India's Largest Springs Mapping Begins

World Water Day 2015proved to be significant to the people of Meghalaya, That day is when the state's Springshed Management Initiative was launched

The Chief Secretary,PBO Warjri saidthat the people of Shillong have traditionally depended on springs but in recent years, land use changes and the installation of borewells have led to the depletion of natural springs.

The inauguration meeting began with an overview of springs and hydrogeology, stories from Springs Initiative partners, a report on the previous day's training and voices from the field officers about their experiences around the State. The latter half of the day consisted of meetings with decision makers, including Shri Mishra, Principle Secretary, Water Resources Department, to plan events moving forward.

Before this inauguration, a training session on spring sensitisation and methods for mapping and monitoring was conducted for field officers and department heads of numerous agencies connected with natural resources in the state. This covered both the theory and practise of the importance of springs, hydrogeology, discharge measurement, water quality, field sheets, uploading to the database and using the mobile application.

The trained field staff - more than 30 -will now disseminate learnings to an additional 215 people, each of whom is expected to map 15 springs before the rains in May. This exercise should yield some 2000-4000 spring data points within a few months.

The data collected will help Meghalaya plan springshed protection activities and will constitute a scaled-baseline for the programme. Speaking of the training programme, PBO Warjri says, "We can have an army of volunteers to monitor and feed data and have reliable data on the State".

Can you tell us more about the Springs Initiative?

The initiative is a group of organisations around the country who happen to be working independently on springs but doing a lot of the same work in parallel. Arghyam had the idea to bring everyone together and see if we can leverage each other's strengths and learn from each other. It's been going very well. There have been some excellent connections and cross-learning.

The case for community-based spring conservation centres around a scientific approach to groundwater. It has been made stronger, since everyone has passed through the same place -- this has been everybody's experience in different parts of the country.

The initiative is less than a year old, but we've already had a lot of successes, including this connection with the Meghalaya government. Different partners with the Springs Initiative are coming together to help the government of Meghalaya to get its springs programme up and running.

What does the Meghalaya springs programme include?

The Meghalaya government has embarked on a very ambitious plan for water and livelihoods, the Integrated Basin Development Livelihood Programme. The springs conservation is a part of that. It is at the initial stages now, but they are looking at doing something at scale. They want to ramp up quickly and cover the entire state.

The state of Sikkim took seven or eight years and went very carefully. That's not a bad thing; they figured out a lot of stuff along the way. Because Sikkim did that, there is some precedent and some analogue Meghalaya can borrow from. Meghalaya might be able to skip some of the initial figuring things out piece.

Dr. Jared Buono, a hydrogeologist connected with the Springs Initiative, was part of the resource group which conducted the training. He spoke with the India Water Portal about the Meghalaya programme.

Source: IndiaWaterportal

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• Environment
• Conservation
• Hydrology