प्रवाह
Pravaha
The water it drinks — and the air it breathes.
The first public instrument for India’s water and air.
Scroll7 chapters · 5 minutes
The Crisis

India is running out of water. And air.

Two flows, one collapse — measured, dated, undeniable.

Groundwater ▼ Falling
200020122024
Direction of travel · sourced indicators below
Air Quality Index ▲ Rising
200020122024
Direction of travel · sourced indicators below
0M+
People facing high-to-extreme water stress
NITI Aayog · Composite Water Management Index
0 / 100
Of the world's 100 most polluted cities are in India
IQAir World Air Quality Report, 2024
0M
Deaths a year linked to air pollution
The Lancet Planetary Health
The Blindness

You can't fix what you can't see.

India's monitoring is sparse, slow, and read by hand. Between the few sensors lies most of the country — unmeasured.

Everything dark is unmeasured
25,437
groundwater observation wells for the whole of India
Central Ground Water Board
558
continuous air-quality monitors for 1.4 billion people
CREA · Tracing the Hazy Air, 2025
4× / yr
how often most of those wells are read — by hand
CGWB manual monitoring cadence
The Reveal

What India could never see. Now seen.

POS
Move across India  —  water, and air
Right now · India

Three instruments. Three honest layers.

Air from the Central Pollution Control Board, hourly. Water stored from the Central Water Commission, daily. Tap-reach from the Jal Jeevan Mission, daily. Three feeds on a public cron — every claim sourced, every gap honest.

Air CPCB · hourly · data.gov.in
Loading…
Each card is one CPCB station — the lead reading per city. AQI is computed via the CPCB national PM2.5 sub-index. "Stale" means the station has not transmitted in six or more hours. Cities marked "honest gap" had no station report in this fetch.
Water stored CWC · daily (scheduled) · data.gov.in
Loading…
Each card is one major reservoir. Percentage = current live storage ÷ live capacity at FRL. Critical (<10%) · Low (10–30%) · Moderate (30–60%) · Good (60–90%) · Full (>90%).
Tap reach JJM · DDWS / Jal Shakti · daily (scheduled)
Loading…
National rollups computed from district-level rows. State bars show coverage % on the headline household metric — the same denominator a Cabinet review uses. ₹67,000 cr of promise, measured against the ground.
The Third Flow

The carbon India burns — in India's own code.

Not Europe's framework borrowed and bolted on. India's own grid, India's own factors, India's own measure of what is fair.

India's per-capita CO₂ — against the world's 4.7 t. Less than half.
India's total fossil CO₂ — about 8% of the entire world's
India's grid emission factor — and falling, as renewables grow
“Measure carbon in India's own terms — where a village lighting up for the first time weighs as much as a tonne traded on a European exchange.” The case for sovereign, India-context carbon accounting — grounded in CEEW, CSEP & MoEFCC research
One System

The water you pump is the carbon you burn.

Water, air and carbon are not three problems. They are one system — and the clearest proof runs straight through India's fields.

India #1
No nation on earth draws down its groundwater harder.
CGWB · NASA GRACE
of India's electricity goes to agricultural pumping — mostly lifting groundwater to the surface.
India's single largest source of irrigation-energy emissions — about 32% of the entire planet's.
Save the water, and you save the carbon of lifting it. One intervention. Two flows healed.
The Strategy

National in vision.
Beginning where the gap is widest.

Pravaha covers India. We start where three signals converge — government has named the crisis with budget, citizens already feel it, and the data exists to be honest.

Where the money flows
Government has identified the crisis
₹67,000 cr Jal Jeevan Mission · ₹16,539 cr NCAP · ₹6,000 cr Atal Bhujal Yojana — budget lines that name the problem at scale.
Where the crisis lives
Citizens already see it
UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Haryana flagged worst by NITI's CWMI. 74 of the world's 100 most polluted cities sit in India — most along the Indo-Gangetic plain.
Where the data sees
Honesty becomes possible
CGWB wells · Sentinel-1 InSAR · GRACE-FO · CPCB monitors. Clearest where alluvial geography lets satellites measure ground motion to the millimetre.
Phase 1 priority states
The first instrument — भूजल दर्पण Bhujal Darpan · Lucknow ↓
भूजल दर्पण
Bhujal Darpan · The Groundwater Mirror · Lucknow

The water beneath Lucknow is leaving.

For the first time, you can watch it go.

A cross-section of the ground · Azad Nagar, Lucknow

A decade, disappearing.

SURFACE 2014 — where the water was 2014 · 80 ft
Depth to water
80 ft
Lost since 2014
0 m
49 m
beneath Azad Nagar, Lucknow — gone in a decade.
One neighbourhood · not a city average · c. 2014–2024 · NGT proceedings · Mongabay India
How we know

Three instruments. One truth.

01 · The Water Table
≈49 m
The water table, fallen in a single decade.
CGWB observation wells · NAQUIM 2021
02 · The Ground Itself
>36 mm/yr
Charbagh and Indira Nagar are sinking as the water drains.
Sentinel-1 InSAR · More et al. 2025
03 · The Whole District Stale · 2003–2012
−1.46 cm/yr
Lucknow's groundwater storage trend. ±0.74. Shown because honesty about staleness is the point.
Singh et al. 2019 · GRACE 2003–2012 · GRACE-FO 2014–2024 refresh queued
The decade, in motion

Not a number. A trajectory.

