Is digging another borewell in my layout a good idea? How deep do I need to go to? How quickly will my borewell dry up? Can I reuse my wastewater ? We are all familiar with questions like these. Many of us have also gone through the agony of seeing our borewells go dry and wondered what to do next. As much as these are problems being grappled with at an individual and community level, they are also a manifestation of the problems faced by our city as a whole.well known
As Bengaluru has grown, its main source “Cauvery water” has become insufficient to meet all its needs. Us residents increasingly rely on groundwater to meet our true demand. But we have proceeded to make this shift without making the effort to understand or learn how to take care of this precious resource. As a result we have found ourselves in a vicious cycle where we extract large quantities of groundwater, use it, and then discharge our wastewaters into the environment. This has had many negative effects, most notably the often reported pollution of our lakes. But now we’re also starting to see our borewells go dry.
While our institutions of governance grapple with and try to address the larger challenges facing our rapidly growing city, we still need to respond to the everyday necessity of ensuring we have enough water, and we have to learn to do this intelligently. We have the power to change our relationship with water and our environment if we change the way in which we solve our everyday water problems – at our house, our layout, or our apartment buildings. We have the opportunity to solve not just our individual problems, but to help the city as a whole. And in Bengaluru, many conscientious individuals and communities have already begun to demonstrate how to this can be done.
Urbanwaters.in brings together the knowledge, experience, and practice of many such individuals, communities, practitioners, citizen activists and researchers. It seeks to inform, guide and provide any and all resources aimed at making us water-literate, community-oriented problem solvers who can act responsibly to protect our common urban water resources. It seeks to help make us a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.
This website is a culmination of a three year experiment called “Participatory Aquifer Mapping” , abbreviated (rather unimaginatively by us bunch) to PAQM (help us give it a more evocative name!). The three years of rigorous work that enabled PAQM was generously supported by Wipro Ltd. in their quest to be more responsible corporate citizens. Wipro recognizes the need to look beyond water use efficiency measures within its campus, and towards addressing the challenges of collective stewardship of our urban common water resources, especially our groundwater aquifers and local lakes.
It was this shared interest that brought Wipro, Biome Environmental Trust , ACWADAM and Mapunity in partnership, to leverage their combined strengths of citizens engagement, hydrogeology expertise, and participation oriented digital tools, to try and understand how to collectively manage urban water resources. During these past three years we have engaged with many communities, encouraged communities to share their stories and data, measured some important data parameters ourselves, and conducted many events to constantly share our evolving learnings with all of you.
This website formally presents the most important and actionable of our learnings and serves as a community resource for all to learn from and share. However this three year effort is only the beginning and we hope to continue working with all of you as partners.
We hope you will help us make this a more useful destination for information on our urban water. We are excited and grateful to receive your contributions, your stories, your research, and your experiences.
Thank you!
PAQM Team
Please contribute and share your feedback. Write to us at water@biome-solutions.com.
Read our final report: Participatory Aquifer Mapping – Final Report
