Meet Ajay, a software professional in Bangalore with over 8 years work experience. He came across the India Water Portal when he searched for borewell consultants. He found the information on the site so reliable and useful that he kept coming back. On one such visit, he read about the volunteer program, which encourages non-water experts to engage with water data. After registering to be a part of it, he got involved in data projects and worked in particular, on central ground water data.

The Central Groundwater Board publishes district-wise groundwater profiles for all of India in text and pdf formats. It contains useful information on groundwater availability, aquifer types, and valuable descriptions of wells. It also provides data on water quality, water levels and shows how much land is irrigated by groundwater. Ajay helped to collect and format this information for the districts of Chickballapur, Haveri, Kolar, Mandya, Shimoga, Tumkur and Udupi in Karnataka.

Rachana has an MS in Computer Science and has worked both in India and the US. She was interested in data mining and machine learning. She also had a keen interest in the open data movement data science in general. That’s when she came across the Portal. Her background in reporting and analytics helped her contribute to the data visualization on Census Data project.

The project involved cleaning up the data, getting it in analysis-ready format, creating visualizations to capture underlying patterns, and writing about what could be learned from it. Data sets analysed included household data on access to drinking water and availability of electricity and latrine for the following states - Assam, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand,Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, Rajasthan and Sikkim.