Digital Innovation in Water Scarcity in Coimbatore, India

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The project is designed to be a rapid, reflexive intervention in the ongoing, and worsening, water crisis in Coimbatore in Southern India. The project will build the considerable potential of digital humanities to generate robust and trusted data sets and to design meaningful, resonant visualisations that will reframe and subvert cycles of water over-exploitation and depletion. The depletion of the region's water resources is abundantly documented: river basins are shrinking, droughts increasing, water tables lowering and rivers are being transformed from perennial to monsoonal as tributary aquifers and rivers vanish. However, there is a paucity of trusted quantitative data that connects water to the localities faced with an acute and immediate resource crisis. Pan-regional or national aggregate data is dominant in the crisis discourse and, while significant, these figures have little relationship with quotidian patterns of local water use. There is an urgent need to challenge the disjunctures created between locality and information, and between water and land, created by colonial and post-1947 practises of cartography, governance and water exploitation. This project will draw on the concepts and methods of spatial humanities - georeferencing, entity recognition and corpus linguistics methods - to restore meaningful associations between landscape, people and water. Text mining and geotagging can create a unique data base relating to the water resources of the Coimbatore region. Digital Humanities methods are uniquely capable of drawing data, at great speed, from a wide-range of materials (for example, revenue statistics, cartographies, hydrology interventions, poetry, geology, agrarian history, art, advertising, industrial expropriation, medical topography and contemporary oral testimonies) in order to create data sets that can radically re-frame the water crisis and create innovative, integrated strategies of conservation. The project will assemble a range of qualitative and quantitative data relating to water bodies in Coimbatore: volume, surface area, distribution in urban, semi-urban and rural, quantification and naming of dry and perennial water resources (canals, tanks, lakes and rivers). This data will be gathered from digitised materials drawn from across the world and returned to Coimbatore.The project partners include journalists, activists and scholars. Their participation allows both the formulation, the development and the outputs of the project to be embedded within ongoing conservation strategies and debates in the region (see Pathways to Impact). Third sector partners include five local NGOs engaged in activist work in Coimbatore: Kovai Kolangal Paathukaappu Amaippu, Sirithuli, Siruvani Vizhudhugal, Osai and Kurichi Kulam. These NGOs undertake a range of information, engagement and conservation work and have made explicit their interest in collaborating on the proposed project. Other participants include scholars, writers and academics working on water histories and conservation in Southern India.Digital data can provide the foundations and tools to create new, robust practises of water conservation only if it has credibility and resonance with a number of stakeholders: communities, activists, local, regional and national officials with jurisdiction over water. Digitised media and platforms will be used to return water to the localities of Coimbatore through creative visualisations - animations, imaginative counter-mapping and narratives - that are based on historical, literary, linguistic and cultural understandings of the Coimbatore region. These data visualisations will be framed and determined by local collaborations and interactions. Project collaborations will ensure that the outcomes of the project are meaningful resources and interventions that can be used to re-frame and re-orientate struggles for water conservation, management and access in Coimbatore.