Back to resources

Distributing the Ability to Solve

Water | Societal Thinking | Sep 29, 2020

Water is the key sector when it comes to climate change related challenges. It is ever changing and complex, with equity, quality and quantity issues rising routinely. Usually, water issues have to be dealt with locally, in context. For example, even if you planned to bring water from a faraway river to a city, it is the city planners who need to engage with how equitably that new water will be used; they will have to design to carry away excess flow and sewage and so on.

For that, you need local talent. You need communities to come together along with trained professionals and local leaders to understand how THEIR water behaves, both above and below the ground. They must be able to find granular solutions that accommodate upstream and downstream solutions created by others. For example, to manage groundwater sustainably in one panchayat, you need to find out if you are sharing an aquifer with another panchayat, and co-create an equitable system.

This means that we cannot push for one size fits all solutions. Instead, we must design capacity building in order to distribute the ability to solve. A technology backbone, which is unified but not uniform, which allows local, contextual problem solving at scale is the need of the hour. Our teams at Societal Platform.org and Arghyam are beginning to build just such an open, digital, shared public infrastructure.

Nurturing community capacity and resilience in the face of climate change is critical. In the water sector, for life and livelihoods, it is especially so.

[Written for the September 2020 issue of the ICC Newsletter]

More like this

Water

Stanford Social Innovation Review: Case Study: ARGHYAM

Arghyam, a grantmaking foundation, takes a data driven approach to helping transform India’s water and sanitation systems. View PDF
Aug 1, 2017 | Case Study

Water

The Importance Of Water Data With Peter Gleick & Rohini Nilekani | Dalberg

In the first episode, our guests Peter Gleick from Pacific Institute and Rohini Nilekani from Arghyam, join us to talk about the role and importance of water data and the trends they have observed in the sector through decades of practice. They will also discuss the challenges and gaps in the water data ecosystem and […]
Oct 22, 2021 |

Water

Arghyam : Presentation to Planning Commission Feb 2007

Arghyam : Presentation to Planning Commission Feb 2007. View PDF
Feb 1, 2007 | Presentation

Water  |  Civil Society

IIHS-UC Berkeley Conference | Building Urban Infrastructure in India

The “urban” economy plays an increasingly vital role in India’s economic development. The joint two day conference hosted by IIHS and the University of California, Berkeley on 26th and 27th March, 2013, brought together leading scholars from India and globally to discuss the many critical questions relating to the effective and equitable functioning of the […]
Mar 26, 2013 |