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India is the world’s largest user of groundwater, with over 21.9 million wells and tubewells extracting an estimated 247 billion cubic metres annually. This invisible resource supports most of the country’s drinking water needs and sustains the livelihoods of millions of small and marginal farmers. Yet despite its centrality to India’s water security, groundwater has long been poorly understood and weakly governed. Over-extraction and growing aquifer stress have become widespread, as conventional top-down approaches, relying on licences, permits, and quotas, have failed to recognise groundwater as a common pool resource shaped by local geology, social relations, and everyday practices.
Over the past few decades, civil society organisations, scientists, and community institutions have worked to challenge this paradigm. Organisations such as the Advanced Centre for Water Resources Development and Management (ACWADAM), networks like the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network (RRA), and numerous grassroots groups have advanced Participatory Groundwater Management (PGWM), an approach rooted in aquifer literacy, collective decision-making, and equitable use.
It was against this backdrop that a diverse group of researchers, practitioners, and policy thinkers gathered in Pune to reflect on the state of groundwater governance in India. The occasion also marked the conferring of the University of Oklahoma International Water Prize on Dr Himanshu Kulkarni, founder of ACWADAM and a leading hydrogeologist, making him the only Indian to receive this honour.
More than a celebration of an individual, the gathering became a moment to collectively reflect on how India understands, manages, and imagines its groundwater future. Across panels and discussions, participants reflected on the values, processes, and partnerships that have animated Himanshu Kulkarni’s work and ACWADAM’s broader engagement with groundwater governance.
While government programmes increasingly recognise the importance of groundwater, they often lack sustained investment in community engagement and capacity-building. Mihir Shah, former Member of the Planning Commission of India, pointed to concerns around the possible discontinuation of the Atal Bhujal Yojana, India’s first national programme that formally recognised the need for people’s participation in groundwater management.
Ravi Chopra, founder of the People’s Science Institute (Dehradun), emphasised the importance of looking back into history to understand how people had managed water sustainably for generations. Many traditional water systems, he noted, survived because of the sanskar of those who practised a sanskriti of conservation, often supported by responsive local administrations. These experiences, he argued, offer important lessons for present-day governance.
A strong message emerged across discussions: groundwater cannot be governed through centralised frameworks alone. Sharad Lele from ATREE emphasised that the dispersed and highly local nature of groundwater required decentralised decision-making, community ownership, and institutions with the capacity to act across scales. Without people’s ownership of common property resources, participatory programmes were unlikely to succeed. Bishwadeep Ghosh from Water For People emphasised the need for identifying entry points to engage with people and policy for groundwater management.
Urban groundwater emerged as a critical yet under-addressed frontier. Vishwanath from Biome Environmental Solutions began by acknowledging the role of ACWADAM, and particularly Himanshu Kulkarni’s work, in bringing urban aquifers into India’s groundwater imagination, an area that has long remained invisible in both policy and practice. He highlighted the deepening crisis of urban groundwater management, marked by an institutional vacuum in governing groundwater alongside urban water supply, despite the crucial role played by shallow aquifers in sustaining cities.
Unclear regulatory strategies, limited institutional capacity, and deteriorating surface and groundwater quality continue to compound urban water stress. Emerging pressures from industrial demand and pre-urban groundwater use to the rapid expansion of water-intensive sectors such as data centers further complicate the landscape.
Emphasising the need to rethink how groundwater is accessed and managed in cities, he argued for a shift away from extractive competition towards collective stewardship, noting that “we need to move from competitive drilling to cooperative drilling.” He also called for recognising the knowledge of traditional well diggers, such as those in Karnataka, whose practices have sustained groundwater systems for generations.
Reflecting on the future of PGWM, PS Vijayshankar from Samaj Pragati Sahayog emphasised that the core challenge today lies not in replicating past models but in reinterpreting participatory principles for rapidly changing landscapes. Climate uncertainty, shifting agrarian structures, external water transfers, and growing urban-industrial pressures are fundamentally altering how groundwater is accessed and used.
Rather than treating PGWM as a fixed framework, he argued for flexible, context-specific approaches that respond to contemporary realities while remaining rooted in agroecology and collective decision-making. As he put it, “The future of participatory groundwater management lies in translating its principles, not its past models, into rapidly changing ecological, agrarian, and socio-economic contexts.”
Ravindra A from the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network reflected on how ACWADAM’s work in demystifying groundwater science, particularly the concept of aquifers, has shaped collective water-sharing practices in rainfed regions. Initiatives such as borewell sharing were driven by knowledge-building, capacity strengthening, and partnerships and have influenced how practitioners engage with community-based water management.
Looking ahead, he underscored the challenge of embedding these learnings within agroecological frameworks and of communicating “groundwater as a continuum” across surface water, soil moisture, and aquifers to farmers and practitioners working in diverse ecological and social contexts. Taking this understanding “right down to the panchayat level” through strong institutional structures remains a key priority for scaling practice.
