Context: Groundwater has been a priceless resource for humanity for centuries. Today, technology, with local governance, offers the last chance of saving groundwater even as the world stands at a critical crossroads.
Key Statistics

• An analysis of water level data done by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) indicates that about 33% of the wells monitored have registered decline in ground water levels in the range of 0 – 2 metres.
• Moreover, a decline of more than 4.0 m has also been observed in a few pockets of metro cities like New Delhi, Chennai, Indore, Madurai, Vijayawada, Ghaziabad, Kanpur, and Lucknow, etc.
• According to the CGWB, with 230 billion metre cube of groundwater drawn out each year for irrigating agriculture lands in India, many parts of the country are experiencing rapid depletion of groundwater.
• The total estimated groundwater depletion in India is in the range of 122–199 billion metre cube.

Groundwater in India

• India is the world’s largest user of groundwater. The country’s economy is tagged to groundwater development in many ways and its inadequacy will jeopardise progress.
• Tube wells, bore wells, springs and open-dug wells remain the primary source of groundwater production and abuse in India. Currently, there is a complete mismatch between available resources and the volumes of water withdrawn.
• Drilling rigs and pumps registered an annual growth of 10-12 per cent. An additional 10 million wells were energised with submersible pumps in the last two decades. Centrifugal pumps in domestic, institutional, commercial and entertainment sectors remain unaccounted for.
• Groundwater extraction has to be decoupled from wealth-generation if the excessive demand for groundwater has to be moderated.

Use of technology

• Automated decision-making is one aspect that needs to be adopted as an integral part of groundwater extraction. We need to enable technologies to simulate appropriate human responses.
• All existing tube well owners should be required to upgrade to the new technology. All new wells should integrate automation during construction. Industries, farms, residential complexes, commercial establishments with multiple wells with bulk extraction should implement automation within six months of notification.
• Individual households, small farms, schools, public institutions need to be incentivised to adopt automation and conform to water extraction norms.
• Smart pumps should form part of automation at the basic well level. Sensors and decision-making tools must be integrated with the pump design to make them intelligent.
• Analysis of millions of wells’ data in real-time needs to be supported by big-data analytics, cloud computing and real-time modelling with forecasting tools.

Automation advantages

Adopting artificial intelligence (AI) will help make decisions and visualise emerging scenarios for pro-active governance.

• Smart sensors in different appliances and Internet of Things shall enable visibility of data of consequence.
• Data from millions of nodes (wells) can be analysed simultaneously in a decentralised fashion. Owners can be notified and decisions implemented simultaneously across India. Data from all nodes shall aggregate at the cloud servers for advanced regional analysis.

Groundwater use through automation, be it for agriculture, industry, commerce, sports, entertainment and domestic use, will be forced to adhere to water footprint norms on daily and annual consumption.

• Zettabytes of data traffic flow shall enable daily audit of water balance at the well, watershed, aquifer and river basin scale. Big data analytics, combined with AI, shall transform governance into a practice of national behaviour for protecting the common property resource under threat.

Key Steps to be taken

Technology-guided decision-making would help distinguish groundwater abuse and promote efficient use. Additionally, this would ensure the safekeeping of groundwater within aquifers for posterity.

• Make it mandatory for all energised pumping wells to integrate sensors and decision-making tools to help curb wastage and contamination.

Privately financed wells, pumps, conveyance pipes, storage reservoirs, drips, sprinklers as well as treatment plants installed by millions of ordinary citizens and institutions have already built an efficient decentralised supply chain.

• The onus now lies with the investors in safeguarding and protecting such a resource from irrelevance.

Attaching additional technology to the existing investment is the first step in reducing wastage, improving efficiency and self-governance.

Road Ahead

• Appropriate policy interventions in regulating further constructions and ensuring retention of 50 per cent of the resource within the aquifers can only help in its sustenance. Groundwater remains the only natural resource that offers free access to all. 
• For the poor, this has ensured economic growth, combined with social mobility. Groundwater cannot be allowed to fail.
• At the end, given water’s role as an existential resource in a world whose population is growing, it is urgent to drive stakeholder action towards water financing. The silver lining is scalable interventions are possible. Scaling up, and replicating such interventions in other places, can go a long way towards improving the worrying water statistics we are currently facing.