Presentations

A two day workshop on "Safe guard Future drinking water supply in Odisha", was organised on 29-30 April 2010. This event was as a result of cooperation between Gram Vikas, UNICEF, Deltares and ICCO (organisations involved in water supply and sanitation) and evolved out of a felt need to engage people from diverse fields to provide inputs for designing future courses of action.

This presentation by ACWADAM on community organization in groundwater management deals with the processes involved in people’s mobilization and participation. The requisites of groundwater management include: resource enhancement, demand management, equitable distribution, institutional mechanism and controlling of free riding. It deals with groundwater management at a local scale when compared to aquifer management.

Aquifer management involves:

• Identification of aquifer on the basis of geology;
• Identification of recharge and discharge areas;
• Assessment of aquifer capacity and yield through aquifer mapping;
• Protection of recharge area and increasing the groundwater level through artificial recharge in recharge area (based on the geology);
• Treating groundwater as a common property resource;
• Encouraging community use of groundwater and restricting individual use;
• Putting in place an institutional mechanism and legal back up for community groundwater management;
• Awareness generation regarding groundwater and science of hydrogeology.

This presentation by ACWADAM on hydraulic conductivity deals with the hydrologic properties of rocks that signify the status of a rock as a good or poor aquifer. The status of a rock with regard to groundwater occurrence and movement is decided by its porosity (specific yield, more practically) and its hydraulic conductivity. These properties decide whether a rock can store and transmit groundwater.

Hydraulic conductivity is also commonly called as permeability of the rock or rock material and is its ability to allow the flow of groundwater through it. A rock with good hydraulic conductivity allows groundwater to easily flow through it.  

The presentation describes Darcy’s Apparatus, which comprises of a glass cylinder filled with porous sand. The glass cylinder with the sand bed had an inlet for inflow of water and an outlet for outflow of water. Two vertical glass tubes (manometers) are fitted in the sand tube placed at a fixed distance from each other to measure the respective levels (hydraulic heads).

The presentation by ACWADAM deals with Pani Panchayats as a model of groundwater management.

Pani Panchayat is the name first given to a movement by Mr. Vilasrao Salunke for motivating farmers of Naigaon village of the drought-prone Purandhar taluka of Maharashtra in 1974. The government's inability to deal with the drought situation prompted him to take a 40 acre land on lease from the village temple trust and develop a recharge pond in the recharge area of the village, a dug well in the discharge zone and a lift irrigation system.

Farmers got impressed with the results demanding a scale up of the experiment leading to the setting up of Gram Gaurav Pratisthan (GGP) through which the work was expanded to encompass both groundwater and surface water management. 

The presentation by ACWADAM deals with a case study of augmenting groundwater resources by artificial recharge in Kolwan valley, Mulshi taluka, Pune. The DfID funded project was undertaken by the British Geological Survey in collaboration with its partners in India from 2002–2005. The objectives of the study were:

• Improved knowledge of the impacts of managed aquifer recharge in different physical and socio-economic settings.
• Guidance on scope and effectiveness of managed aquifer recharge for implementers, funders and policy makers.
• Dissemination of knowledge.

The presentation by ACWADAM is part of the training module developed by them on “Planning, development and management of groundwater with special reference to watershed management programmes”. Pumping a well and observing the effect of such pumping on the water level in the pumped well as well as in the adjoining parts of the aquifer through observation wells is the basic procedure involved in a pumping test.

This report by ACWADAM describes the results of a research study conducted under the DFID funded AGRAR project at the Kolwan site in Pune district of Maharashtra state in India. The research focused on studying the usefulness of artificial recharge to augment groundwater resources through watershed development.

An important criterion of the study was also to understand the impact of artificial recharge on already changing livelihoods in areas where watershed development was conducted on a large scale.

This document by ACWADAM is a report of a rapid geohydrological assessment of some of the microwatersheds from parts of Bolangir district Orissa.

Bolangir district in Orissa forms a part of one of the hottest and backward regions of India with low land-productivity, and opportunities and technologies for agriculture in the district remain relatively unexplored.

Vagaries of rainfall and the underlying hard-rock geology further compound the problem and limit agricultural productivity to a great extent. Given such natural uncertainties, systematic implementation of a watershed management programme is the most viable avenue to overcome the problems of this region.

Bolangir district was thus selected as pilot area to conduct a pre-feasibility exercise for planning of water resources management. ACWADAM, Pune was invited, along with Samaj Pragati Sahayog, Bagli to conduct this pre-feasibility exercise.

A national workshop on 'A Decade of the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC): Lessons Learnt and the Way Forward' was organised in New Delhi on the 22-23rd April 2010, by the Department of Drinking Water Supply (DDWS) and Water and Sanitation Program (WSP). The three presentations below are outputs from the workshop.

The presentation from the ENVIS - CES (IISc) website, emphasises the important role that the tank system has played in the development of the city of Bangalore and highlights:

•  The principles behind the working of the tank system
• The process of evolution of the tank system with respect to the growth of the city
• The underlying planning principles that were used in the tank system
• The role and importance of water tanks as an asset to the city
• The relationship between the system of tanks and the city of Bangalore
• The usefulness of the tanks as an important source of drinking water and agriculture in lean periods