About Ahmedabad Water Intelligence
An open-source water intelligence platform for Indian cities, built to make public data accessible and actionable.
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What we track for Ahmedabad
Ahmedabad is governed by Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, Water Project and Water Operations with civic services under Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (48 wards).
Water sources tracked daily
Reading this dashboard
How “Days of Water Left” Works
We compute three scenarios based on current reservoir storage, daily consumption, and inflow patterns:
What each page shows for Ahmedabad
Dashboard - a city that drinks a canal
84% of Ahmedabad's water comes down one canal. AMC's own source table, in its Budget 2026-27 (pp.63-64, in Gujarati), puts 1,550 of the 1,850 MLD it draws a day on three offtakes of the Narmada Main Canal, which carries water from Sardar Sarovar dam: 330 and 800 MLD at the canal's two head regulators for the Kotarpur plant, and 420 MLD on the Dholka branch for Jaspur. Another 200 MLD is Mahi water from Kadana dam, diverted at the Wanakbori weir into the Mahi canal and its Shedhi branch, and treated at Raska. The last 100 MLD comes from AMC's 555 borewells.
That is why the dashboard opens on a supply chain carried from far away rather than a reservoir countdown. The Sabarmati, the river the city was founded on, is not in AMC's source table at all, and the full river you see through the riverfront is held by the Vasna barrage and topped up from the same Narmada canal. Three treatment plants carry the city: Kotarpur (1,150 MLD), Jaspur (400) and Raska (200), 1,750 MLD in all, treating 1,700 MLD a day.
AMC's Water Project web page still shows an older table (2,100 and 1,535 MLD) that has not changed since early 2022. The dashboard reads the budget instead, because it is the corporation's only current statement of where its water comes from.
What AMC does not publish: measured losses and an entitlement
No measured loss figure.AMC's 2023-24 budget says connections are unmetered and the tap runs two hours a day, from 6 to 8 in the morning. Its 2024-25 and 2025-26 budgets promise a 5% cut in losses without stating what the losses are. So the dashboard carries no non-revenue water figure; we would rather show the gap than a guess.
No entitlement. Gujarat sanctions raw water to cities each year with a 25% band either side, under a 2007 resolution and its 2008 clarification. The quantity sanctioned for Ahmedabad is not in any public document we have found, which is also why this city has no allocation ledger.
Figures shown exactly as AMC printed them
The same budget gives the city's population as about 90 lakh on p.63 and 80 lakh on p.9, so the dashboard divides nothing by population. Its supply table gives 1,850 MLD drawn at the sources and 1,700 MLD treated, which are two different measures, and counts 555 borewells whose own sub-totals add up to 560. Each figure is shown as AMC printed it, not corrected to make the sums agree.
Why the sewage balance card is off
Other cities' dashboards compare sewage generated with sewage treated. For Ahmedabad both numbers are worked out rather than measured. AMC's budget and the state's affidavit to the National Green Tribunal give generation as 80% of the water supplied (in the state's words, “Calculated as per 80% of Water Supply”) and set the treated figure equal to it, so the gap between them is zero by method.
Measured figures point elsewhere. A 2022 outfall survey that the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) filed with the Tribunal measured 284.18 MLD of sewage bypassing a single pumping station near the Vasana-Narol bridge. A card showing a zero gap would present an assumption as a measurement, so it stays off until a measured generation figure is published.
Reservoirs - and why there is no days-of-water-left number
The dashboard carries three dams: Sardar Sarovar on the Narmada, Kadana on the Mahi and Dharoi on the Sabarmati. None of them is the city's own storage.Sardar Sarovar is a four-state project and Kadana an irrigation dam, and AMC's share of either is not published. Dharoi is the Sabarmati's own dam, upstream of the city, but the city has not received its releases since 1999. Dividing any of these reservoirs by the city's demand would credit Ahmedabad with water that belongs to farmers and to other states, so no days-left figure is computed.
What the dams do have is a good public record. The state's Narmada, Water Resources, Water Supply and Kalpsar Department publishes a dam report every day: level, storage, inflow and releases for each dam, and the Narmada Main Canal's flow at its head regulator. Each day's report is kept exactly as issued, back to 7 June 2019, so the history can be read back from that archive rather than starting the day we began collecting.