Lucknow · depth to water (ft)
What it cannot see

An honest instrument shows
you its blind spots.

01Wells are read by hand — four times a year, not live.
02Satellites see the district — not your street.
03This decade's fall is one neighbourhood — not all of Lucknow.
The record

Seen. Not stopped.

2021
The aquifers beneath Lucknow were mapped. Block-wise recharge plans were drawn.
May 2024
The Green Tribunal: the city's rainwater schemes exist "only on paper." They had "failed miserably."
2025
Ordered — map Lucknow's surviving ponds in six weeks. The groundwater dip, "alarming."
A second mirror

The aquifer can come back.

Central Delhi · 2014–2018
Sinking, before regulation reached the ground.
Central Delhi · by 2023
Still sinking — but at half the rate. Regulation worked.
Dwarka · recent
The ground is rising again.

Lucknow shows the loss. Delhi shows it can be reversed. The mirror works in both directions.

Ask the instrument

The mirror answers — in your words.

Ask in English or हिंदी. Every answer is drawn only from sourced records — and where there is no sourced data yet, it says so.

AI Interventions

Twelve places where AI can
step into India's water system.

From district groundwater to national river basins — each intervention addresses a documented gap. Every one is grounded in existing government data and published science.

01
Corporate Water-Stewardship Platform
Maps each facility's water footprint across its supply basin. Predicts shortage risk 6 months ahead. Generates audit-grade disclosures for CDP Water and TNFD-water.
IndustryWater
02
National Watershed Digital Twin
A live decision engine for India's six river basins. Simulates policy interventions — cropping changes, MAR programmes — and scores each by ₹/m³ recharged or saved.
GovernmentWater
03
District Waterborne Disease Surveillance
Fuses ASHA reports, wastewater epidemiology and source maps. Detects waterborne disease clusters 2–4 weeks before clinical manifestation and auto-attributes the source.
GovernmentWater + Health
04
Vernacular Crop Water Advisory
A daily voice call in the farmer's own language with irrigation timing, soil moisture, ET₀ and weather risk. Agriculture is 83% of India's freshwater use — a 10% efficiency gain equals 56 BCM saved per year.
CommunityWater
05
Wastewater Treatment Plant Optimization
Real-time inflow prediction feeds chemical-dosing optimization and predictive maintenance. Sold as an analytics overlay on existing SCADA — no plant retrofit required.
IndustryWater
06
Power-Sector Water Risk Forecasting
Per-plant cooling-water availability 6 months ahead using basin water balance modelling. Thermal power is India's single largest industrial water user — 88 BCM/yr.
IndustryWater
07
Reservoir Operation Optimization
Multi-reservoir cascade optimization that simultaneously balances power, irrigation and flood control under current climate hydrology — not the historic averages the original rule curves were designed for.
GovernmentWater
08
Predictive Drought Intelligence
District-level drought prediction 3–6 months out. Models livelihood and migration impact. Recommends pre-emptive interventions: MGNREGA acceleration, fodder procurement, tanker positioning.
GovernmentCommunity
09
Industrial ZLD Cluster Intelligence
Optimizes the recycle-reuse loop inside shared effluent treatment plants. Predicts membrane fouling. Attributes contamination across shared CETPs. Turns ZLD compliance into competitive advantage.
IndustryGovernment
10
River Pollution Source Attribution
Fuses Sentinel-2 satellite, in-river IoT and hydrodynamic flow models. Traces a pollution event back to the responsible discharge source within hours. Generates enforcement-ready evidence packages.
GovernmentWater
11
Himalayan Glacier & Snowmelt Forecasting
Seasonal snowmelt timing and volume 3–6 months ahead for the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra. Critical input for reservoir management, irrigation planning and hydropower scheduling downstream.
GovernmentWater + Climate
12
AI-Validated Groundwater Clearances
When a new factory applies for groundwater extraction clearance, AI runs a 10-year aquifer drawdown simulation. Output: approve / reject / conditional, with quantified impact on neighbouring wells.
GovernmentWater
The Atlas

Where the mirror goes next.

Shipped Next Queued Parked
Every city added at the same rigor: every number sourced, every period and cadence visible, every last-verified date shown.
Open Platform

Built open.
For everyone who depends on water.

The data is public. The models are transparent. The methodology is cited. Pravaha is built to be held to account.

🏛️

For government officers

District-level data for your region. What's happening in your aquifer, what interventions other states have deployed, and what the numbers say before your next policy decision.

🏢

For corporate & CSR teams

Basin-level water risk mapped to your facilities. Science-backed replenishment frameworks aligned to CDP Water Security and the emerging TNFD water standard.

🌿

For researchers & environmentalists

Every claim sourced, every period shown, every cadence honest. Trend analysis, aquifer models, and river attribution open for scrutiny, replication, and collaboration.

🎓

For students & citizens

Real numbers. Plain language. District-level data that makes India's water emergency tangible — not abstract. The crisis nearest you, legible to anyone.

Open Source · CC BY 4.0 · All data cited
The evidence

Every figure. Every source.

No claim without a citation. This ledger is generated straight from the data spine — period, cadence, confidence and last-verified, for every hand-verified record the instrument shows. The three live feeds carry their own source-and-freshness badges above.

Two provenance classes: hand-verified records — primary documents and peer-reviewed studies, listed in this ledger — and cron-fetched feeds, which carry their own source-and-freshness badges in the Now section above.