India Water Portal/Arghyam
Water insecurity is a large-scale problem in most parts of the world. It is even more so in developing countries like India where access to safe drinking water is still a piped dream for many. Water, in policy and management, is highly fragmented and governed across multiple departments. And of course, because of its nexus with other major economic sectors like agriculture and industries, its management has been historically a challenge and continues to be so even now.
India Water Portal is an open knowledge platform on water supported by Arghyam. One of the objectives of the platform is to generate mass awareness on the scale and seriousness of water issues in India; and bring policy attention to emerging trends on water.
Project Information
Lack of data at a single place for better governance, policy design and decision making is a gap and India Water Portal has been trying to address that by hosting publicly available datasets or links to them on the platform. But for most of the datasets, the formats are not user-friendly, and very few indicators have readily available visualizations that can aid quick understanding of problems and support awareness and decision making. With a reader base of more than 8 million in English and Hindi, the Portal has the power to generate discussions on macro level shifts on important indicators that highlight water security challenges.
We need dashboards, visualizations, and data storyboards of some or all of the indicators listed below. Contributors will be duly credited on the Portal for their contribution to sectoral asset creation.
Per capita water availability in India (last 30 years)
Water use by sectors (agriculture, industry, domestic, others)
Water use by source (groundwater, surface water)
Rainfall trends in water stressed regions of the country (last 30 years)
Blocks and districts with water quality issues (fluoride, arsenic, iron, biological contaminants, others)
Status of groundwater development (critical, overexploited blocks)
Total groundwater extraction trend comparison (India, China, USA)
Trends in borewell and deep tubewell structures in India (last 4 minor irrigation census)
Call-to-Action
Help solve the problem of lack of awareness and sufficient focus of water issues and the alarming rate of aggravation of the same by sharing these findings with your network and contributing any kind of relevant content to India Water Portal.
Audience
General public, youth looking to enter civil services and policy jobs, government functionaries working on water, philanthropists, Civil Society actors
Use of Data Visualisation
Websites of IWP and Arghyam, social media, annual reports, advocacy presentations, other communications
Data
Download data from Google Drive
Key dates
Project kickoff: 2 September | Recording
Deadline for volunteers to submit: 30 September | Submission form
Volunteer live presentations: 8 October 5 PM IST | Recording