About

In this webinar, we share experiences from the MARVI project, Managing Aquifer Recharge and Sustaining Groundwater Use through Village-level Intervention, particularly how villagers can be transformed into local groundwater champions through training and capacity building and empowering them to develop their own solutions for groundwater sustainability. One of the significant achievements in this project was the development and implementation of MyWell App to facilitate groundwater and rainfall data collections and visualisation. We discuss how MyWell evolved and what the future holds for it to share data and make groundwater use and sharing decisions at the village level. We also discuss how the village level MARVI approach can be extended in other parts of India and beyond.

Presenters

Basant Maheshwari

Western Sydney University

Prof Basant Maheshwari's research focusses on water and its interactions with the landscape. This includes modelling and analysing the water cycle for long-term water resource planning at a regional l... Read more

Lewis Daly

Lewis Daly is the Founder and CTO of Vessels Tech, in Adelaide, Australia. Vessels Tech is an IT-for-development company which builds technology to lift the lives of others. As a graduate of IT and Bu... Read more

Over the last 50 years, groundwater use for irrigation has increased dramatically and was instrumental in India’s green revolution in 1970’s.  As such, groundwater played a major role in making the country food sufficient and improving livelihoods of over 260 million small-scale farmers. However, this remarkable achievement came at the cost of increased pressure on groundwater resource, and now the annual groundwater pumping in many areas of the country far exceeds the annual monsoonal recharge. As such, India has now become the world’s largest user of groundwater, and the groundwater levels have been dropping across the country.  The top down approach of the Government so far has failed to stop the ongoing decline in groundwater levels.

The MARVI project team includes 9 Organisations, 30+ Researchers and 35 Farmer Researchers (known as Bhujal Jankaars or BJs):

  • Western Sydney University
  • Development Support Centre
  • Arid Communities and Technologies
  • MP University of Agriculture and Technology
  • Vidhya Bhawan Krishi Vigyan Kendra
  • CSIRO Land & Water
  • International Water Management Institute
  • Mekong Region Futures Institute
  • Carnegie Melon University, South Australia Campus

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