The Problem Of Meeting The Water Needs Of A Rural Community Is A ...
292 / Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
Jal Chitra: Water Map
Software for Rural Water Management
V I K R A M V Y A S
“The village will have its own waterworks, ensuring clean
water supply. This can be done through controlled wells or
tanks.”
M.K. Gandhi, Harijan 26 July 1942
The problem of meeting the water needs of a rural community is a complex problem.
There is no doubt that in solving this problem IT can potentially play a useful role, but
how to harness this potentiality is a question that has not received the attention it
deserves. For example, a reasonable first step in a strategy for drought-proofing a village
is to have an estimate of the amount of water that is reliably available to the village in a
given month and to compare it with the water requirement of the village in that month. Quan-
tifying the water deficiency in a given month and then estimating the cost of developing
water sources to bridge this gap, perhaps through building rainwater-harvesting systems,
or through recharging existing wells, and sharing this information with the larger village com-
munity could start the process of drought-proofing a village. Similarly, as is well known,
often the question is not simply of the availability of water but of access to it. A very clear
picture of the water situation in a village emerges if all the functioning water sources are
shown on a community map of the village. These are just examples, there are many other
detailed questions whose answer can be of much value to the community as it plans its
water resources, but these are the questions that only the community itself can articulate
and IT based tools should respond to them.
The first attempt at such a tool was the development of a mathematical model for
determining the reliability of rainwater harvesting systems with covered tanks against recur-
rent droughts. In 1997 this model was converted into an easy to use free software, Sim-
Tanka. The original plan was to continue to develop various similar models, like a model for
rainwater harvesting systems with open water reservoirs – Sim-Talab; a model for estimat-
ing the yield from wells and tube wells – Sim-Well; and then to integrate them in a unified
model of various water sources available to a rural community.
Encode + Decode / 293
A serious risk in the use of IT for rural development is that it can become a case of
solutions seeking problems. The development of Sim-Tanka suffered to an extent from this
pitfall. Sim-Tanka was developed with the intention of helping a rural community design a
reliable rainwater harvesting system using past rainfall data. In a technical sense the soft-
ware is very useful, but a community does not approach its water resources in a piecemeal
manner; it does not think in terms of optimised rainwater harvesting systems working in iso-
lation. Thus while Sim-Tanka was received positively by many IT practitioners, and received
a fair amount of positive publicity, its actual use in building rainwater harvesting systems
has been insignificant.
The development of Jal-Chitra started with the recognition of this failure. More
specifically it was the reluctance of the Barefoot College, Tilonia, to use Sim-Tanka in
their programme of constructing rainwater harvesting systems that initiated the process
of trying to understand what kind of information and analysis is truly useful to a rural
community. The long development period of Jal-Chitra, which has now extended over
more than three years, has been a continuous debate, discussion and dialogue to answer
this question.
The result of this debate was recognition that there are three sets of information that
can assist a Panchyat in managing its water sources:
An estimate of the monthly water budget of the village;
A way of keeping track of the maintenance work required for the various water sources;
A community based water resource map of the village with information about access to water.
Further, to ensure transparency and accountability all this information has to be avail-
able to the entire village in Hindi.
The defining feature of Jal-Chitra is its ability to allow a user to draw a community
based water resource map of the village; further, by clicking on any of these sources the
user can enter information about the amount of water available from that source, the details
of any maintenance activity in that month and, if available, it also keeps record of the water
quality test. The information so entered is then used to generate monthly water budgets,
and various maintenance and water quality reports. These reports are in Hindi and can be
printed and shared with the village at large.
Community map of the
Database of water
Water budget,
village showing water
sources and water
maintenance and water
sources
demand
quality report
Conceptual Outline of Jal-Chitra
Jal-Chitra at a Glance
1. Uses Hindi as the language for interacting with the user.
2. Allows users to draw interactive community based water resource maps of the village.
3. Allows the community to keep a monthly record of the amount of water available from
each of the water sources.
4. Has a facility for keeping records of water quality testing.
294 / Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
5. Has a facility for keeping records of maintenance work required and the maintenance
work that has been done.
6. Estimates the water demand for domestic, livestock, and agriculture uses.
7. The farm records also suggest the optimal water irrigation required depending on the
crop planted and the amount of rainfall.
8. Generates future monthly water budgets based on past records; as more monthly
records are kept the corresponding estimates become more reliable.
9. Informs the community as to how much of its annual water need is being met from
underground water and the approximate amount of recharging that is taking place.
10. Finds out the reliability of covered rainwater harvesting systems.
11. Estimates the amount of rainwater harvesting done by a village and compares it with
the total potentiality of rainwater harvesting in the given village.
Who Will Use Jal-Chitra?
