ACT and Innovations in Village communities – Challenges and Strategies

 

TEAM WINFOUNDATION 

An interview with Dr.Yogesh Jadeja and Dr.Sezina Bhimani, Arid and Communities Technologies

1. Please give introduction of ACTs role in bringing innovations in the village communities

 

Natural resource management at village and community level will be a key determinant of the standard of living and overall village development and well being of the communities.

 

ACT has evolved the concept of Participatory Groundwater Management (PGWM) for water security and sustainability. ACT’s long term experiments and success through PGWM program have shown a more sustainable path towards this, by skilling and active participation in the water security planning, monitoring and management. Alongwith water supply augmentation, water demand management is a crucial component of PGWM. The demand side of water management has logically led to the need to introduce smart or precision farming among the small and marginal farmers. This has potential for not just better water security, but also increased farm incomes with better soil health.  Women-led initiatives have led to nutri-garden projects, bringing more nutrition to their families and also creating opportunities for barter and microentrepreneurship.

 

2. Objectives of bringing Innovations to Grassroot rural communities

Water balance is a key to water management that includes many dynamic parameters such as rainfall, runoff, water storage as surface and groundwater, groundwater dynamics. As every component is a part of water cycle and is dynamic, it is essential to maintain the balance of water input vs output through integrated hydrogeological monitoring that has been framed using innovative technologies.  Rural communities are adopting innovations and technologies in form of mobile phones, household durables, electric motors, etc. Our village society had evolved practices in water use suitable for different locations. However, in view of vastly higher population and their rising aspirations, there is great need for new innovations to be adopted in management of rural Commons – particularly water sources. Innovations for optimised usage of water for farming arises as a key need due to agriculture being the biggest user of water, roughly 80 to 90% of total usage.

As an example, we have introduced soil testing kits at field level. These are very useful for quick analysis of soil, enabling farmers to determine adding soil nutrients. These are particularly useful for organic farming, since organic inputs, by their very nature, have varying strengths of nutrients, requiring farmers to measure and then fine tune nutrient inputs to achieve optimum level.

Our family nutrition practices have also suffered due to reduced agriculture diversity and lack of knowledge in evolving sustainable nutrition practices suitable for modern lifestyles, affecting even villages.

3. Please tell us about the challenges faced in above objectives

Fortunately, several Indian startups and corporates are introducing new products in the above domains, at affordable prices.

ACT and WIN Foundation have worked together to bring several innovative solutions to the grassroot communities. In this process, we have observed several challenges in (i) initiation and execution, (ii) achieving desired impact and (iii) scaling and replicating the practices.

The major challenges are explained below:

1. i) Product and services level:

Startups have limited resources and their founders find it very difficult to reach rural areas, for sales and service.

Also innovative products, by their very nature, require extensive trials and refinements, to reach maturity stage.

As the users themselves are not familiar with such products, continuous training, and guidance are required for these trials and feedback needs to be obtained.

Demonstrating the benefits of innovations to users is essential for the continued adoption. This is challenging as impact is often dependent on a series of steps including multiple products, and requiring measurements over a few seasons and explaining the same to users in simple terms. Farmers used to follow the practices and tools available locally and being in used in the respective region widely. Therefore, the tools need to be mainstream in local market and need wide adaptation among the farmer communities.

ACT’s participative approach has helped here by training rural young men and women for these tasks. As the variety of products and their technical complexity increases, there is a need to train at least some rural youth with greater technical skills to install, train users and do basic maintenance. Getting technical assistance from cities is neither affordable nor scalable in the long run.

While we have shown impact of many of the innovations, the challenge to show significant impact to create demand for the products is still not tackled.

We have now launched an integrated project providing a series of innovations and practices towards precision farming, to show major improvements. For this, we are collaborating with multiple partners, including WIN Foundation, Krishi Vigyan Kendra, several startups, to bring increased expertise to rural areas including local capacity building.

We hope to show significant results in terms of better soil health, higher yield and incomes and greater health for local communities. Alongwith this, we aim to create a local village level cadre with skills in leading the villages to adopt these practices at scale.

The next challenge is market linkages. Here again, we have brought innovations like low cost cooling systems, for storage and transport of perishables. In coming years, we aim to train our women nutri-gardeners, to use their surplus to produce nutritious food supplements and products.

For scaling up across a vast number of villages, we are also working on developing local leadership at village level, to enable village level initiatives to take of the vast diversities in our country.

4. Please mention some areas where good innovations are required

We see great need for affordable and mature innovations for  soil and water quality and and water quantity with higher efficiency of results. Soil moisture meter needs to be upgraded with guideline for decision making to schedule irrigation for various crop types.

 

There is a need of integrated guideline considering different soil types, its quality and suitable crop types. Water irrigation control for high HP pumpset at a reasonable price with robustness to work in tough rural environment is another unmet need.

 

Small powered farm implements, for de-weeding, harvesting, removing crop residue after harvesting, etc., in small farms. Seed bank for local varieties and indigenous seeds.

