Project Approach 

WIN Foundation water-related projects are strongly focused on community participation, at multiple levels:

1. Training and creating local expert cadre of young men and women, with training in water security planning, conservation, water recharge structures, smart farming for small farms, safe drinking water, etc.

2.  Involvement of village governing bodies like panchayat, water committee etc.

3. Involvement of major groups like farmers, dairy farmers, women

4. Brining innovations from startups and institutions, for testing and adoption at grassroots through the trained young persons and village community. 

Objectives

Our water and sanitation projects continued focus on:

1. Water Conservation: Water Security with supply and demand management, including new technology and processes, with community participation

2. Water treatment, water recycling , waste management: Technology and Product development for cost-effective solutions at different scales.

For the effective implementation of Participatory Groundwater Management, our work includes the following approaches:

i) Science and planning

ii) Supply and Demand side Interventions

iii) Participation and Sustainability Innovation

i) Science | Planning

Through our work, we want to take ‘Science to Society’ and also ‘ Society to Science’. We do this by involving locals from villages in study, planning and implementation processes, which includes training them and building their capacities. All the village level water security plans are developed from well structured studies, and some of these study and planning activities are listed below:

• Developing Water Security Plans

• Revising past Water Security Plans

• Socio-economic data of village, farmer groups and women groups

• Demand side management plans

• Integrated proposal for villages 

• Regular (seasonal) data collection and monitoring

• Action research for implemented interventions

• Demand side impact monitoring

• Developing SOPs (eg soil moisture monitoring, RRWH maintenance, defunct borewell recharge)

ii) ‘Supply’ and ‘Demand’ side Interventions

Water conservation can effectively be done when it is done by (i) increasing Supply - rainwater harvesting and recharge (ii) decreasing Demand - Finding ways to use water optimally and reduce wastage. Having documented the results from supply side interventions we are implementing it in other locations, and also working on demand side to conserve water. 

Supply side

The following are the different techniques we have implemented based on local context to recharge and store rainwater. This helps in recharge groundwater and reducing salinity. 

• Defunct borewell recharge

• Artificial recharge tube well

• Riverbed recharge for salinity mitigation

• Recharge pits

• RRWH at household level

• RRWH in schools

• Drinking water source revival

• Catchment area treatments

• Well recharge pit

• Pond desilting for water harvesting and unconfined aquifer recharge

Demand side interventions

The following innovative methods we have experimented and also standardised to reduce demand at village level, farm level and household level.

• Soil aquifer recharge

• Bio inputs

• Crop-related activities

• Activity-wise advisory to farmers for soil and water conservation

• Efficiency improvement equipment (eg chaff cutter, filters, flow meters, recycling and reuse technology)

• Wastewater treatment and reuse

• Nutrigarden

• Fodder garden

Innovations and Data Management:

We have introduced several innovations for water conservation, and smart farming.

These include borewell level sensors, automatic irrigation control, water and soil quality testing kits, water moisture sensors, together integrated cloud based data management system to enable expert advisory at farm level for marginal farmers.