Information Graphics and Visualisations

Both rural and urban India are faced with water problems. People do not have access to good quality, safe drinking water. The source for most drinking water is either rivers or underground aquifers (wells). Since water can dissolve just about anything that it comes into contact with long enough, often the groundwater we get isn’t pure.

India waterportal’s data finder has over 300 datasets. A non-data or non-analytics person can feel overwhelmed trying to pull out important information and understand it.  A data story will help do just that. It will show you the data, explain the analysis behind it and present it visually so that you can find patterns, ask questions and reach conclusions. 

IWP has over 200 sets of water data online. Of this, we have converted around 16 to an Excel format and will be adding more in the coming weeks for you to download. Use our Data Finder, a search tool for finding water data online, to search for this information. 

A stepwell or ‘bawdi’ or ‘baori’, is exactly what the name suggests – a well with steps that lead down to the water. About 1000 years ago, a 13-storey deep water reservoir boasting 3500 steps was built to ensure that people in the arid Abhaneri region of Rajasthan had a dependable water source.

At the start of the 20th century, India had nearly 40,000 tigers. That number came down to a mere 1827 in 1972. It took us just 75 years to almost wipe out an entire species!

But we woke up in the nick of time, launched ‘Project Tiger’, spent colossal amounts of money and energy and managed to double this number to 3642 by 2002.

Now it is the turn of the Indian farmer. Like the tiger, he too seems to be slowly and steadily on his way out…fighting for survival like this magnificent animal. 

There is a palpable sense of a looming water crisis in India. Conflicts across competing users and uses are on the rise. In the irrigation sector, it is widely felt that “paucity of resources and poor performance of existing major and medium irrigation systems are the two main problems”(1). More recently, the sector has been faced with a spate of allegations of poor irrigation facilities created at inflated costs resulting in demands for a realistic assessment of its various programmes.