Water is probably the thing we take most for granted, and it is going to become one of the defining issues of our times. As climate change worsens, we are going to see more erratic monsoon patterns, and that will only exacerbate an already difficult problem.

A lot of India is already under water stress. In places like Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi, we are simply extracting more groundwater every year than is being replenished. And the dependence is massive, with over 60% of our irrigation coming from groundwater, in a country where more than 40% of people still work in agriculture.

It is easy to look at all this and expect the government to fix it. But water is something all of us use every day without thinking about it, which makes it everyone’s problem to work on. And a lot of people already are, across governments, startups, nonprofits, and communities.

But I think at some level this is also an awareness and data problem. Before figuring out the solutions, we need to know how good, bad, or ugly the situation actually is, and today we largely don’t. Most borewells in the country don’t even have meters on them. Which is why the PM’s recent message on better water data, and using AI and other technologies to collect and make sense of it, is an important one.

Water is also a big theme for us at Rainmatter Foundation and Rainmatter. We are already supporting several organisations and startups doing a variety of things in this space, including Kritsnam, FluxGen, Boson White Water, Solinas Integrity, Wattr, GreenvironmentAI, and Biome.

If you are building something meaningful around water, do reach out to us. We’d be happy to support🙂

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