Each report is read with a built-in check. A row is accepted only if its own sums hold: gross storage must equal live plus dead storage, and the printed percentage must match. A misread column then fails loudly instead of writing a wrong number. The cards show live storage, the water above the lowest outlet; the department's own headline percentage is gross storage, and both are kept.
Two official capacities for the same dam
The Central Water Commission's weekly reservoir bulletin uses different live capacities from the state's (Kadana is 1.472 BCM in CWC's, 1,191.7 MCM in the state's). The two are never mixed: every number on the cards is the state department's.
Groundwater - the district hides the city
The groundwater map shows Ahmedabad district's ten talukas across five editions of the national groundwater assessment (IN-GRES, 2021-2022 to 2025-2026), drawn on IN-GRES's own unit boundaries. The measure is the stage of extraction: how much of the groundwater that refills each year is pumped out. We go below the district because the district figure says the opposite of the finding.
Ahmedabad district reads 79.14%, semi critical, in 2025-2026. Inside it, the Ahmedabad Urbanunit, which holds the city's wards, is over exploited at 128.85%: it draws more each year than the assessment counts as extractable. The ring around it, Ahmedabad City and Daskroi, is over exploited at 143.16%, and 82% of that ring's draw is irrigation. Six safe talukas to the west and south pull the district average down.
The Urban unit's jump is a relabelling, not a measurement
IN-GRES carved the Urban unit out of City and Daskroi in 2021-2022, so no earlier edition can be joined to it. Its extractable resource is 1,919.4 hectare-metres in each of the last three editions, but its extraction was filed entirely as industrial in the first two, as irrigation plus industrial in 2023-2024 (70.80%, semi critical), and with 1,606 hectare-metres of domestic use added from 2024-2025 (127.18%, then 128.85%). We quote the category in the latest edition and do not draw the series as a trend.
Two talukas cannot be assessed on extraction at all
Dholera and Dhandhuka are categorised ‘salinity’ in all five editions. CGWB does not assess saline aquifers on extraction, so they carry no percentage and are drawn grey rather than left off the map. Across the district, 74% of the assessed area is poor-quality groundwater. Volumes on the page leave the saline tract out, as CGWB publishes them; the portal's own total includes it and would more than double the district's extraction.
The dots on the map are 139 telemetry wells: 101 run by Gujarat's Surface Water and Ground Water Department and 38 by the Central Ground Water Board, read every six hours on the National Water Data Portal and shown as monthly means. 24 of them stand in the Ahmedabad Urban unit. Each well is placed by its coordinates, not by the district it is tagged to, because the tags follow old boundaries: some wells tagged Ahmedabad stand in Botad, and wells tagged Surendranagar and Sabarkantha stand inside Ahmedabad's talukas.
Why there is no ward-by-ward depth map
Shallow and deep piezometers stand side by side in the same neighbourhoods, and the portal does not say which aquifer each one reads. A depth surface drawn across the wards would average different aquifers into one number, so the page shows the wells themselves. The readings also need care: depth is recorded as negative below ground, some stations flip sign partway through their record, and -1.0 is used as a placeholder. Months with no reading that passes the quality checks are left blank, never set to zero.
AMC's own draw is 100 MLD from its 555 borewells. Private borewells appear in no AMC figure.
Rivers - clean where the Sabarmati enters, without oxygen where it leaves
The rivers page carries the Central Pollution Control Board's annual readings, 2018 to 2024, at ten Sabarmati stations from Kheroj, where the river enters Gujarat, down to Vautha, and on the Khari at Lali village. Each year's lowest and highest value is shown as CPCB printed it; nothing is averaged or filled in.
The finding is the change across the city. At Hansol bridge, where the river enters Ahmedabad, the highest BOD (a measure of organic load) each year was between 1.2 and 5 mg/L. At V.N. Bridge, below the city's outfalls, it was between 82 and 358 mg/L; CPCB's bathing-water criterion is 3 or less. In every year from 2019 to 2024, dissolved oxygen at V.N. Bridge fell to 0.3 mg/L, the lowest value CPCB reports, while at Hansol it never went below 4.2 mg/L in the same years. The river does not arrive polluted.
CPCB's polluted-stretch reports have put the Sabarmati below the city in Priority I, its worst class, in all three editions (2018, 2022 and October 2025), and the Khari at Lali as well. Each edition draws the stretch differently and uses different years of data, so the class is the constant, not the peak numbers.
