Community Resilience through Geospatial (An Esri India and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Initiative)

Mera Gaav, Hamara Jal (“My Village, Our Water”) initiative was jointly launched by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s UNESCO Chair on Experiential learning and ESRI, India in March 2022 and aims to bring a transformational change by altering the perception of society to view water as a community resource rather than as a personal resource. 

Through this initiative, communities are trained and empowered to map & monitor the water resources, map water quality, practices prevalent in the community and livelihood activities. Extensive crowd-sourced data is harnessed to derive water sustainability challenges in communities quantitatively and qualitatively. The data collected through Amrita’s “Empower Community App” is ingested into ESRI’s ArcGIS platform which has increased ease and accessibility to water-related information at the household level while at the same time facilitating assessment of climatic changes and anthropogenic activities from communities perspective for devising interventions and policies for sustainable water resource management. 

Mera Gaav,Hamaara Jal, augments Amrita’s Department of Science and Technology funded Community COVID Resilience Resource Centers (CCRRC) currently implemented across 14 communities in selected states in India. These 14 communities act as the HUB which connect to 200 spokes with a primary aim to strengthen Science Technology and Innovation (STI) based resilience capacities and capabilities of the communities for improved resilience and livelihood systems on the themes of Education, Water, Skill Base, Agriculture, and Health. 

Promoting integration of geospatial information into capacity-building initiatives, this project fosters a shared future through a geographic approach for inclusivity, equitability and sustainability to ensure that “no one is left behind”.