1. MISMANAGEMENT OF RIVERS

Rivers, the lifeline of our economy and wildlife are drying up and becoming too polluted. Drought and floods are becoming frequent and more intense. Addressing these challenges involves making sound data-driven and evidence-based decisions in the context of a river basin.

Making data-driven and evidence-based decisions requires a database of river information that integrates data housed and maintained by multiple agencies, including scientific agencies at the international level. The current setup has no such databases in place or has databases that are woefully inadequate for the task at hand and are perhaps bordering on triviality.

As a result, citizens and decision-makers are misinformed. Misinformation has fostered irrational justification for dams, execution of needless water infrastructure projects and inequitable distribution of precious water resulting in mismanagement of rivers. Mismanagement is endangering rivers and threatening water security of humans and wildlife alike.

2. RIVER BASIN INFORMATION SYSTEM

One way for concerned citizens to address mismanagement of rivers and drive change is to have facts on hand. Facts, in this case are data on river flows, dams storage levels, dam water utilization, distribution of river water, river water quality, basin rainfall trends and the various pressures the rivers face like quarrying, industrial pollution, sewage, sand mining and so forth, at the river basin level.

To that end, we intend to spearhead a bottom-up citizen initiative to build a sensible and closer to reality River Basin Information System, by sourcing and analysing data from government, independent scientific studies, media, google earth engine, and ground-truthing for the rivers of Karnataka. We also intend to present this data and information, in an easily understandable format to assist in river conservation.