Over the last 50 years, groundwater use for irrigation has increased dramatically and was instrumental in India’s green revolution in 1970’s. As such, groundwater played a major role in making the country food sufficient and improving livelihoods of over 260 million small-scale farmers. However, this remarkable achievement came at the cost of increased pressure on groundwater resource, and now the annual groundwater pumping in many areas of the country far exceeds the annual monsoonal recharge. As such, India has now become the world’s largest user of groundwater, and the groundwater levels have been dropping across the country. The top down approach of the Government so far has failed to stop the ongoing decline in groundwater levels.
In this webinar, we share experiences from the MARVI project, Managing Aquifer Recharge and Sustaining Groundwater Use through Village-level Intervention, particularly how villagers can be transformed into local groundwater champions through training and capacity building and empowering them to develop their own solutions for groundwater sustainability
Trevor Pillar, National Partnerships Manager, ICE WaRM