Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Water Budgeting and
Construction of Future
Scenarios for Prediction and
Management of Ground Water
under Stressed Condition
Faisal K. Zaidi, Benoît Dewandel
1
,
Jean-Marie Gandolfi
1
and Shakeel Ahmed
Indo-French Centre for Groundwater Research, National
Geophysical Research Institute, Uppal Road, Hyderabad-500007, India
1
Water Division, Resource Assessment, Discontinuous Aquifers Unit
BRGM, France
INTRODUCTION
The Indo-French Centre for Groundwater Research (IFCGR) has carried out
intensive research for understanding the structure and functioning of the
hard rock aquifers in granitic area by taking a small watershed at
Maheshwaram, RR Dist of Andhra Pradesh and has developed a number of
specific techniques during five years for aquifer characterization, groundwater
balance both global and discretized including the technique of the “Double
Water Table Fluctuation (DWTF)” (Maréchal et al., 2005), well suited for
arid and semi-arid areas to improve the groundwater resource management
in hard rock aquifers. This method has been implemented in the small pilot
watershed of 53 km² area, a representative of the Southern Indian catchment
in terms of overexploitation of the hard rock aquifers in semi-arid climate,
cropping pattern, rural socio-economic context, etc. Between June 2001 and
June 2004 three annual water budgets have been prepared. It is observed that
both water balances for a “bad” and “good” monsoon could more or less be
counterbalanced, the water balance is negative for a normal monsoon inducing
a depletion of the Water Table at about 1 m/year due to consecutive deficit
rainfall years. Due to this, in the long, medium, or short-term, drastic
groundwater problems will inexorably occur if any realistic solution is not
