Abstract Summary
Future planning in developing Indian cities is as dynamic as her rivers. Global South cities will become front-and-center during this century as they become crucibles of global trade & development. For my MSc. thesis, therefore, I wanted to study one aspect of this in my home country, India. Rather unexpected on the global stage, groundwater is a critically stressed resource in the fertile plains of the holy river Ganga as regions are rapidly extracting groundwater for agricultural & urbanization needs. Another trend to note in India is the nature of urbanization – agriculture is set to grow just as rapidly as urbanization in cities. One might expect a rural exodus into nearby cities as regions develop, but this model doesn’t hold everywhere. One example is the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, crucial to the global food trade as it produces critical crops for import & export. UP’s cities are growing in density while rural regions are simultaneously growing in their agricultural production. This has a direct impact on groundwater consumption since a growing city like Moradabad & its surrounding agriculture is 100% reliant on groundwater. The underground aquifer does not discriminate between rural & urban, thus groundwater overuse by one side equally impacts both sides when the resource runs dry. This dynamic now demands a new way of thinking about cities & rural areas – a reinvention of critical resource planning for cities. My research studies groundwater sustainability in the Ramganga river basin of northern India in partnership with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). This region experiences a trifecta of hydrological stressors from groundwater over-extraction, frequent flooding during wet seasons, and agricultural droughts during dry seasons. There is a growing body of interventions known as Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) which attempts to co-manage these concerns. One example is a technology known as Underground Transfer of Floods for Irrigation (UTFI) proposed by IWMI. The most common mode of UTFI is recharge ponds. A holistic approach encompassing rural and urban (R & U) to plan for the implementation of groundwater recharge structures is missing. Considering this, this work analyzes opportunities and barriers for UTFI’s scale-up in growing rural-urban regions of the Ramganga basin by unpacking rural-urban linkages. Through mixed methods of qualitative & quantitative, I propose a holistic R+U approach for land-use planning to incorporate recharge infrastructures and in so doing, identify rural & urban implementation zones like existing ponds and parks for mixed interventions. These recommendations are useful for planners, and specific spatial, community, institutional, and planning strategies are aimed at IWMI’s use when they work in India & similar groundwater-stressed regions globally.
