From Lalit Mohan Sharma, Institute of Rural Research and Development, Gurgaon
Posted 28 September 2010
I work with the Institute of Rural Research and Development (an initiative of S.M. Sehgal Foundation) on Natural Resource Management. We have a programme on Integrated Sustainable Village Development (ISVD) in which water Management (WM) is our flagship programme. It is a key component of the Natural Resource Management Center WM that focuses on improving water availability and quality, promoting safe drinking water and its judicious use, wastewater disposal, salinity regression, research and innovation.
The Mewat district of Haryana is one of our primary intervention areas. This is a semi-arid region where groundwater is the main source of water as surface water is scarce. However, even this resource is very limited; only 61 of the 503 villages in Mewat have sweet groundwater and these are mostly situated along the Aravali hills where the land is steep and the soil, sandy. Groundwater recharge is low because of the topography; the shortage of surface storage compounds the problem. These few pockets of sweet water serve surrounding villages as well. People use them for domestic and farming needs. We have seen that rich farmers in the district buy small patches of land in fresh water zones, install a bore well, and pipe the water to their fields many kilometers away. The saline groundwater is slowly spreading as the sweet water gets depleted and many wells that had sweet water earlier have turned saline.
To deal with this problem we built structures to collect the runoff from large catchment areas located uphill in Aravalis to recharge the fresh groundwater pockets. We also have managed to increase the amount of recharging in low lying saline zones to check further advancement. Many wells where the water had turned saline have started yielding sweet water.
We are seeking ways to increase the reach of our recharging interventions and analyse the efficacy of our existing interventions. Can you please provide us the following information:
- How can we determine the salinity levels at different depths in aquifers if there are no test wells?
- What technology can we use to determine this and how reliable is it?
- Please let us know which institutions or individuals work in this area.
This will help us to fine-tune our interventions.
Please see attachment below for the responses.
