Technical Consulting

Water stress is increasing rapidly across India and climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods. To address these issues, governments, Corporate Social Responsibility departments, and international agencies are making significant investments in water conservation and climate adaptation. To ensure that investments in the sector yield optimal benefits, the Technical Consulting programme is building evidence around the effectiveness and efficiency of water interventions.

We are conducting impact evaluations of three community-based groundwater management approaches in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, and building a MEL toolbox.

These evaluations are technically rigorous and focus on the improvement of intervention design.

1. Impact Evaluation of JalTara Pits in Maharashtra

Partners: Environmental Defense Fund, Save Groundwater Foundation

This project aims to evaluate an innovative water conservation technique called ‘JalTara’, which is being implemented in the drought-prone district of Jalna in Maharashtra. This intervention can reduce waterlogging and increase groundwater recharge in regions carpeted by low-conductivity black cotton soils.

2. CLART and MGNREGA Planning Evaluation in Karnataka

Partners: Environmental Defense Fund, Arghyam, Foundation for Ecological Security, Socion 

We are evaluating the impact of a programme aimed at improving the planning of water conservation structures built under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in northern Karnataka.

3. Evaluation of Groundwater Collectivisation in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh

Partners: Environmental Defense Fund, WASSAN

The third part of our MEL work focuses on evaluating the impact of a project for the sustainable management of groundwater through a shared pipeline network managed by water user associations.

4. MEL Toolbox

Partner: Environmental Defense Fund

The toolbox will be akin to a directory of impact evaluation tools and methodologies, and offer a generalised protocol for how to approach MEL in the water sector in the Indian context. Through tools that can be deployed for a specific intervention or geography, it seeks to reduce the cost and expertise required to conduct evaluations and foster a coherent understanding of MEL among diverse stakeholders.

The scope of the toolbox is threefold:

1. It begins with an understanding of the challenges the water sector faces with respect to impact evaluation and provides appropriate solutions.
2. It facilitates and improves impact reporting of watershed interventions.
3. Over the long term, we shall integrate the toolbox into organisations’ workflows. This entails iterative development to make the toolbox relevant to different kinds of organisations.

WELL Labs’ researchers and field staff use a double ring infiltrometer to assess the impact of JalTara pits in Maharashtra’s Jalna district. Photo by Lakshmikantha Narasipura

A major challenge in the water sector is the ability to accurately and holistically gauge the impact of interventions. To address this issue, WELL Labs is working with the Hindustan Unilever Foundation to develop simple, evidence-based and easy-to-measure indicators on the state of water security. These indicators will focus on outcomes rather than inputs to track actual progress towards water security.

WELL Labs’ tool Jaltol, with its capability of using remote sensing to measure changes in various indicators, is an integral part of this initiative. Over 2024-2025, we are partnering with various watershed organisations to:

1. Validate the utility of proposed water security indicators.
2. Collect feedback on the Jaltol web app.
3. Conduct field validations of the Land Use Land Cover maps based on which we derived the indicators.

The India-Water Resources Information System (WRIS), built by the Ministry of Jal Shakti’s National Water Informatics Centre, is a repository of water resources data from across India.

WELL Labs is collaborating with the centre to: 

1. Redesign the India-WRIS portal to improve user experience and ease of data access.
2. Boost data validation and coherence through secondary analysis.
3. Develop use cases for the available data and promote innovative applications of the data.
4. Explore the feasibility of building a digital public infrastructure where organisations can build APIs and associated software using India-WRIS data to address water-related risks and provide services. This could be analogous to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for digital transactions in India.

While the state of Assam has abundant water resources, it faces significant challenges in securing sustainable and safe water supply for all its residents. These include deep and inaccessible groundwater in the foothills, arsenic and fluoride contamination, and climate change-driven water supply disruptions.

WELL Labs is working with Jal Jeevan Mission Assam to create a strategic roadmap with specific recommendations to enhance the resilience and source sustainability of water supply systems in Assam.

1) Synthesising the State of the Science on Hydroclimatic Modelling and Setting Research Priorities

Partner: Rural Evidence and Learning for Water (REAL-Water)

WELL Labs is part of Rural Evidence and Learning for Water (REAL-Water), a consortium of partners led by Aquaya and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It develops and evaluates strategies for expanding access to safe, equitable, and sustainable rural water services.

Under this larger mission, we are developing a comprehensive knowledge base to identify points of consensus and contention related to hydroclimatic modelling in India. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews with scientists and government officials to gather expert opinions on the state of hydroclimatic modelling in India and identify priority areas for further research. We documented key insights from these interviews in a report and submitted it to the Ministry of Jal Shakti.

We also organised a roundtable on July 19 in New Delhi, where scientists, practitioners and government officials charted the way forward on how to improve decision-making based on hydroclimatic models. 

2) Rural Water and Sanitation Report

Partner: The/Nudge Institute

We published a report providing an overview of the emerging challenges and livelihood opportunities in rural water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in India for The/Nudge Institute. It incorporated insights shared by WASH experts from across India, who took part in the two listening circles we organised on the subject.

The report was a part of the research to inform the design of the second edition of the Ashirvad Water Challenge.