Abstract
Despite global efforts, many communities fail to deliver water sustainability due to lack of context-sensitive solutions, community awareness, stakeholder coordination, and reliable ground-level data. To combat this, this study proposes a geo-enabled, participatory, digital governance platform—“Mera Gaon Hamara Jal”—for decentralised water management through empowered multi stakeholders. It integrates a multi-level, multi-stakeholder decision module (MMDM) that utilises 50 water sustainability indicators to perform evidence-based diagnostics. The module operationalises water security as a composite outcome, derived from two complementary dimensions—water poverty, which captures multidimensional deprivation across resources, access, use, capacity, and environment, and water quality, which reflects the physicochemical and microbial integrity of drinking-water sources. It uniquely integrates localised indicator development approaches, heterogeneous data collection approaches and data driven decision models to derive threshold-based risk classification, index computation, and composite risk scoring. Validated across ten rural communities (1,039 households), Alappad emerged as the highest-risk cluster (~ 37% risk). The platform identified spatial and thematic vulnerabilities, mapped hotspots, and enabled real-time decisions, context specific intervention, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and actionable strategies for water sustainability, contributing to advancing SDG 6.
Data availability
The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy and community consent restrictions, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors express their immense gratitude to Sri. Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, Chancellor of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, who has guided and provided funding to them for developing the Mera Gaon Hamara Jal platform. The authors would like to heartfully thank all the colleagues who have directly and indirectly contributed to the development and testing of the platform – Mrs. Aishwarya, Ms. Maya, Mrs. Amrita Jayakumar, Dr. Varsha Prem, Mrs. Namitha, Mrs. Krishnendu, Mr. Renjith Mohan, Ms. Pooja, Mr. Amritesh, Ms. Soumya K, Mr. Pratapachandran, Dr. Sani Satheesh, Mr. Anandu, Mr. Mahesh, and Mr. Balmukund Singh. The authors’ gratitude extends to all the coordinators working in rural communities in various Indian states for providing all the necessary support to conduct the study.
Funding
Open access funding provided by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. This research was supported by the E4LIFE International Ph.D. Fellowship Program offered by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
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R.A.S., K.N., H.C.E., A.S., and V.A. conceptualized the study, developed the methodology, and carried out data analysis, field implementation, and validation. H.C.E. and R.G. contributed to data visualization. M.V.R. supervised the research, guided the platform architecture, conceptualized the study, and led the manuscript development. All authors contributed to the interpretation of results and reviewed the manuscript.
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Reshma, A.S., Nandanan, K., Ekkirala, H.C. et al. Unravelling water sustainability: a decentralised, data-driven model for water governance.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-39927-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-39927-0
Keywords
- Water sustainability
- SDG 6
- Community empowerment
- Geo-enabled
- Policy recommendation
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