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Abstract:
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"Groundwater issues have become prominent since last three decades due to the erratic rainfall pattern, irregular supply of surface water flows and growing demand for agriculture, industries and for other domestic requirements. Alongside many basins are already closed or on the verge of closure. With increasing scarcity of water, Groundwater has become all the more important for the agriculture and for the livelihoods of the people. Consequently, the stress on groundwater has been increasing tremendously and it has been over exploited in the last couple of decades, which lead to the deterioration of the water table at an alarming rate and causing environmental hazards in some places. Semi arid regions are the worst affected due to the deepening of water levels in wells.
"Many localized initiatives have been launched to address water scarcity; however, these developmental programmers are improving situation at local level without the perspective of basin flows at a larger level, thus leading to upstream and downstream conflicts sometime within a village or community due to the slag in supply and demand status of the resource. The problem of course, is that groundwater has been not treated as a common pool resource. This is compounded by the fact that there is also a lack of knowledge on base flows, which depend on the aquifer properties rather than on the administrative divisions, and some times the flows could be across villages, tehsils, districts and even countries like surface water.
"In order to address these issues much technological advancement happened in the last two decades in understanding the hydrological aspects of the resources. However, it would have no value unless these innovations are practiced. Community could only adopt these technologies only if these are robust and user friendly. Government and non-government organizations have initiated a few attempts. At the outset, the participatory hydrological monitoring is a good solution to curb the groundwater depletion and managing the resources in a sustainable manner.
"This paper talks about the management of groundwater resources by communities adopting various regulatory mechanisms and assessing the status of the resources with robust methods and utilizing the resources more sustainable across community."
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