Information Graphics and Visualisations

As a run up to World Water Day 2014, India Water Portal conducted a Grassroots Comics workshop with Field Facilitators, Barefoot Engineers and other field workers of the Dhara Vikas Programme.

Every school needs good students and students need good sanitation. According to India Sanitation Portal, access to sanitary toilets not only ensures dignity of the individual but also positively impacts health, well-being and productivity, reduces drop-out rates and encourages regular attendance in schools.

Prabha, 23 years old lives in Mankapur village in Uttar Pradesh. She recently delivered a baby boy at home. Prabha has never used a toilet in her life. Every day of her pregnancy, she woke up before dawn, carried a mug of water and went 1.2 km away in the fields to defecate.

Both rural and urban India are faced with water problems. People do not have access to good quality, safe drinking water. The source for most drinking water is either rivers or underground aquifers (wells). Since water can dissolve just about anything that it comes into contact with long enough, often the groundwater we get isn’t pure.

India waterportal’s data finder has over 300 datasets. A non-data or non-analytics person can feel overwhelmed trying to pull out important information and understand it.  A data story will help do just that.

IWP has over 200 sets of water data online. Of this, we have converted around 16 to an Excel format and will be adding more in the coming weeks for you to download. Use our Data Finder, a search tool for finding water data online, to search for this information. 

A stepwell or ‘bawdi’ or ‘baori’, is exactly what the name suggests – a well with steps that lead down to the water. About 1000 years ago, a 13-storey deep water reservoir boasting 3500 steps was built to ensure that people in the arid Abhaneri region of Rajasthan had a dependable water source.

At the start of the 20th century, India had nearly 40,000 tigers. That number came down to a mere 1827 in 1972. It took us just 75 years to almost wipe out an entire species!

But we woke up in the nick of time, launched ‘Project Tiger’, spent colossal amounts of money and energy and managed to double this number to 3642 by 2002.

There is a palpable sense of a looming water crisis in India. Conflicts across competing users and uses are on the rise. In the irrigation sector, it is widely felt that “paucity of resources and poor performance of existing major and medium irrigation systems are the two main problems”(1).