Establishing sustainable water management in rural ecosystem

Overview

Ekatvam is social startup, being incubated under Digital Impact Square, working in the agri-water sector, with an aim to ensure participatory water management in rural ecosystems.

Context

Water supply and support in rural areas is more challenging due to the settlement locations mostly in environmentally fragile areas. Being an agrarian country, irrigation requires a hooping value of 78% of India’s total water reserve.

The scope of work included streamlining the service around this SAAS platform which requires a data centric approach towards establishing “sustainable water management” in rural ecosystem.

About the project

MIDAS (Model of Interactive Decision Assistance Simulator) is a water management web dashboard that allows the authorities to understand the water related conditions of villages. This web based portal consists of different data processing engines which allows a flexibility of it being used and the subsequent service model has been made keeping in mind the challenges faced in this arena.

For the MIDAS project I have helped the team with their MVP launch, gamification and developed Design System.

Challenges

In our country INDIA there is an increasing gap between water availability and its demand and is majorly linked to agricultural sector. This gives rise to a dire need to bridge the gap between the two and build resilience in the community and create water sustainability in crisis months. But currently managing water is time consuming, because of various challenges as mentioned below.

Solution

Addressing these issues, a technology enabled water governance tool MIDAS (Model of Interactive Decision Assistance Simulator) was developed by Ekatvam. 

In this stage, we started with understanding the business context, goals, target audience and constraints. To help the business and understand the problem space better, I started studying the research documents shared from the client, websites of government initiatives in the similar space and went across the competitors website. These studies helped a lot as it was the first point of contact around the topic and provided a baseline to connect with users for validating the insights.

Research

The research phase of this project was quite extensive and dynamic as I had  to spent 12 days visiting 8 villages spread across 3 Indian states, talking to over 100 farmers.

Research goals

• To deep dive into user’s challenges and how better we can solve them
• To understand the complete rural landscape with its nuances such as importance of community gathering, identify villagers for implementing advisory and the outlooks towards water management plans.

Research insights

Defined two key user groups involved at different levels, module of the product and made a list of some of the probable features we would like to incorporate in the first phase of MIDAS. 

And finally comes the most challenging part of the project was to create the Information architecture. As we had no clear understanding of what and how the information to be presented in UI. To solve this issue we conducted an workshop with Program Managers, Village development officer & Gram panchayat to map out how we can group the data points logically which would be helpful for users to navigate.

There had been multiple iterations in the IA as we got matured with the field operations team getting ideas of what actually needs to be presented in the tool. Initially there have been three categories under which the contents of the dashboard were divided: Home, Reports and Planning

Information architecture

Design

The wireframes were accompanied by initial level validations, trying to figure out content divisions from my notes and detailing out screens and layout to verify with stakeholder and water expert mentors.

First version of the screens

Typography

When it comes to rual projects, based on the research Inter was one of the popular choice due to its multiple variant types and accessible with different regional languages.

Components

Visuals

Business impact

• 20% more water saving with community meetings quarterly
• More than 20+ water plan creation monthly
• 10+ new villages onboarded per quarter

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