Indian water resources are under strain from increasing population, intensified agricultural production, industrial development, changing food habits with growing income as well as pollution of the surface and subsurface waters. Climate change aggravates the problem with higher temperatures, longer droughts and increased intensity of rainfall and reduced number of rainy days during the monsoon season (Amit et al., 2012). This has led to concerns whether water demands can be met while achieving food and nutrition security for the growing population and at the same time protecting the ecosystems.
The semi-arid state of Rajasthan is particularly vulnerable (Rajasthan Water Assessment, 2013). It has 10% of India’s area but only about 1% of the water resources. Although Rajasthan is mainly rural, the rate of urbanization has increased considerably over the last decades (Fact finding mission report, 2015). One of the growing urban areas is Udaipur City, which now is the sixth largest city in Rajasthan and also known as the ‘city of lakes’ in India.
This has led to increased pressure on the water resources. Nearly 50% of poorer households lack a reliable water supply (Fact finding mission report, 2015). Likewise, the sewage treatment is inadequate and untreated sewage water is diverted to rivers and lakes (Williams et al., 2019) and infiltrates to groundwater causing environmental and health problems. Thus, the Udaipur District is facing serious problems and challenges in securing adequate water supply of acceptable quality and in mitigating pollution of the water resources.
The water supply of the city is unique as it is largely based on water from the lakes around the city. Nearby villages use groundwater (Groundwater Year Book, 2017). Hard rock is the region’s dominant lithology; groundwater occurrence is mainly controlled by the structural features of the rock system often resulting in limited yield. In many areas, groundwater is overexploited (Government of India, 2013).
Proper integrated water resources management in the district is hampered by insufficient knowledge of the overall water balance. The seasonal Ayad River flows through Udaipur City connecting the lakes. The seasonal and annual dynamics of this water system is poorly known and understood. To improve the understanding of the system and thus establish a basis for better and sustainable water management, we propose to develop an integrated hydrological and hydraulic model, which considers all important hydrological fluxes. By such a model various management schemes can be analyzed under both current and future climatic conditions.
Currently, participation of citizens and stakeholders in the management of the surface and ground water resources is limited (Mangal et al., 2015). Citizen science is an emerging discipline, which can contribute to better utilization and preservation of the water resources, and at the same time help building capacity and enhance awareness related to efficient and sustainable water management among the citizens. Citizen science is also a methodology to improve data collection through crowd sourcing of data in data-scarce catchments where a better understanding of the water resources is required (Walker et al., 2019a). Hereby important hydrological and hydraulic parameters and time series of hydrological and climatic variables can be obtained. These data constitute invaluable information for developing an integrated hydrological model for the catchment and thus for obtaining improved knowledge of the system behavior.
Denmark has developed advanced research expertise and knowledge-based sustainable practices within groundwater management in particular and integrated water resources management in general, integral to larger environment planning and protection. Integrated water resources management for sustained and high-value uses requires knowledge of the catchment’s surface and subsurface characteristics and the interactions between surface and subsurface waters. It also demands knowledge of the human interaction with the water resources and how to properly mitigate adverse effects and ensure sustainable water resources exploitation. This is particularly vital in arid and semi-arid regions where the water resources are under relatively heavier pressure of intensive use. Udaipur City is one such example (Mangal et al., 2015).
In this project, we seek to clarify for the first time the overall water balance as well as the seasonal and annual dynamics of the water system of Udaipur District by using traditional and innovative field measurement techniques including citizen science in tandem with state-of-theart hydrological modeling.
We propose applying the distributed hydrological model MIKE SHE (Abbott et al., 1986) to the Ayad River catchment within which Udaipur City is located. The model is usually parameterized according to knowledge of land surface and subsurface characteristics, driven by climatic measurements and estimates, and calibrated against field measurements of groundwater heads and river discharges. This is a standard method in temperate regions (Henriksen et al., 2003), but more challenging in arid and semi-arid regions with seasonal rivers (Garg et al., 2013). Given the scarcity of monitoring data in the area, satellite platforms offer an increasingly wealth of remotely sensed hydrology-relevant data, which can be used to drive and validate integrated models (Stisen et al., 2008). New satellite platforms, e.g. the Sentinel satellite (Yang and Chen, 2017), provide fine-resolution spatial and temporal data, which are suitable for mapping free water surfaces. This information is very important for acquiring data on flow occurrences in river stretches and in flood plains during flooding in systems with limited hydrometric monitoring. This data can be used for constraining model simulations of flow through rivers and lakes. Data from the SMOS (Kerr et al., 2010) and SMAP (Entekhabi et al., 2010) satellites provide very useful information on soil moisture. However, these data are supplied on a larger spatial resolution and thus suitable downscaling procedures need to be applied before the data can be used for hydrological purposes (Meyer et al., 2019; Montzka et al., 2018). The developed model will provide an innovative scientifically-based, tested tool to understand the water resources of the system.
We propose to develop a state-of-the-art, web-enabled, and GIS-supported data support system (DSS), which will contain time series of hydrological and meteorological data as well as geo-referenced information on physical elements of the Ayad River catchment. This system will not only provide ease of storage, retrieval and analysis of data required for the project but also support statistical analysis, visualization of relevant variables and parameters, and provide a datalink to the proposed integrated hydrological and hydraulic model.
The importance of water resources for livelihoods and environments, coupled with the looming challenges of climate change, population growth and other stressors (IPPC, 2014), highlight the need for novel approaches to generate new knowledge of the water resources, enhance community awareness of their importance, and develop sustainable management. Citizen science is a proven methodology to involve stakeholders and citizen in managing environmental resources (Walker et al., 2019a; Walker et al., 2019b). The discipline is emerging as a viable way to support hydrological research, especially in low and middleincome countries where data scarcity is more pronounced and conventional monitoring methods are expensive and logistically challenging. There are only a few noteworthy examples where these approaches are implemented in low-income countries, e.g. Kenya (Weeser et al., 2018), Ethiopia (Walker et al., 2016), Tanzania (Gomani et al., 2010) and South Africa (Kongo et al., 2010). Uptake of citizen science in hydrology in low-income countries is gradually rising, although still at its infancy. Most of the programs are located in North America and Europe (Njue et al., 2019).
The project will further develop and adapt the citizen science approach for integrated surfacegroundwater systems to enhance data collection, empower water users to co-manage their resources, and raise awareness and insights into best management practices, supporting and supported by the modelling approach. The project leverage on the potential of citizen science to complement conventional scientific data collection and knowledge generation for water resource management. In the process, the citizens become centrally involved in the planning of decisions related to water resource management (Overdevest et al., 2004).
The overarching challenges that will be addressed through the citizen science approach of data collection include bridging knowledge and communication gap between citizens and scientists through improved interaction and community access to decision making. Citizen science’s democratic nature promotes a more equitable form of decision-making, allowing for meaningful contributions to discussions and policymaking (Bulkeley and Mol, 2003). In a country constrained by scarce data, like India, citizen science has the potential to generate extensive scientific datasets cost-effectively.
The project group behind the proposal held a three-day workshop at the Vidya Bhawan Polytechnic, Udaipur, India, in the period July 2-4 2019, to jointly shape and formulate the proposal. As part of the workshop municipality and state officials, local experts in surface water and groundwater resources as well as representatives from local community organizations presented their ideas and views. A field visit to the study area (Udaipur District) included an inspection of pertinent hydrological features.