Significant populations in India have come to increasingly depend on groundwater for use in agriculture, domestic supplies, industry and other economic uses. However, this sudden and uncontrolled boom in groundwater development has resulted in water table declines, wells running dry and well failures, rising energy use and pumping costs, weakening drought protection, salinity ingress in coastal regions and health hazards due to arsenic, fluoride and other pollutants. These impacts are seriously threatening the long-term sustainability of the groundwater resources. For long-term sustainability of use of groundwater resources, artificial recharge of aquifers must always be followed simultaneously along with the source finding, exploration, prospecting, development and groundwater exploitation.
Due to diverse hydrological and hydro-geological conditions, availability of groundwater is not uniform in the country, especially in the hard rock terrain of central and southern India where groundwater occurs in cracks and crevices, fractures and faults, and is limited. Exploring and locating a potential source of underground good quality water, without a technology driven approach, is a challenging task. Conventional methods rely on expensive, time consuming, pseudoscientific 'water dowsing' resulting in 72 % chances ending up drilling a dry well and wastage of human and financial resources. Greenfield Eco Solutions Private Limited provides precision-driven, UAV and satellite-based, AI-enabled hydrological analyses for exploration, prospecting, targeting and managing groundwater resources with limited ground truth. We have achieved 90 % accuracy in alluvial and 75 % in hard-rock terrains for precise targeting of potable groundwater resources. Our technology is scalable and affordable for small and marginal farmers also. Currently we are operating in the States of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and intend to launch pan-India operations shortly.