Neer Vazhvu
Urban Water Intelligence
An open-source platform that makes India's urban water systems legible - reservoirs, groundwater, rivers, floods, and water bodies - city by city.
Cities
Each city is its own dashboard, built on whatever public data can carry an honest picture.
Live now
Chennai
CMWSSB|TN
Reservoir days-left, groundwater by ward, river health, flood risk, lost water bodies, and a satellite shoreline-change map. The origin city.
Open dashboardMadurai
MMC|TN
Vaigai-basin reservoir runway, groundwater, water bodies, and flood context for the temple city.
Open dashboardBengaluru
BWSSB|KA
Cauvery pumped 100 km uphill, ward groundwater stress, the tanker market, and lake restoration.
Open dashboardMumbai
BMC|MH
Seven BMC lakes, the Mithi river, and the parallel water systems behind the city's taps.
Open dashboardDelhi
DJB|DL
The Yamuna, 237 groundwater wells, 250 MCD wards, and the five-state paper trail behind the city's taps.
Open dashboardHyderabad
HMWSSB|TG
The Musi and its tank cascade, a 2,978-lake gazetted register, the utility's own tanker ledger, and a daily statement that publishes the draw as well as the storage.
Open dashboardKolkata
KMC|WB
Victorian sewers rated for 6 mm of rain an hour, KMC's own weekly waterlogging register, the wetlands that treat two-thirds of the city's sewage, and the Adi Ganga at zero dissolved oxygen.
Open dashboardGurugram
GMDA|HR
No river, no reservoir, and a dark zone since 2008 - plus GMDA's own ledger of every tanker load it sold, naming who bought it and at what price.
Open dashboardPune
PMC|MH
Four dams on the Mutha, a water budget where the leak is bigger than the shortfall, groundwater drilled to taluka, and the corporation's own record of every tanker it sent.
Open dashboardSurat
SMC|GJ
A live flood chain from Ukai to five khadis, six editions of river monitoring, and two CETPs against their own consent.
Open dashboardComing soon
Want your city, or a dataset, on this map sooner? Email contact@neervazhvu.org.
Why it exists
Neer Vazhvu was born from Chennai's water crisis. In 2019, the city reached "Day Zero" - its major reservoirs ran dry and taps across the metro fell silent. The question that followed was simple: why did almost no one see it coming, and where was the data that could have?
The data existed. It was just scattered - across research papers, government portals, citizen surveys, and satellite archives - with no one holding a single, joined-up view. India does not lack water data. It lacks an eagle-eye view of it, and the ability to drill from a whole city down to one neighbourhood, road, or locality.
That is the idea behind Neer Vazhvu: use AI to bring those scattered sources together into one coherent picture, then use that picture to surface what matters - the gaps, the contradictions, and the changes worth acting on. Collating the data is only the start; the goal is the gap analysis that turns it into something genuinely useful.
The stance is deliberate. Neer Vazhvu is infrastructure that enables accountability, not a publisher of verdicts. It surfaces public data honestly, dates every number, names the gaps it cannot fill, and keeps its code open. No scorecards, no grades, no hype - just the water systems made legible so anyone can ask better questions.
What we track
The capabilities below are the building blocks. Which ones a city has depends on its data - we turn a layer on only when the public record can support it.
Reservoir levels & days-left
Live storage against demand, and how much runway is left.
Groundwater by ward
Depth, stress, and extraction stitched to local geography.
River & canal water quality
Pollution loads and health along the streams that drain the city.
Flood risk & drainage
Hazard zones, historical events, and where the water goes.
Water bodies & restoration
Lakes and tanks, what was lost, and what is being revived.
Coastal shoreline change
Satellite-derived erosion and accretion along the coast.
AI daily briefings
Plain-language summaries in English and regional languages.
A home for peer-reviewed data
Neer Vazhvu is built alongside the people who produce the data - researchers, surveyors, civic groups, and institutions. Much of what you see here exists because data collaborators chose to share peer-reviewed work that would otherwise sit in a PDF or a one-off report.
The aim is a safe space for water data: shared carefully, attributed clearly, dated, and stewarded for the long term. Sharing a dataset here adds to a public commons without losing the credit or the context, so the next person can build on it instead of starting over.
Open source, open to collaboration
The code is open on GitHub, and the data is curated city by city. Partners, journalists, and officials who want to extend a city or contribute data are welcome to reach out at contact@neervazhvu.org. For a sense of the methodology depth, read the Chennai methodology.