. In order to cater to growing water demand, as a result of increase in tourist footfall, local groundwater resource is exploited. The uncontrolled abstraction of groundwater from the coastal aquifers increases its vulnerability as the freshwater resides in the coastal aquifer in form of lens floating on top of the saline water. This factor makes the freshwater availability limited by promoting sea water ingress in the coastal aquifer. This eventually impacts the availability of good quality groundwater in the coastal villages. Communities in these villages have to depend on water supply that is sourced from water sources located outside of the village boundary, such as a dug well which has freshwater. A medley of ways are sorted out by the community members to access the freshwater source, they are either organized by village organizations or a direct transaction with a fellow dug well owner who have access to freshwater throughout the year.

If the success of agricultural intensification continues to rely on the depletion of aquifers and exploitation of (female) labour, transformations to groundwater sustainability will be impossible to achieve. Hence, the development of new groundwater imaginaries, based on alternative ways of organizing society-water relations is highly important. This paper argues that a comparative documentation of grass-roots initiatives to care for, share or recharge aquifers in places with acute resource pressures provides an important source of inspiration. Using a grounded anti-colonial and feminist approach, we combine an ethnographic documentation of groundwater practices with hydrogeological and engineering insights to enunciate, normatively assess and jointly learn from the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize such initiatives. Doing this usefully shifts the focus of planned efforts to regulate and govern groundwater away from government efforts to control individual pumping behaviours, to the identification of possibilities to anchor transformations to sustainability in collective action.

India’s groundwaterGroundwater usage is the largest in the world. Nearly, all sectors, especially rural domestic water and water in agriculture, have large-scale dependencies on groundwater resources. Groundwater exploitation, without due consideration to the concept of aquifers as common pool resources, has led to the dual problem of groundwater depletion and contamination. Groundwater depletion has also led to depletion in river flow. Competition over groundwater resources has slowly emerged as a complex problem across India’s diverse aquifer typologyAquifer typology, sometimes leading to conflict. The rise in the number of wells across the small land holdings in India has meant that groundwater extraction occurs at high granularity, making it difficult for large-scale data and information to capture the reality of problems of the ground. The social, economic and environmental consequences of groundwater over-extraction in India is as much related to the variability in the transmission and storage properties of different aquifers as it is about the diversity in the social context of people who use groundwater resources. Community-based normsCommunity-based norms on managing groundwater resources have been one of the emergent areas of responding to the crisis of groundwater management in the field. Policy, on the other hand, has been toying with conventional regulatory responses, mainly through groundwater legislation. The gap between the policy and practice of groundwater management is quite wide and requires a combination of groundwater management and governance. Institutionalizing the integration of groundwater management and governance, although seemingly challenging, has become crucial in addressing India’s groundwater crises. Combining demystified science, people’s participationPeople’s participation and institutional reform to bring to the fore the concept of aquifers as common pool resources can form a solid foundation for catalysing groundwaterGroundwater governance in India.

India is the largest user of groundwater in the world accounting for nearly 25 percent of global abstraction. It has been possible due to the atomistic nature of groundwater development in the country. Nearly 85 percent of rural water supplies are dependent on groundwater sources. Given the context of this dependency on the resource, the country today faces unprecedented crisis linked to management and governance of groundwater. The Participatory Groundwater Management (PGWM) efforts by the cohort of Arghyam partners across various hydrogeological settings of the country argues for a hydrogeology based approach to groundwater management (Ghose et al. 2017). What opportunities does the PGWM approach provide for holistic water resources and livelihood development in the CITB? What strategies and processes will enable decentralization of groundwater governance in the Central Indian Tribal Belt? What are the challenges that one may come across for PGWM in CITB? This document analyses the above set of questions in the context of work undertaken by Bharat Rural Livelihood Foundation (BRLF) in collaboration with 14 civil society partners working across the CITB. The work on PGWM was undertaken across 20 pilot locations spread across 7 states of CITB.

India is the largest user of groundwater in the world, with an atomistic resource development paradigm. The millions of groundwater users across the diverse hydrogeological settings of the country have led to an overarching dependency on the resource for agricultural livelihoods, drinking water security and also meeting and increasing industrial and urban water demand. Increasing dependency has led to growing exploitation trends, often with concurrent contamination effects and complex competition around groundwater resources. Groundwater management efforts are emerging where science and participation of communities have led to management of aquifers as CPRs. However, such management has also revealed the urgent need for a groundwater governance agenda which tackles the problems through effective amalgamation of hydrogeology, stakeholder engagement and institutional arrangements. The article discusses the framework for an integrated groundwater governance paradigm in India that follows a bottom-up approach through decentralisation of the principles of governance and some examples of how this is evolving in conjunction with participatory groundwater management.

Groundwater has been the backbone of water for agriculture in India. Millions of farmers depend on groundwater for sustaining their agricultural livelihood. Any discussion on groundwater would be incomplete without taking into consideration the resource unit i.e. aquifers. Aquifer storage capacity is not necessarily reflected in discussions on water use efficiency. Efficiency estimation in agricultural systems has centred on a crop-per-drop approach. We take up three traditional approaches to efficiency in the context of two case studies from western Maharashtra which are part of shallow unconfined Deccan basalt aquifer systems, viz. Pabal and Randullabad. We compare the efficiencies of these two aquifers and propose a more comprehensive methodology to address efficiency in groundwater-based agricultural systems taking into consideration the characteristics of aquifers, mainly the specific yield. Such an efficiency index is useful in gauging specific impacts from initiatives that include supply and demand-side interventions.

The main objective of the project was to create awareness among the community about groundwater, establish a hydrogeological monitoring system in the village, create hydrogeological data base and on the basis of this information prepare a groundwater management plan for Nitrud. In Participatory groundwater management, community plays a vital role as the data collection is entirely done by the community. In Nitrud, the community has shown interest in data collection and has supported ACWADAM and MKF during various surveys. ACWADAM was involved in geological mapping, setting up of monitoring network, data analysis, preparation of water balance, nd in giving recommendations for managing groundwater in Nitrud.