Pan - India

Consolidating data to accelerate water security plan development

forwater — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 09:47:09 +0000

Consolidating data to accelerate water security plan development forwater Mon, 12/26/2022 - 15:17

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Effective water governance and disaster response needs data of stock of water resources, rate of flow of water, soil moisture levels, daily precipitation levels.

Deriving cause-effect links between the scale of use of water in a particular region and its possible effect on the status of water resources in the vicinity is an extremely difficult exercise because water stocks and flows are affected by so many causal links which need to be studied and quantified in an integrated manner. An integral part of any water resource study is developing a water balance model to estimate water availability and water demand.

The project was envisioned to study availability and accessibility of inter-operable data and create prototypes that allowed for overlaying of local data over satellite data. To build a free and open source data portal for water resources information in India.

Output

A web application prototype that will collate and display secondary data
A paper that outlines sources of data, type of data, level to which available (GP, village, etc.) and nature of the source (Paid/ unpaid/ format available etc.)
A model WSP format – along with indications for what data already exists in secondary sources.

Focus Area

Participatory Groundwater Management

State

Pan - India

Duration

Sun, 01/01/2017 - 12:00 - Mon, 01/01/2018 - 12:00

Path Alias

/our-works/consolidating-data-accelerate-water-security-plan-development

Rapid Rural Community Response (RCRC) to COVID-19 in India

forwater — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 09:36:31 +0000

Rapid Rural Community Response (RCRC) to COVID-19 in India forwater Mon, 12/26/2022 - 15:06

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The unprecedented spread of the COVID-19 virus has presented a threefold crisis worldwide – public health, economic and socio-psychological; a truly population scale problem. The reverse migration triggered by the sudden announcement of the lockdown in India poses a huge challenge for the scores of migrant workers trying to get back to the safety of their homes in their native villages. While stoppage of transport services, loss of wages and abysmal social security in the urban areas is making the journey arduous, situations of grave hunger and possible ostracisation awaits them at home.

It is expected that the unprecedented nature and scale of the epidemic will have a long term and wide spread impact on livelihoods and natural resources like water. Thus, it is important to create a reliable channel of communication that allows collection, collation and analysis of factual data and information to flow that will augment the government and civil society’s efforts for targeted intervention in a proactive manner, even as the crisis unfolds across the country. This information will be critical to first understand the change on the ground and then realign the policies of government as well as strategy of funding and implementing organisations.

In this context, the consortium of 20 civil society organizations having a collective outreach of over 1.2 million families has reached out to the donor community including Arghyam for financial support as well as leveraging resources that can strengthen the consortium to be more effective in its work.

The consortium has come up with three-pronged response strategy as below:

Direct Action – support to vulnerable communities, including migrant workers, through an existing cadre of 10,000 CRPs for raising awareness, support GPs, extend reach of government programmes, organize relief (food & medicines), support health workers with PPE/ quarantine facilities etc.
Action Research – to generate usable knowledge for better understanding of the public health as well as the economic crisis both in the short and long term in rural areas. This would entail building contextual understanding in multiple geographies as well as various vulnerable communities, for designing and implementing effective coping strategies.
Support to Elected Representatives and Policy Advocacy – to complement the efforts of the democratically elected representatives from the local self-government (GPs), MLAs/ MPs as well as Niti Aayog. This is for making relief and rebuilding efforts more community based, targeted and humane. The collective advocacy is aimed to inform policy of both national and state governments as well as for funding organisations.

Outputs

Relief from the distress for rural poor community in 500 blocks (estimated population: 6,000,000 people)
Better implementation of government policy and program related to COVID-19
Documentation of the impacts of COVID and the lockdown on vulnerable population especially migrant labourers and old people
Documentation of the best practices of the communities to cope with COVID and lockdown and associated learnings
Learning related to livelihoods opportunities for migrant labourers and other rural population and ideas for new livelihoods strategy in the post pandemic situation

Focus Area

COVID-19

State

Pan - India

Outreach

6000000

Duration

Wed, 01/01/2020 - 12:00

Path Alias

/our-works/rapid-rural-community-response-rcrc-covid-19-india

Democratising knowledge and data on water quality in India

fasmin — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 06:34:30 +0000

Democratising knowledge and data on water quality in India fasmin Mon, 09/19/2022 - 12:04

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Arghyam has been a partner with the INREM Foundation on Water Quality and has supported them since 2013. INREM is acknowledged as a leading organization on water quality in the country and brings both expertise and a network approach to democratize knowledge and data. INREM is also a Sector Partner for water quality for Jal Jeevan Mission. Through the Water Quality Network, INREM is enabling diverse Communities of Practice across scales to first enhance their existing ability to understand WQ problems, and then be able to access resources and expertise to be able to solve them in their own unique local contexts.

In the working at scale approach since last one year , INREM has continued to act as an expert agency and focussing on building capacities and handhold large NGOs and networks to act as lead agencies for water quality and through them co-create scale models for water quality. For this INREM has been using technology as an enabler, to reach out to more people, more frequently, light them up as available assets for the ecosystem while leaving behind knowledge assets.

INREM launched the Water Quality Management (WQM) Online course in August 2021 along with partners such as Gram Vikas, AKRSPI, UNICEF, Water Aid, Tata Trusts etc. The course is supporting to fill a critical gap in the ecosystem and providing direction on Water Quality Monitoring and Surveillance (WQM&S) component of the Jal Jeevan Mission program to the Public Health and Engineering Department (PHED), Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Department (RWSS), Labs and chemists under JJM, and NGOs/CSOs comprising KRCs, Sector Partners, academicians and so on.

From August 2021 to December 2022, around 700 participants from 28 states have been a part of this course and they are further working as ‘Water Quality Champions’ in their respective programs for creating awareness on water quality issues, training the district, block, GP level functionaries and CRP’s in the village and performing water quality tests. The participants of the course besides spreading the word and bringing more participants are also motivated to give back to the program and are coming back as trainers, experts and mentors for subsequent batches.

INREM will continue strengthening the institutional capacities of the diverse stakeholders of the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) ecosystem through the Water Quality Management (WQM course), Trainer Certification Program and also offering the Water Quality Champions to be a part of the wider guided mentoring on Water Quality and make them visible to the ecosystem.

INREM has also partnered with the Govt. of Assam to design and implement a program to create the awareness and ownership on the safe sustainable water being provided under Jal Jeevan mission programs through 1 lakh 'Jaldoots', student volunteers from Class 9 and 11, from the schools across Assam.

In January 2023, INREM signed a non-financial MoU with Madhya Pradesh's Public Health and Engineering Department, to provide support to district-level stakeholders on water quality monitoring and surveillance component of the Jal Jeevan Mission programme.

INREM is also partnering with Govts, CSO organisations and multilateral agencies to improve Field Test Kit testing in the villages and raise the awareness on the issues and solutions of water quality at district saturation scale in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh.

The participants in the course are ‘visible’ on a platform where they can be engaged by other programs and organizations and continue to contribute to safe water to the communities.

Focus Area

Water Quality

State

Pan - India

Implementing Partner

INREM

Outreach

1566

Duration

Wed, 01/01/2020 - 12:00 - Sun, 01/01/2023 - 12:00

Path Alias

/our-works/democratising-knowledge-and-data-water-quality-india