While water sector actors from samaaj, sarkaar and bazaar have been working for decades on programmes that address water security issues in the country, making a sustainable impact at scale has continued to be a challenge.
What can be done to enhance the impact of programmes at scale? Can we learn from other sectors such as health and education? Can digital technology prove to be a useful tool for enhancing participation and help in capacity building at a larger scale by bringing all on a common platform?
Representatives from the samaaj, sarkar and bazaar had got together a year back on July 2019 in New Delhi to contemplate these issues on the common forwater platform and to think of innovative means through which this could be achieved.
What has been the progress year after? What have been the experiences and insights from the engagements? Have these processes tried to bring about a shift in policies, processes and discourses and build stronger bonds between samaaj, sarkar and bazaar towards the common goal of water awareness and management?
An online meeting was held in September 2020 where all the stakeholders involved discussed their experiences and their ideas on taking the movement forward.
Efforts made by a few states on water management and the relevance of capacity building for the communities involved were highlighted in the presentations made by government personnel.
The government had thus gradually started making efforts at building a cadre of people who could work at the village level institutions through capacity building efforts. Collaborations between catalysts like NGOs/CSOs/Practitioners, community and government institutions for building a common platform for training and capacity building through digital technologies was crucial in this process.
Capacity building efforts, producing content in local language with the help of partner organisations and reaching out at scale to enhance skills of frontline workers located in remote areas through training and capacity building by using digital technology were crucial in the process.
While capacity building through digital technology holds the promise of empowering individuals with knowledge, it continues to be constrained by lack of access to quality reference material and adequate and timely data.
It is thus necessary to:
The advantages of using digital technologies for involving communities from different regions in undertaking leadership roles and increasing local ownership of water and its management in programmes such as the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) and Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABHY) were highlighted.
The importance of:
The role of digital technology can be extended beyond water management to include other connected domains such as agriculture, revival of community lands and pastures, drinking water, health and water quality issues.
The role of digital technology to improve outreach and communication, increase awareness and build capacities of grassroot frontline workers for addressing state controlled power structures that prevented them from accessing common property resources such as community lands and pastures was highlighted.
Some positive examples from the groundlevel were shared that included:
Organisations such as UNICEF, Advanced Centre for Water Resources Development and Management (ACWADAM), People's Science Institute (PSI), Community Led Landscape Management Project (CLLMP) shared their experiences on the use of digital technologies to conduct online trainings on WASH, JJM and water management at scale, and the learnings and outcomes from the process.
Digital technology has a great potential in making knowledge accessible to all and can be greatly useful in scaling up efforts made at the ground level. It can aid in better communication and connectivity by breaking down silos and making connections between stakeholders at different levels, be them grassroot level communities, government and non governmental organisations. It can reach the last mile users and empower the disempowered with knowledge and the confidence to use it.
Thus women and the marginalised in remote, inaccessible areas can also be reached through digital technology, and empowered with information and the confidence to use this information.
It can help in generating data on a common platform that can feed into efforts to improve the efforts further and lead to generation of rich training material accessible to all.
While some limitations remain in terms of issues related to connectivity, comfort level of stakeholders in interacting virtually, the lack of face to face interactions, many of these can get better as we see more and more improvements in technology.
And shifts have been happening for everyone to see!
These have started right from
Another shift has been in the
One of the other important shifts has been
The potential of digital technologies for further learning, training, capacity building, empowering people and strengthening programmes and institutions are promising. Equally important are the shifts that technology can bring about by breaking barriers, boundaries, hierarchies, thus enabling the voices of the last mile to be represented in the discourses at the policy level.