Bringing questions of equity to the fore, Seema Kulkarni from SOPPECOM drew attention to the largely invisible labour and negotiations undertaken by farm women, particularly from poor and marginalised communities, to access groundwater. Drawing on experiences from the cotton belt of Maharashtra, she described how widows of farmers who had died by suicide often struggled not only for land rights but also for access to water, sometimes exchanging unpaid labour for water on “unirrigated and infertile land.” Similar dynamics were reported from Telangana and Punjab.
She also highlighted the everyday struggles of women labourers in sugarcane fields, who must constantly “negotiate access to water” for drinking, hygiene, and menstrual health. Against the backdrop of changing landscapes marked by the rise of data centres and solar parks in water-stressed districts such as Beed, she cautioned that large water demands intersect sharply with caste, class, and gender—particularly affecting dalits and women who have invested in borewells through debt. She emphasised the need to recognise and incentivise the often-unacknowledged work of indigenous communities, dalits, and women in building soil moisture in rainfed areas, arguing that groundwater governance must engage explicitly with questions of equity and rights by “recognising women as farmers and water managers in their own right.”
The session on Groundwater in Research, steered by K J Joy, SOPPECOM foregrounded a fundamental question: how should groundwater research evolve in the context of rapidly changing landscapes shaped by urbanisation, climate change, and agrarian transformation? Joy pointed to the persistence of deep silos in the water sector—between surface water, soil moisture, and groundwater; between policy, practice, and research; and between disciplines themselves. Much of mainstream research, he argued, remains preoccupied with groundwater quantity and augmentation, rather than understanding the resource and managing it within its social and ecological context.
Several speakers echoed the need to move beyond technocratic hydrogeology by situating different groundwater typologies within lived social realities—recognising class, caste, ethnicity, and relations of production, as well as competition and conflict over access. There was also a call to rethink how research is produced and by whom. ACWADAM’s work was cited as critical in breaking the elitism of institutional research by democratising hydrogeological knowledge at the grassroots, underscoring that research should not only generate knowledge but also serve as a tool for social change and collective action.
Building on this, speakers highlighted concrete research frontiers across contexts and scales.Rajeswari S. Raina from Shiv Nadar University stressed the urgency of rethinking how groundwater is taught, arguing that engineering-led, compartmentalised education must give way to interdisciplinary learning grounded in field realities. Debashish from PSI Dehradun outlined key gaps in spring research, from understanding spring–aquifer interactions and baseflows to assessing climate change impacts, vegetation effects, and cultural practices around spring protection, including in urban contexts. Veena Srinivasan from WELL Labs brought attention to canal command areas, where groundwater plays a critical yet uneven role, and raised questions about re-situating participatory groundwater management and demand-side approaches in national policy conversations.
Philippe Cullet, SOAS, University of London drew attention to the invisibility of groundwater rights in law and policy, calling for protection zones, locally grounded water security planning, and a multiscalar understanding of groundwater governance that moves beyond top-down frameworks. N C Narayana from Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, IIT, Mumbai highlighted the invisibility of coastal aquifers, pointing to data gaps, informal groundwater dependencies, and the need for conjunctive use approaches informed by historical and institutional realities. Together, the session made a compelling case for a research agenda that is interdisciplinary, socially embedded, and explicitly oriented towards equity, governance, and sustainability.
Himanshu Kulkarni looked back at India’s groundwater journey through the partnerships and collaborations built over decades with organisations and practitioners working on the ground. He emphasised that work on commons such as groundwater cannot progress in silos and that the sector needs catalysts—actors who can convene diverse stakeholders, convince institutions and policymakers, and bridge the worlds of science, practice, and policy to work towards shared goals, even when pathways and trajectories differ.
Turning to emerging challenges, Himanshu drew attention to groundwater’s often-overlooked role in shaping disasters, particularly landslides in regions such as the Western Ghats, where hydraulic loading of soils and subsurface water movement influence slope stability. He noted that disasters are frequently framed as purely “natural”, while their hydrogeological dimensions remain poorly understood. Understanding how groundwater contributes to the causative processes of disasters, and how such events, in turn, affect aquifers remains a critical research gap.
He closed by returning to his classroom experience with his students, a space he repeatedly acknowledged as central to his own learning. Recalling a discussion with his students, Himanshu shared a Kabir doha:
“Kabir kuan ek hai, paani bhare anek,
Bartan mein hi bhed hai, paani sab mein ek.”
(The well is one, though many draw water from it; the difference lies in the vessels, while the water remains the same.)
The reflection served as a fitting close, reminding the gathering that while disciplines, institutions, and approaches may differ, the essence of the work remains shared: learning together, teaching each other, and caring collectively for the commons beneath our feet.