The Narmada Main Canal and the Kharicut canal are drawn beside the rivers. One is where the city's water comes from; the other runs through the industrial east and drains to the Khari.
One station shown without its location
CPCB's station list places Miroli, a village downstream of the city, 18.9 km north-north-east of the Miroli outfall that GPCB located by drone survey, which would put it inside the city. That cannot be right for a downstream village station, so its readings are shown and its map marker is not. Two other stations are left out because they repeat ones already shown.
What is not measured in public, or not mapped
We have not found a live water-quality station on the Sabarmati. Every reading on this page comes from CPCB's annual tables, the latest for 2024, so the page shows years, not days.
GPCB publishes monthly compliance results for the common effluent treatment plants (CETPs) that serve the industrial estates, but with no plant coordinates, so the plants cannot be placed on the map or matched to a stretch of river.
The treatment-plant panel other cities carry is off. GPCB's public record for AMC's sewage plants is 2023-24 averages for ten plants, three of them without a BOD figure, which a monthly per-plant chart cannot show honestly. Sampling of the outfalls along the Kharicut sits in National Green Tribunal filings rather than in any public series.
Flood risk - rain on the streets, and a river on a gauge
Ahmedabad's most recent flood came from rain on its streets, not from the river. On 23 July 2026 AMC reported a city average of 163.24 mm of rain, and 82 of the 148 places it already lists as waterlogging spots went under water. Over the same days the Sabarmati at Subhash Bridge stayed more than 2.5 m below the Central Water Commission's warning level.
That warning level is the page's trigger. CWC reads the river at Subhash Bridge every hour, against a warning level of 44.09 m and a danger level of 45.34 m; the highest reading on record is 47.45 m, on 20 August 2006. We use CWC's gauge rather than the city disaster plan's ladder of river flows in cusecs, because the plan does not say where the flow is measured. The event record runs from the 1868 rains and the 1875 flood, as the 1879 Bombay Gazetteer describes them, to July 2026, as the state's press releases quoting AMC report it. Damage figures appear only where an official document gives them.
What is not public yet
AMC's list of the 148 waterlogging spots, a flood map of the city, a live page for its more than 40 rain gauges, the rainfall its storm drains are designed to carry, and a map of the drains themselves. AMC's 2026-27 budget counts 1,010 km of storm-water drains and 35 storm-water pumping stations; the state's July 2026 releases count 42 pumping stations. Both are given with their dates. For the 1927, 1973 and 2006 river floods we have found the years, and for 2006 the river level, but no official count of homes or people affected.
Water bodies - from OpenStreetMap, because no lake register is published
The water-bodies map draws 232 lakes, ponds, reservoirs and river polygons from OpenStreetMap, 52 of them named. The source is itself a finding: AMC counts 176 lakes in its 2026-27 budget but publishes no lake register and no lake layer. Its City Map app serves lake points only through an encrypted interface, which we do not read.
The search area is wider than the city limit, so lakes on the edge, Bopal, Ghuma and Ognaj among them, are not cut off at the boundary. Drains and wastewater channels are left out, because they carry water rather than hold it; the riverfront channel is kept, because it is the city's largest open water.
The national census also counts 176
The Ministry of Jal Shakti's first Census of Water Bodies (reference year 2017-18) counts 1,964 water bodies in Ahmedabad district, 176 of them urban, and 19 encroached, all of them urban. Those 19 are most of Gujarat's 22. The census's 176 matches AMC's count exactly, but neither source shows whether they are the same lakes.
There is no cascade view. The cascade layer reconstructs chained tank systems, where each tank's overflow was built to feed the next. The two lakes the historical record describes, Kankaria and Chandola, were filled by a stream turned at a dam near Kamod and, from 1881, by the Kharicut canal. AMC's current lake interlinking is storm-water storage, a different system from an inherited chain.
Lake restoration - a municipal programme with a court docket beside it
The lake-restoration page sets AMC's lake programme, reported lake by lake in its budgets across the 176 lakes it counts, beside the court record. The legal frame is the Gujarat High Court's 2002 judgment in Shailesh R. Shah, which ordered water bodies to be notified in the Gazette, and its 2025 orders on Chandola Lake, where it held that “Chandola Lake is a water body and on a water body, no construction can be permitted”. The National Green Tribunal's Western Zone bench took up the city's vanished water bodies after a June 2025 news report (OA 79/2025).
