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The last half-century has been marked by attempts to solve various problems of rural India without involving local communities in any meaningful way. The solutions have always been imposed from above through the medium of all pervasive and centralised bureaucracy. This has resulted in the dying of local traditions and institutions while the alternatives that have emerged have been, at their best, less than adequate. With the advent of the Panchayat-Raj amendment to the constitution there is a glimmer of hope. Panchayats, or the local village parliament, now have a limited say in the use of the development funds for the village; further Panchayats themselves are accountable to the village through the institution of Gram-Sabha or the village assembly. Both these institutions are in their infancy and are subject to all the imperfections of the current political and social climate; still they remain our best hope. They can be the first step on the road leading to Swaraj.
It is in this context that the Ajit Foundation started in 1994 a Scientific Resource Centre with the task of developing tools based on mathematical modelling and information technologies (IT) that can help Panchayats manage their own water resources. The problem of meeting the water needs of a rural community is a complex human problem. 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. Jal-Chitra, which is software for managing water resources of a village, is a continuing attempt on the part of The Ajit Foundation to answer this question. The first attempt of The Ajit Foundation toward the use of IT for rural water management was the development of a mathematical model for determining the reliability of rainwater harvesting systems with covered tanks against recurrent draughts. In 1997 this model was converted into an easy to use free software Sim-Tanka.
A serious risk in the use of IT for rural development is that it can become a case of a solution searching for a problem. In fact the development of Sim-Tanka suffered to an extent from this pit-fall. Sim-Tanka was developed with the intention of helping a rural community design a reliable rainwater harvesting system using the past rainfall data. In a technical sense the software is indeed very useful, but the fact remains that while Sim-Tanka was received positively by various research organisation and was also given a fair amount of publicity in the press, its actual use in the building of rainwater harvesting systems, at least in Rajasthan, has been insignificant.
The development of Jal-Chitra started with the recognition of this failure of Sim-Tanka. More specifically it was the reluctance of the Barefoot College, Tilonia, to use Sim-Tanka in their program 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. A continuous debate and dialogue between the developer of the software and its eventual user marked this process, which soon became a collaborative project between the Ajit Foundation and the Barefoot College, Tilonia. An equally useful dialogue was established with some of the members of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), who have been pioneers in the fight for the right to information. What was solicited most from this dialogue with MKSS was how to ensure that the information provided by Jal-Chitra becomes accessible to the entire village.
Download SimTanka2
Jal-Chitra is computer software developed by the Ajit Foundation, Jaipur, in close collaboration with the Barefoot College, Tilonia. Jal-Chitra allows the users to create an interactive water map of the village. The advent of Personal Computer together with the development and expansion of Internet has provided us with a unique opportunity to bring the tools of scientific modelling and computation to rural development. One immediate area where such tools can make a tangible contribution is in the process of draught proofing the villages lying in the arid and semi-arid regions of the developing world. While the process of making a rural community self-reliant for its water needs is a complex human process with many technical challenges, this process can be greatly facilitated by the availability of relevant information to the village community. For example, an estimate of the monthly water demand and the monthly water availability from various sources would be a starting point for the community's debate on how the water sources should be developed and how to allocate the available water. Similarly, an advance estimate of such a water budget would be a valuable piece of information in deciding the community's strategy for facing a draught. The response to this information could range from water conservation, to the development of new water sources and or water storage systems where possible, and if needed, to quantify the amount of water to be brought from external sources. Any strategy for meeting the water needs of a village in a sustainable and reliable manner would require an optimum and balanced use of underground water and the rainwater harvesting systems. Correspondingly the information as to what extent the community should depend on ground water and to what degree can it depends on rainwater harvesting system will be of great importance. Such information would be of little value unless there are political and social systems that give the village communities the responsibility and resources for managing, maintaining, and developing their own water sources. Here "Panchayat" - the elected local village body together with "Gram Sabha" - the village assembly - offers a glimmer of hope. Jal-Chitra is software developed for local village institutions so that they can take advantage of information and communication technologies in exercising their right to manage their own water sources. Perhaps, Jal-Chitra can be thought of as a small but useful tool for making Gandhi's dream of Village Swaraj a reality.
Key Features of Jal-Chitra
1. Allows users to make an interactive water map of the village.
2. Allows the community to keep record of amount of water available from each of the water
sources.
3. Facility for keeping record of water quality testing.
4. Facility for keeping record of maintenance work required and the maintenance work that has been done.
5. Estimates the water demand for domestic use, for livestock, and for agriculture.
6. The agricultural records also suggest the optimal water irrigation required depending on the crop
planted and the amount of rainfall.
7. Generates the future monthly water budget based on the past records,as more monthly records are kept the corresponding budget become more reliable.
8. Informs 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.
9. Shows the amount of the community's need that is being met through rainwater harvesting
systems and how it compares with total potentiality of rainwater harvestingin the given village.
10. Incorporates a tool Sim-Tanka to determine the reliability of rainwater harvesting systems
with covered storage tank
11. A Hindi version has been develeoped and is being currently used in more than dozen villages.
Figure: A screen shot of Jal-Chitra
For more information on Jal-Chitra please contact:
Vikram Vyas
The Ajit Foundation
396 Vasundhara Colony
Tonk Road, Jaipur 302 018
India
Email: visquare@satyam.net.in