 

5. Please mention about ACTs partnership with WIN Foundation to support in bringing innovations

 

WIN Foundation, through its experience and linkages in startup ecosystem have regularly brought new innovative products and also arranged for training of ACT members in installation and usage.

 

ACT and WIN Foundation have also conceptualised the program for integration of data  services to bring greater value to farmers. Together with other partners, we aim to move towards our goal of taking society to science and enable villages to adopt technologies and products to improve their quality of life and quality and productivity of their work.

 

Somewhere we need to bring this entire region specific concept in a service mode available locally and easily accessible to farmers.

 

Dr.Yogesh Jadeja, Founder Director and Geohydrologist at Arid Communities and Technologies (https://www.linkedin.com/in/yogesh-jadeja-a703611a6/?originalSubdomain=in)

 

Dr.Sezina Bhimani, Founder director and Geohydrologist at Geo science services

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/sazina-bhimani-96b17718/?originalSubdomain=in)

Multi-stakeholder Approach for Participatory Water Management in Rural and tribal Areas

 Team WinFoundation Jun 21, 2021  0 Comment  Water and Sanitation

Robust participatory approach for Water Security and Conservation can overcome the water challenge facing our rural and tribal areas. This encompasses: 

• capacity building of local communities through training of (i) village level hydrogeologists and water experts, and (ii) farmer and women groups for cooperative action
• Water security master plan through local participation
• Supply Side and Demand side interventions
• Cost effective Technologies to bring better practices and knowledge
• Knowledge management – development of processes and protocols for adaptation / adoption in other locations.

The Water Challenge

 “Water touches every aspect of development and it links with nearly every Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). It drives economic growth, supports healthy ecosystems, and is essential and fundamental for life itself. Some 2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities.”    – World Bank 

• Water shortages and its poor quality affect hundreds of districts. Our agriculture suffers from vagaries of water supply, seriously affecting the food and nutrition security of the country as well as livelihood of small farmers.
• The annual natural water cycle provides us limited fresh water. On the other hand, the increased demand for water due to modern lifestyle and industry have led us to over-use surface water and over-extract ground water. This has lowered water levels and increased salinity in ground water. Pollution due to human and industrial contaminants, has added to the water problems.
• As Water is basic to all life on earth, it is also important to use water in a manner which protects the living ecosystems around us. This is particularly critical for living beings which reside in water.
• Hence, the main objectives of governance model for water at various levels of government should be: (i) support conservation, (ii) optimized usage, (iii) recycling and reuse of water. 
• The Government of India has recognised the massive challenges in Water and Sanitation domain and launched the Swachha Bharat Abhiyan, Atal Bhujal Yojana and Jal Jeevan Mission.

It is necessary to adopt multi-stakeholder approach to bring value to grass root interventions with multiple innovations in technology and processes, community empowerment and knowledge management

To introduce innovations for social impact in a sustainable manner, requires multiple partners in the ecosystem to collaborate.

Institution and Capacity Building

• Local village level experts team – trained on geo-hydrology, Water Security planning,(may be called as Bhujal Jankar, Jaldoot, etc)
• Farmers and Women Groups in villages for institution building, farming practices through collective decision making

• Water Security Plan (WSP): Water supply and demand planning for all needs of village
• Supply Side:
  • Ground water recharge: in village water bodies, river-bed, abandoned well
  • Desilting, embankment repair for village water bodies
  • River / canal water planning and storage of excess water
• Demand Side:
  • Farming intervention support like drip irrigation, fodder crops, silt application, and so on
• Technology introduction at grass root (affordable and usable by communities)
  • field level soil quality and moisture measurement
  • field Water quality and availability measurements
  • village level Weather forecast station
  • Modular cold chain for storage and transport of perishables
  • Smart agriculture and water conservation data system
• Knowledge Management
  • Protocol, process development with community expertise built into the systems
  • guidance and support for Adoption of above in same hydrogeological region 
  • guidance and support for Adaptation of above in different hydrogeological regions

To Summarize, Multistakeholder collaborative approach brings synergistic benefits to community. Each stakeholder brings unique competencies, and enables accomplishing complete solutions significantly better than that achievable individually by each.

WIN Foundation has supported;

(i) Participatory Ground Water Management Project pioneered by Arid Communities and Technologies (ACT), Kutch, for water conservation. This project is also guided and supported by Coastal Gujarat Power Ltd (a Unit of Tata Power Limited in Kutch). CGPL provides on-ground support with its own team, logistics support and project monitoring and review support. 

(ii) Technology, products and process development projects with 4 IITs, covering water treatment, water distribution and waste-water processing, with further aim to translate the technology developed and apply in the field. 

(iii) It has supported several innovative startups in this domain, bringing their products through ACT and other NGOs to community, for the critical prototype -> test -> refine stage of product market validation.

If interested: 

Whether you are an NGO or Foundation working in water, or Gram Panchayat or a Government official working to improve water conservation practices, WIN Foundation and its partners are happy to share its knowledge. If interested in above, feel free to contact us at info@winfoundations.org