A background note can be accessed here: Digital Water Monitoring Is Becoming Central to India’s Water Governance
Digital monitoring is expanding across aquifers, reservoirs, water bodies and water-related infrastructure. Can India's digital water architecture help shift policy attention from monitoring the physical status of water resources towards actively managing demand and allocation, particularly in groundwater-dependent regions?
As India adopts digital monitoring in water asset management, digital monitoring and water architecture can help redefine our policy perspectives on water access and allocation. Individualised, property-rights-determined groundwater access and allocation are currently unsustainable in terms of use, allocation, and conservation. Digitised groundwater monitoring can change water consumption patterns across various uses and promote conservation through regulated extraction.
This digitised water infrastructure can have policy implications from the perspectives of equity and sustainability. Monitored water extraction can promote distributive justice among water users, who currently face differential access due to disparities in property rights and consequent uncontrolled extraction and exploitation by some sections of the community. The state can monitor and regulate these distributive inequities, which, in some cases, are also tied to social injustice rooted in historical factors.
These interventions can encourage regulated extraction, wise crop choice, adoption of conservation measures, and preservation through recharge measures. So far, the focus of government schemes and water users has been on the sustainability of water supply and access. With these initiatives, a regulated, judicious approach to water use and incentives can also shift the focus towards ensuring the sustainability of water resources.
India is developing multiple digital systems to collect and disseminate information on water resources across different programmes and levels of government. What would it take for these systems to become decision-making infrastructure for States, districts and local institutions rather than primarily reporting and monitoring platforms?
Water is a state subject under the Constitution of India. Yet, given water's contribution to drinking water and food security, Central interventions through policies and schemes include water sector regulations and pollution control laws. States generally implement central sector schemes, supported by grants/incentives. Generally, these schemes are uniform and do not account for local hydrological, climatic, social, and economic factors, making them unsuitable for many areas.
Even where decentralised implementation is envisaged, data on local water availability, hydrogeological conditions, and related factors are needed for meaningful implementation. Data can also bring transparency and accountability to scheme beneficiaries, who have the right to know about the schemes implemented.
With data interoperability, States can make prudent decisions on water security and scarcity. Aquifers, as shared common-pool resources, can benefit from interoperable data that provides a better understanding of water resources and opens the possibility of coordinated, shared management across different areas. Greater control over data on water resources by States can strengthen institutional control of groundwater, which is currently subject to individual control. Better data can enable timely intervention to regulate extraction and bring parity in access and allocation, thereby enabling greater conservation.
Greater digital monitoring can make the status of water resources and implementation of water programmes more visible. How should India use this increased visibility to change accountability for water outcomes when responsibility for water management is dispersed across departments, States, local governments and users?
India’s water governance architecture is fragmented, with diverse actors contributing to water management, raising concerns about accountability and responsibility. While surface water is regulated by the state under the public trust doctrine, groundwater remains subject to a property-rights-based regime. Digitised monitoring can make programme implementation more visible and strengthen accountability for effectiveness, transparency and responsiveness.
Different departments oversee different programmes. Digital monitoring can identify good practices and defaulters, while data managed by various entities can support evaluation and scrutiny of implementation effectiveness. For schemes implemented by state and local governments with central funding, each unit should be responsible and accountable.
In drinking water, these systems can support the State’s responsibility to ensure the right to water, a fundamental right under the right to life, in both substantive and procedural dimensions. Continuous monitoring can enable rights holders to hold the State accountable for regulatory lapses in water supply and simultaneously gain a stake in decision-making on scheme implementation, supporting substantive and procedural justice.
In irrigation, digital monitoring can improve parity in groundwater access, allocation and distribution, regulate informal groundwater markets, and curtail industrial extraction exceeding the limits permitted under No Objection Certificates (NOCs). Digitalised water management can thereby bring a new dimension to equity and sustainability in water governance.