My Village, Our Water has been Highly Commended at the prestigious International Green Gown Awards. Known as Mera Gaav, Hamara Jal in Hindi, the project is working to empower communities to come together to map and monitor water resources, quality, and practices prevalent in the community.
Globally, water sustainability has remained elusive due to a lack of community engagement and knowledge. Water has always been considered as a personal resource rather than a community resource.
Amrita School of Sustainable Futures (ASF) had conceptualised and devised My Village, Our Water to bring a transformation in the community members to view water as a collective resource and join hands to utilise it more sustainably. This is achieved through a digital platform that uses data-driven insights to empower both communities and decision-makers.
The award is in the category of Creating Impact to recognise institutions that demonstrate how they can achieve significant sustainability outcomes with limited resources. It especially acknowledges the potential for easily accessible technologies to be used as tools for community empowerment to build water-wise communities.
According to the Green Gown judges, My Village, Our Water is an impressive project that tackles a major sustainability issue by engaging various stakeholders to find solutions. They especially remarked upon how Amrita developed an accessible digital system to achieve water management.
The data-driven insights bring together both community members and decision-makers. It also demonstrates that community knowledge is a powerful, and often untapped, resource for sustainable solutions.
This year’s International Green Gown Awards include 95 finalists from 28 countries across 8 categories. With sustainable development moving up the global agenda, the Green Gown Awards have become established as the most distinguised recognition of best practice within the further and higher education sector.
Launched in 2022, ASF developed My Village, Our Water with Esri India, the country’s leading end-to-end Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and solutions provider. The technology is a system for tracking data related to positions on Earth’s surface.
This includes livelihood activities, drainage mapping, weather variability, and climate impacts. This extensive crowd-sourced data provides the opportunity to derive the water sustainability challenges in each community.
Participants use Amrita’s Empower Community app to map their water resources through various aspects like sources, distribution, family-wise consumption pattern and demographic details.
The data is fed to SREE, an AI-powered and Geo-enabled platform used for mapping hotspots at the village level for water sustainability and quality. It then suggests interventions to the community on more effective utilsation of water resources.
Today, My Village, Our Water has been piloted in households in 14 states across India and demonstrates the power of citizen-driven digital solutions that empower communities to achieve water equity.
It equips the local administration, community organisations, and individuals to develop strategies for water conservation, optimise water usage, develop restoration of water resources, and build awareness of short and long-term impacts.
The states reached are Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa, Utharakhand, Bihar, Gujarat, Bihar, West Bengal, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Kerala.
