CSEI at ATREE Launches Jaltol, a Free & Open-Source Water Accounting Tool
The Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation at ATREE, Bengaluru launched Jaltol, a free and open-source tool that makes water balance estimation easy for grassroot communities, on November 30.
With the Jaltol QGIS plugin, decision makers involved in rural water security planning (including civil society organisations and government officials) can get data about their watershed at the click of a button. The plugin provides remote sensing data — rainfall, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, changes in surface water/groundwater storage, land use/land cover — together on one platform in an easy-to-use format, to help estimate the water balance.
Water security planning is important to assess water availability and demand in a region so that rural interventions can be designed accordingly. To prepare a robust water security plan, we must first accurately estimate the water budget, i.e. how much water is available, and how much is being used.
CSEI Director Dr. Veena Srinivasan spoke about the need for digital water tools and underlined that without understanding water budgets, solving India’s water crisis is going to be a non-starter:
‘Government schemes are now pushing for water budgeting to be done at the gram panchayat level as part of the rural water security planning process. But at the community level, developing the hydrological expertise required to do water budgeting accurately is a tall order. Digital tools like Jaltol can potentially make data easily available and more accessible, making water budget estimation easy.’
The virtual launch event was also attended by Dr. Sashikumar N. and MS Raviprakash, from the Karnataka government’s Advanced Centre for Integrated Water Resources Management (ACIWRM). They talked about the importance of micro-scale planning in preparing water budgets that can accurately determine state’s efforts to improve rural water management and elaborated on a case study in water security planning carried out by ACIWRM at the Oorkunte Mittur panchayat in Kolar district.
Jeff Albert, Deputy Chief of the USAID-funded Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Partnerships for Learning and Sustainability (WASHPaLS) project, said that Jaltol was addressing an important gap in water resource management and service delivery in rural areas: ‘It’s very early days but we see this tool as having the potential to allow evidenced-based planning to happen in earnest’.
Harold Lockwood, the director of Aguaconsult, cautioned against regarding a piece of technology as a silver bullet. It is important to be cognisant of the fact that a digital tool, on its own, cannot make a difference in the messy political realities around water, he said. ‘As well as introducing these tools, we need to carefully understand the ecosystem where it’s introduced’.
The final speaker was Ujaval Gandhi, GIS expert and founder of Spatial Thoughts Academy. He talked about the benefits of open source softwares such as QGIS and detailed how the community can contribute to the development of Jaltol.
Funded by India Climate Collaborative and EdelGive Foundation, Jaltol was developed as part of CSEI’s Food Futures Initiative that aims to help boost water security and restore five million hectares of degraded agricultural land, thereby improving 150,000 livelihoods by 2030. The project team talked to grassroot communities about their water management challenges to identify two critical gaps – lack of water data and the hydrological expertise to use this data well. This led to creation of Jaltol, as digital tools have the potential to make data easily accessible, thereby addressing the ‘expertise bottleneck’.
About CSEI
CSEI is a new centre within the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru. CSEI was established in September 2019 to innovate solutions that tackle socio-environmental problems at scale by capitalising on the deep domain knowledge of research organisations like ATREE in ecology, environment and development.
About India Climate Collaborative
The India Climate Collaborative (ICC) is a first-of-its-kind, India-led and India-focused collective working to accelerate climate action in the country. Founded by some of India’s pre-eminent corporate and philanthropic leaders, we operate at the nexus of business, philanthropy, government and civil society, using collaboration as a lever to influence systems change.
About EdelGive Foundation
EdelGive Foundation is a grant-making organization, helping build and expand philanthropy in India by funding and supporting the growth of small to mid-sized grassroots NGOs committed to empowering vulnerable children, women, and communities. This approach has enabled the foundation to be a go-to partner of choice for Indian and foreign funders wanting to engage with the Indian development ecosystem.
For more information or if you would like to speak to the project team, please write to [email protected].
Disclaimer: The team began this work when they were with the Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (CSEI-ATREE). WELL Labs is now taking it forward.