Sustaining India's invisible resource – groundwater – through participatory management

By Mutum Lamnganbi, Garima Taneja, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Alok Sikka

India depends deeply on an invisible resource: the groundwater that enables 60 percent of irrigated agriculture and provides 85 percent of all drinking water. However, these resources are rapidly depleting in response to increased food production.

Sustainable groundwater management is still possible, but it requires a much better understanding of aquifer conditions. While a borewell may be drilled in one spot on the landscape, aquifers are interconnected, in different ways and to differing degrees. To increase sustainability of groundwater use, groundwater users need to coordinate and unify their knowledge. Participatory groundwater management is a grassroots approach to this where the community and stakeholders actively monitor and manage groundwater as a shared resource. The mutual benefits of the approach have been proven by model villages like Hiware Bazar under the Andhra Pradesh Farmer Managed Groundwater Systems project.

A path to participation

Participatory groundwater management originated in the late 1970s and 1980s. It later evolved with participatory hydrogeological monitoring to further promote sustainable groundwater use. In the 2010s, the participatory approach advanced further by incorporating village-level data to enhance aquifer recharge and ensure sustainable groundwater management.

Recognizing that development should start with an understanding of grassroots needs, in 2019 India’s Ministry of Jal Shakti (Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation) created the distinctive participatory groundwater management scheme Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABY). The scheme aims to combine scientific decision-making with participatory management by implementing government policies supported by robust guidelines. These include tools for measuring rainfall, groundwater levels, and water quality; training in water budgeting and water security plan development tailored to local needs; and efforts in information dissemination and community engagement. All of the above hinges on active participation from local communities and stakeholders, with a focus on demand-side management. ABY is being piloted in seven states and in some cases localized to water-stressed areas.

To understand the ground reality under the ABY program, a team of specialists in groundwater governance from the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains visited 12 blocks random in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh (6) and Madhya Pradesh (6), initiated with exploratory visits followed by focus group discussions for the qualitative study. Researchers found that in some villages, local NGOs have formed women’s collectives to engage in activities like renovating water harvesting structures and promoting water conservation. These already-active community groups can be leveraged to form water users associations, playing a key role in driving the program forward.

Insights from the ABY villages included the importance of strong leadership; the constraints posed by the caste system on participatory groundwater management; and the fact that community involvement varies depending on the village size and local population of the village administrative unit. In many cases, a single strong leader overseeing efforts appeared more effective at achieving ABY targets than a group of people managing the effort. In particular, delays and difficulties in meeting targets could be caused by the unavailability of government lands, as private landowners were often reluctant to part with their property. The team also observed that younger farmers were more willing to adopt new approaches than older farmers, who had experience with both water-abundant and water-scarce conditions.

Based on this field study, the NEXUS Gains team developed a scorecard to capture all adaptations and their implementation status, and to assess the strengths and weaknesses of various interventions. The team identified 25 distinct adaptations under six categories: social, gender-specific, technical, economic, political, and environmental. Each adaptation was incorporated into a theory of change to illustrate its potential impact on sustainability and groundwater governance. The scores for each village were calculated according to the level of intervention and the extent of community involvement. The success rate was higher when there was active community involvement, with even less-technical interventions achieving increases in groundwater levels.

Throughout the field study, one notable observation was a widespread lack of awareness in the villages of one of the most important steps in groundwater governance: water budgeting. Many people were not aware of water budgeting and had not joined any training on the subject. Where training programs were held, they typically drew a shifting audience of participants, mostly made up of people who lived near the training location.

In dialogue with policy

As the first scheme of its kind, ABY has room for improvement. The various ground learnings suggest that it can be fine-tuned to strengthen outcomes. At the same time, grassroots-level information and feedback needs to be effectively shared with all stakeholders, including policymakers, researchers, academicians, and NGOs. For that to happen, a common platform is essential.

In July 2024, NEXUS Gains made a significant move in this direction by organizing a Science Policy Dialogue in New Delhi. The dialogue served as a platform to gather diverse perspectives on groundwater governance from various stakeholders and explored insightful discussions on the use of scientific tools in strengthening groundwater governance through the scheme. The dialogue explored how science and research can build on the ABY scheme to develop better and more inclusive strategies for groundwater governance. It reinforced the potential of opening discussions to different stakeholders and bringing in input from different organizational levels. The ABY scheme, therefore, presents opportunities to break the isolation of decision makers and benefit from other perspectives when making the crucial decisions on India’s invisible resource.

Mutum Lamnganbi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI); Garima Taneja is Research Officer – Economics, IWMI; Ruth Meinzen-Dick is Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute; Alok Sikka is Country Representative – India, Bangladesh, IWMI.

This work was carried out under the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, which is grateful for the support of CGIAR Trust Fund contributors: www.cgiar.org/funders

Header image: Photo by IWMI.