Bridging the Gap: Data and Community in Water Management

Bridging the Gap in India’s Water Strides

India has made great strides in improving water access and security, especially for its rural communities. Initiatives like the Jal Jeevan Mission have established networks of water tanks, wells, and piped systems that are regularly managed by village representatives. Yet despite these great strides, a critical vulnerability remains. Water shortages still occur, often catching both village leaders and residents completely off guard. Without a proactive and predictive system, villagers are often left unprepared and vulnerable. The current state of water management in rural India is a human-driven process, but it could be made far more effective with the power of data.

We’re a team of Tanzanian students in the Next Generation Digital Action (NGDA) Challenge, and we’re excited to be working on a solution that builds live datasets and a real-time dashboard to help predict and manage water shortages in rural India.

The Bedrock of Our Solution: A Collaborative, Open-Source Water Data Set

When working on this problem, the biggest issue we found (and one that is common in many such situations) was the lack of data or data sets to help with analysis or prediction of water shortages in rural areas. Effective, data-driven insights are only possible with a robust and transparent data foundation. That’s why our solution begins with creating an open-source data set built by and for the rural Indian community. The data set is designed to be a dynamic collection of community reports, tank levels, and weather information. This public data set is automated, thus is updated everytime someone reports an incident through the set-up helplines. This ensures the data set and its insights become more accurate over time.

This data set is powered by three key types of information that, when combined, can be used to spot trends and correlations:

• Community Incident Reports: The most exciting and most human part of our data set comes from the villagers themselves. When someone reports a water shortage, an outage, or a quality issue, we capture key information about that incident. This includes the date, the location of the incident, the number of people who reported it, and their distance from the water tank they rely on. This provides a granular, real-time map of ground-level issues.
• Weather Intelligence: We integrate crucial weather data from APIs, including historical rainfall over the past 3, 7, and 30 days. This information, when paired with the incident reports, proves to be a powerful indicator of water availability.
• Water Tank Levels: We track the water levels in shared village tanks and wells over time. This gives us a direct, numerical measure of the available water supply and how it varies with time.

The emphasis here is on the openness of this data. Every report and every data point collected contributes to a communal knowledge base, helping everyone to better understand and manage their water resources. This data set is not just for our use; it is public so that anyone, from researchers to other developers, can use it as a stepping stone to find new solutions to this persistent problem. We believe that by democratizing this information, we can attract more minds to help solve the issue of water scarcity.

From Data to Action: The Village Water Resilience Dashboard (Aqua-sense)

Building on this powerful data set, we are actively working on a Village Water Resilience Dashboard. While still in development, we are excited to share what we have so far. The platform is designed to transform raw data into actionable insights, providing services that go beyond mere prediction.

• Real-time Dashboard & Community Reporting: Our system links ground-level issues with high-level insights. The real-time dashboard offers a clear, color-coded status of the water supply, allowing village leaders to make rapid decisions. This vital information is generated by the community reporting system, which allows villagers to report issues. These reports, when integrated with weather data and real-time tank levels, form the basis for our predictive model, providing invaluable early warnings of potential shortages.

• Village Map: The dashboard includes a map showing which areas are running low on water. This helps send water tankers to the right place at the right time.

• Alerts & Predictions: The system will study past data to predict shortages before they happen. It will then send SMS or WhatsApp alerts to villagers so they can plan ahead and buy water together, saving money and time.

Conclusion: Our Journey Continues

We couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities the open-source data set could hold and the profound impact that community collaboration can have on uplifting rural communities. We believe that by creating a transparent, continually updated data set and building an intelligent dashboard on top of it, we can empower rural communities to move beyond reactive crisis management. We are incredibly excited to continue our work on this project and look forward to seeing the positive impact it can have on rural communities.

The Team