Educating Stakeholders about the Need for Water Balance Using a Participatory Modeling Framework

Session F3: Modeling with Stakeholders: Old Problems, New Solutions

Groundwater resources in many villages of the developing countries have been undergoing rapid decline over last few decades due to their unsustainable large scale exploitation. One of the main reasons for such overexploitation is the inability of village communities to collectively visualize and understand clearly the long term implications of such overexploitation. There is hence an urgent need to create awareness among stakeholders about the unsustainable nature of such overexploitation and to facilitate sustainable usage. Spatio-temporal participatory modeling of their water management practices can help greatly in promoting such awareness among village communities. These modeling tools can then be used by these stakeholders to analyze various future scenarios and plan their actions in an informed way. In this paper, a participatory modeling framework for carrying out water balance studies at village level is proposed and is demonstrated using case study of a South Indian village. Stakeholders analyzed their past actions and future plans using simulations. Classes needed for simulation and rules for their behaviour, such as what influences the decision of a farmer to sow a crop or to sink a well, were gathered through discussions with knowledgeable stakeholders. An open source Geographical Information System. 'Quantum GIS', extended using Python programming was used as the platform for carrying out and visually presenting these spatio-temporal simulations to the stakeholders.