Basant Maheshwari knows drought. Growing up in rural India, he saw crops wither in parched earth, dry wells and thirsty livestock. “In a severe drought, we were fetching water from kilometres away. That’s when I understood the importance of water, and it stuck in my mind.”
A distinguished professor of international engagement, life sciences at the Western Sydney University, Maheshwari has spent more than three decades studying water management. Key to his work is the understanding that water sustainability is not just about data modelling and resource policy – it’s about people.
That’s the inspiration behind MARVI (Managing Aquifer Recharge and Sustaining Groundwater Use Through Village-Level Intervention), a programme run by Maheshwari that’s turning villagers and farmers in rural India into citizen scientists with a shared responsibility for groundwater.
Since it was first funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) in 2011, MARVI has won over policymakers and politicians in India, with the team now working with water managers in Laos, Indonesia and Timor Leste.
The programme’s slow-burn success has seen it swept into a much larger initiative – a US$1billion national groundwater management project, supported by the Indian government and the World Bank, and operating in more than 20,000 Indian villages across seven states.
“I didn’t plan it like that,” says Maheshwari. “It just happened, step by step.”
Making an invisible resource visible
Rajasthan is the largest and driest state in India. Maheshwari grew up in the village of Hinta, where his progress-minded father ran a business and small farm. His family was an early adopter of electricity, which they used to power the well pump. But with water being scarce, the well soon ran dry.
“I was only about 13 years old, and didn’t understand groundwater at that time, but I knew that there was an abandoned well near our well,” Maheshwari recalls. “I said to my father, ‘Can we redirect rainwater into this abandoned well, and have more water available from our well?’ My father said yes, but supply didn’t improve much’,” he laughs.
Stored in rock, earth and crevices called aquifers, groundwater represents almost one-third of readily available freshwater on the planet. Around 60% of irrigated agriculture and 80% of rural drinking water in India depends on groundwater. Abundant, but not infinite, supplies are dwindling due to overuse and a changing climate.
In some parts of the world, including Australia, groundwater use is regulated. But in the developing world, small farm irrigation has been swamped by the demands of large-scale agriculture and industry with capacity to drill hundreds of metres below the surface, says Maheshwari. Unevenly shared, this resource is vanishing.
“One farmer digs a well, it impacts his neighbour,” Maheshwari explains. “The neighbour digs deeper, the water flows to him, forcing the first famer to dig deeper. If you have the money, you can dig a hole. If you have more money, you buy a bigger pump, dig deeper and get whatever you need.”
Maheshwari recalls his surprise when, in an introductory MARVI workshop in a village school hall, with 120 farmers present, the research team was told, respectfully, that they weren’t needed. “They said, ‘Give us your funds, we will dig deeper wells, and we’ll have water! Our water comes from an underground river and a dam about 200 km away and that connects our groundwater system and wells.’ They didn’t understand groundwater.”
The MARVI project, supported by a range of organisations including the Australian Water Partnership and ACIAR, has revolutionised water management by creating a collective of citizen scientists called Bhujal Jaankaar (BJs), meaning “groundwater informed” in Hindi. Provided with wooden floats and a 30 to 40-metre measuring tape, the BJs have been trained in basic hydrology, geology and mapping. They take regular measurements and assess water quality.
While most BJs haven’t had much formal education, their life experience and deep connection with their own land drives the research. Maheshwari says the BJs have been treated as fellow scientists, sharing meals and insight with MARVI staff, and they are paid a small fee for their efforts.
We’re not there to tell them what to do, but to help them do what they want to do. We work with them to bring out their potential”.
The BJs developed their own “practical science”, says Maheshwari, by noting the correlation between rainfall and water level change in their wells and estimating how much water they could use. By sharing this information with other farmers, they have become powerful advocates for sustainable practice.
Empowering locals as custodians of water
Over more than a decade, the MARVI team has installed groundwater sensors, developed the MyWell app to support water management, and created groundwater cooperatives that link individual fields on farms via pipes, turning an abstract ‘shared resource’ into a literal one.
They’ve also helped villagers build recharge pits that can capture monsoon rain can be captured and used to recharge groundwater stores.
While government and international attention is one measure of MARVI’s success, Maheshwari is impressed by the BJs’ growing knowledge and their willingness to advocate for sustainable groundwater management.
“When they started measuring rainfall, if you asked a farmer how much they’d had, he would say, ‘It was good’ or, ‘not much’. Now they know to the millimetre, and with numbers, you can talk. The dialogue changes from, ‘We don’t have water; this is hopeless,’ to objective discussions and planning, understanding that although the water level is fluctuating, there are things we can do to make it better.”
Story by Michelle Fincke
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