Introduction
The second edition of Urban Waters Forum workshop 2023 was conducted on the 15th and 16th of March 2023 and brought together water practitioners from across the country for knowledge sharing, including new developments in their respective domains of work. There were around 60+ members, who included academicians, lake group members, water professionals and government officials, and representatives from various states like Maharashtra, Kerala, Gujarat, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Karnataka.
The first day of the workshop had field visits to see the integration of shallow aquifers into water supply systems, and to understand the challenges of peri-urban town water management. The team visited:
- Open wells revived in Hunasamaranahalli TMC
- Open well in Devanahalli, located adjacent to the SihiNeer Kere (lake)
- Devanahalli Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant
The purpose was to show how local community action has driven local water resource management.
A plenary session was organized to discuss and set the context for ‘Framing the challenges of water management for the town’, curated by three speakers – Dr Jagdish Krishnaswamy (IIHS), Mr Vishwanath Srikantaiah (Biome Environmental Trust) and Dr Himanshu Kulkarni (ACWADAM) – who talked about the social, ecological, economic and institutional perspectives of water management.
On the second day, urban water practitioners spoke about their work on local water resource management. The themes varied from ‘shallow aquifer in the city’, to ‘used water and its management’ and ‘the city & the monsoon experience’. Each of the presenters and participants in the workshop came in with unique experiences, talked about the praxis, and presented the themes in various contexts. The forum was a space for the team to reflect, enquire, question, and informally discuss the challenges and opportunities that they experience in the field.
These interactions among practitioners were intended to create pathways for potential solutions and future collaborations.
The need for an Urban Waters Forum
Supported by Wipro Foundation in their quest to be more responsible corporate citizens, and to address the challenges of collective stewardship of our common urban water resources, especially our groundwater aquifers and local lakes, Biome had put together bengaluru.urbanwaters.in, with the most important and actionable resources of our ongoing learnings. This website was intended to serve as a community resource for all to learn from and share.
This has now expanded to become www.urbanwaters.in, a webspace that has evolved into an ongoing comprehensive knowledge base for the urban waterscape. The webspace seeks to inform, guide, and provide any and all resources to all of us to make us water literate, solve our individual or community water problems and act responsibly by taking care of our common urban water resources. It seeks to help make us a part of the solution rather than being a part of the problem.
With Wipro’s support, Biome organised the first Urban Waters Forum workshop in March 2019. The success of this meeting prompted the thought of a regular annual event, which couldn’t be organised in the following three years because of the pandemic. At this year’s meeting, the idea of the forum was discussed again.
During the concluding session of this year’s workshop, Dr Himanshu Kulkarni put forth pertinent questions to the team and brainstormed ideas around what role this Forum will play, what/how each can contribute to its richness, and how this can feed into the institutional and governance space.
It is envisioned that the Urban Waters Forum will be a space for the shared interests of various individuals and organizations working in the water sector, to leverage their combined strengths of citizen engagement, hydrogeology expertise, and participation-oriented digital tools, with the intent of trying to understand how to manage the urban water resources collectively. This Forum hopes to bring together the knowledge, experience, and practice of many individuals, communities, practitioners, citizen activists, and researchers.
Here is the detailed report of the Urban Waters Forum workshop, 2023.
