Groundwater resources in India: an arena for diverse competition

Kulkarni, Himanshu; Shankar, Prabhat

doi:10.1080/13549839.2014.964192

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…1 Some scholars suggest that modern groundwater science's success in making groundwater visible may even have contributed to accelerating extraction (See Kulkarni and Shankar, 2014).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caring for Groundwater: How Care Can Expand and Transform Groundwater Governance

Zwarteveen,

Domínguez-Guzmán,

Kuper

et al. 2024

International Journal of the Commons

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Efforts to measure and regulate groundwaters and irrigators are notoriously ineffective. The starting point of this article, therefore, is to question the continued faith in techno-managerial solutions to groundwater depletion. We discuss the potential of the conceptual vocabulary of 'care' to complement, refresh and expand ways of talking about and doing groundwater governance. Mobilizing a diverse range of examples from places where pressures on aquifers are particularly acute, we do this by exploring what care entails in everyday practices of groundwater use and management. We show that foregrounding care nuances and sometimes challenges stories of users unavoidably depleting aquifers when given the chance and means to do so. Irrigators may display concern about the longer-term sustainability of the aquifers on which their livelihoods depend, even when their own pumping practices are unsustainable. In spite of pressures to intensify and individualize, farmers sometimes do hold on to or creatively develop collective rules to fairly share groundwater and use it sustainably, complementing strategies to make do with what is available with investments in conservation and recharge. Attention to care, moreover, highlights the ongoing processes of tinkering that governing groundwater always entails. The ability to tinker hinges on intimate and often embodied knowledge of a watery place. Accepting the care involved in governing groundwater, our analysis therefore concludes, prompts a re-consideration of what is and who has water expertise, with important implications for the role of 'outside' experts. More than a new theory, we propose embracing care as an analytical sensibility, with the study of practices of care serving as one promising way to widen the conceptual and political space for understanding and doing human-groundwater relations.

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“…1 Some scholars suggest that modern groundwater science's success in making groundwater visible may even have contributed to accelerating extraction (See Kulkarni and Shankar, 2014).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caring for Groundwater: How Care Can Expand and Transform Groundwater Governance

Zwarteveen,

Domínguez-Guzmán,

Kuper

et al. 2024

International Journal of the Commons

Self Cite

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“…The shift in analytical emphasis is clear. Taking as an example dynamics of groundwater recharge/extraction, an SES analysis would focus not only on geomorphological properties of the aquifer, rainfall availability, surface runoff and so on but look at patterns of groundwater access regulated trough formal and informal institutional arrangements above the ground (Kulkarni and Shankar, 2014), focusing on the ways social and natural subsystems co-evolve through a 'two-way feedback relationship' (Berkes, 2007: 285) where coping, adaptive and transformative capacities are key (Folke et al, 2010;Keck and Sakdapolrak, 2013).…”

Section: Resilience: An Archelogy Of the Conceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As mentioned at the beginning of this section, after identifying a problem of interest, the SES approach demarcates boundaries around it, following either its ecosystem or social lines. In the case of water scarcity in a groundwaterdependent socioecology, an approach would be to follow the boundaries of an aquifer, the underground layer of rocks bearing groundwater, identifying its social components as the population withdrawing water for various purposes and the formal and informal institutional arrangements regulating access (Kulkarni and Shankar, 2014). While for an SES analysis the aquifer itself appears as a rather self-evident entity, a socionatural interpretation would question whether the aquifer boundaries may not be as 'real' and fixed as it seems, highlighting how its interconnection with lakes, rivers or forest makes drawing such precise line of demarcation around the system artificial (Linton and Budds, 2014).…”

Section: Socionatural Resilience To Water Scarcity: An Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

An approach to pluralizing socionatural resilience through assemblages

Tozzi

2021

Progress in Human Geography

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Resilience provides a forward-looking framework to understand human–environment relations. Yet, adopted through a system-modelling approach in coupled social-ecological systems, it often reinforces a functionalist vision of the world as an interconnected whole, unable to engage with the multiplicity of people’s practices navigating change. I argue for sustained engagement with resilience and propose a socionatural approach to overcome its system-modelling limitations, thinking through the world’s entities as inherently social and natural. I discuss how socionatural resilience can be pluralized through assemblage ideas and reflect on the implications that an ontological politics of resilience poses for our conceptual framing and methodologies.

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“…With an estimated 250 km 3 /year, India is the world's largest groundwater user [9]. The lack of conjunctive management and infrastructure, but also insufficient wastewater treatment, is blamed for the country's growing urban groundwater problem [10,11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep Drilling for Groundwater in Bengaluru, India: A Case Study on the City’s Over-Exploited Hard-Rock Aquifer System

Kulkarni

Gaßmann

Kulkarni³

et al. 2021

Sustainability

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Over-exploitation of groundwater in India’s fastest-growing metropolis, Bengaluru, has resulted in wells being bored to unprecedented depths in a crystalline-rock aquifer. However, key questions about sustainability of this extraction process remain unaddressed due to the complexity of monitoring. Using primary surveys, this study looks at the spatio-temporal evolution of the wells on a city scale, finding that catchments with deficient water infrastructure have deeper wells. To maintain yields, well with depths >400 m are drilled, especially since 2000, leading to unsustainable groundwater extraction. Camera inspections in 54 wells at Electronic City in 2016 and 2017 revealed that water levels in the majority of the wells remained lower at depths <100 m, although some wells had deeper water levels at depths >250 m. Analysis of δ18O and δ2H signatures of groundwater samples at all depths followed the local meteoric water line indicating recent recharge, implying that drilling deeper only increases the borehole volume and does not tap into newer water sources. Water levels in deeper wells may stabilize at lower depths, are subject to high spatial variability, density of drilling, and high connectivity in upper zones. Given the interconnectedness between shallow and deeper aquifers, our research shows that increasing borewell depths could be a good indicator for falling aquifer water levels. This study fills an important gap in peri-urban, intermediate-scale aquifer conceptualizations across different land uses and provides further evidence for the difficulties of reliable groundwater monitoring in the over-exploited hard-rock aquifers of Bengaluru city.

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Groundwater resources in India: an arena for diverse competition

Cited by 14 publications

References 5 publications

Caring for Groundwater: How Care Can Expand and Transform Groundwater Governance

Caring for Groundwater: How Care Can Expand and Transform Groundwater Governance

An approach to pluralizing socionatural resilience through assemblages

Deep Drilling for Groundwater in Bengaluru, India: A Case Study on the City’s Over-Exploited Hard-Rock Aquifer System

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