Since the aim of Jal-Chitra is to provide a tool for the village community, it naturally raises
the question how will the various rural communities access Jal-Chitra? The tentative answer
that has emerged from the testing of Jal-Chitra at Barefoot College, Tilonia, and with the
Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), Devdungari, is that two kinds of institutions have
to be involved. Firstly, voluntary organisations that are working directly with the village
Panchayats and have access to a computer. Their role is that of an intermediary and one
that will change once Panchayats themselves have access to computers.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the village school has to be involved in the
use of Jal-Chitra. The minimum information that Jal-Chitra needs to be useful is the
monthly record of the amount of water available from various sources. This requires record-
ing the discharge rate of handpumps, the area of water cover in the rainwater reservoir, the
average depth of water in the reservoirs. For more advanced use, it also requires main-
taining meteorological records like that of rainfall. The village children can do these acti-
vities, together with the exercise of making the village map. Apart from facilitating the use
of Jal-Chitra, this has the potential of making the education of a child living in village more
engaging and rooted to her or his environment.
Testing Jal-Chitra
Since January 2002 Jal-Chitra is being used in more than a dozen villages of Rajasthan. Its
use in these villages roughly follows the following steps:
1. First a rough community map of the village is drawn on a paper.
2. A survey of all water sources is conducted.
3. A survey of the village is conducted to determine the approximate human and livestock
population.
4. Water sources are then marked on the paper map.
5. The village community map showing all the water sources is then drawn on the com-
puter using Jal-Chitra.
6. Information about each of the water sources is then connected with the map of the vil-
lage in Jal-Chitra.
Encode + Decode / 295
7. Every month all the water sources are surveyed to determine if they are functioning or
not, the kind of repairs required and the approximate amount of water being withdrawn from
each of the sources.
Using this information Jal-Chitra generates the following monthly reports:
>A monthly water budget of the village.
>A maintenance report, indicating water sources that require some form of maintenance.
>A maintenance log of every water source in the village, showing all the repair works done
on that source.
It is planned that these reports will be shared with the village community during the
Gram-Sabha. To make full utilisation of all the tools incorporated in Jal-Chitra requires a
basic hydro-geological survey of the village and an incorporation of the monthly meteoro-
logical records. Unfortunately, in the village where Jal-Chitra is currently being tested, this
information is missing. Incorporation of these records and an independent validation of the
monthly water budget generated by Jal-Chitra are some of the pressing tasks.
For the testing of Jal-Chitra in Silora Panchayat, the collection of the monthly informa-
tion is the responsibility of a worker of Barefoot College, Tilonia, who has graduated from
its night school. Ms. Lalita, who had formal education till lower high school and does not
know any English, records the collected information in Jal-Chitra. Some of the reports gene-
rated during the course of this testing are included below as computer screen shots. The
testing of Jal-Chitra in Todgadh is of particular importance as it is being done in a manner
Figure 4 Schematic Community Water Resource Map of Kacharia Drawn by
Ms. Lalita of the Barefoot College, Tilonia.
296 / Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
close to its envisioned mode of usage. The high school students collect the monthly data
of the amount of water available from various water sources and Vivek Ramkumar, a mem-
ber of MKSS, then enters the information into Jal-Chitra on his laptop computer. Further,
another member of MKSS, Tejaram, is the head of the Todgadh Panchayat and can there-
fore potentially use the analysis coming from Jal-Chitra in the Panchayat’s development plan.
Future of Jal-Chitra
Even the limited use of Jal-Chitra has validated the basic premise behind its development.
For example, the records of handpump maintenance and their maintenance log are vividly
bringing out the water situation in various villages. Once these reports are shared with the
whole of the village through Gram-Sabha then, hopefully, one will be able to see the use of
Jal-Chitra as an advocacy tool.
There are still many questions whose answers will emerge only after a more extended
use of Jal-Chitra. One particularly important issue that has to be understood is how should
Panchayats use the monthly water budget generated by Jal-Chitra in its planning and water
management exercise.
The development and the use of Jal-Chitra has suggested two related projects. Firstly,
there is a need to document the experience of developing, testing and using Jal-Chitra so
that the lessons learned from this work can be analysed and shared with the wider com-
munity. Secondly, based on the testing of Jal-Chitra and through a continuous dialogue with
the members of various Panchayats where Jal-Chitra is being used, the development of a
new version has to begin. It is hoped that the future development of Jal-Chitra will take place
within the paradigm of open and free software so that users, software developers and plan-
ners from all over the world can collaborate in its continuous development.
Jal-Chitra is a result of collaboration between the Ajit Foundation, Jaipur, and Barefoot College, Tilonia. I am
grateful to my colleagues at both these organisations. At the Barefoot College I am particularly grateful to Ms.
Lalita for her insistence on the Hindi version of Jal-Chitra and for her diligent testing of it. I am also grateful to
Vivek Ramkumar of the MKSS and to the students of Todgadh High School who have been involved in the test-
ing of Jal-Chitra in Todgadh.
My views on the use of information technology for rural development have been greatly influenced by my
conversations with Bunker Roy, Dr. Kamla Chowdhary, Laxman Singh, Prof. Narendra Singhi, Nikhil Dey and
Prof. Vijay Vyas. I would like to thank them all for sharing their insights with me.
Jal-Chitra is free software meant for Panchayats and voluntary organisations working with them. To obtain
a copy of Jal-Chitra please contact: The Ajit Foundation, 396 Vasundhara Colony, Jaipur – 302 018, India.