Where AMC's budget and the AMRUT 2.0 portal give different figures for the same lakes, Bhadaj and Okaf among them, both are shown rather than one chosen. Each project carries the document it came from.
No register of lost lakes
We have not found a public register of the lakes Ahmedabad has lost, so the page carries the lakes that exist and the work on them, not a count of those that are gone.
My Ward - on AMC's own ward map
My Ward covers AMC's 48 wards in 7 zones, on the corporation's own boundaries. They come from its City Map app, the one linked from ‘Know Your Ward’ on its website, which carries the ward layer inside the app; there is no download or map service for it. The boundaries match the State Election Commission's final delimitation of 3 October 2020, including Bopal, Ghuma and Kathwada, added to the city in June 2020.
The ward file on OpenCity is not used, because it predates that 2020 extension. Two of AMC's own attributes are also off (the hectare column holds square kilometres, and Navrangpura's area is copied from Jodhpur's), so areas are recomputed from the shapes. Each ward's population is its Census 2011 figure from the delimitation order: 5,664,062 across the city, between 1.05 and 1.30 lakh a ward. Ward 33 is Sarkhej in the order and Vejalpur in the national local-government directory.
Each ward shows what can honestly be placed in it: its groundwater unit (all 48 sit in Ahmedabad Urban), the nearest telemetry well and its latest monthly depth, the nearest CPCB river station, and the OpenStreetMap water bodies inside it.
Five sections read 'not available', each for a stated reason
- Lost lakes:no public register of the city's lost lakes has been found.
- Flooding: AMC identifies 148 waterlogging spots but has not published the list or their locations.
- Drainage: AMC reports 1,010 km of storm-water drains but publishes no drain map.
- Sewerage: the sewage plants are named in the budget and in GPCB filings, but no plant or pumping-station locations are published.
- Industry: GPCB publishes no coordinates for the common effluent treatment plants or the units that discharge to the Sabarmati.
Commitments - ten dated promises
The commitments page tracks ten promises about Ahmedabad's water, from AMC's budgets, its affidavits to the Gujarat High Court, the state's 2018 reuse policy and the Chief Minister's Office. Five have passed their dateswith the work still described as under way: the Sola (30 MLD) and Jagatpur (15 MLD) sewage plants, due by September 2025; the Vinzol 75 MLD plant, due 15 February 2026; the Kharicut canal rebuild, which AMC said in February 2023 would take two years; the 2050 sewerage and storm-water master plan, due March 2023; and the state's target of reusing 70% of treated wastewater by 2025, against the 26% the state's own March 2026 affidavit gives for Ahmedabad.
The rest are still ahead or were never given a date. Where documents give different costs for the same work, all are shown: the 400 MLD Kotarpur plant has been Rs 118 crore (2023-24 budget), Rs 138 crore (MoHUA, March 2026) and Rs 230.42 crore (2026-27 budget). A status changes only against a dated document, and the register is re-checked each February against the new budget.
Facts and rainfall
The facts page is a set of cards, each read from the data behind the page it summarises rather than typed in a second time. Two of the cards are gaps: how much water is lost in the pipes (not measured) and how much Narmada water the city is entitled to (not published).
Rainfall comes from IMD's 0.25-degree gridded record, 1970 to 2025, at the grid cell at 23.0 N, 72.5 E, inside the city. We checked the choice: IMD's own Ahmedabad observatory normal is 783.6 mm a year (1991-2020); this cell gives 800.4 mm over the same years, 2.1% higher, while the next cell east gives 868.3 mm, 10.8% higher. Its 1970-2020 average is 805.1 mm, 68% of it in July and August. Months after IMD's last published month are filled from Open-Meteo's reanalysis and marked provisional until IMD catches up.
Origins - from a thin stream to a canal
The origins page tells the city's water history from its founding beside the Sabarmati in early 1411: Kankaria's 34-sided tank, the stepwells, the rain cisterns (tankas) under the pol houses, the turn to groundwater (87% of AMC's supply in 1970-80, by AMC's own figures), Dharoi, Mahi water in 2000 and Narmada water from 2002, and the river now held between a barrage and a canal.
It is as careful about what it leaves out. There is no founding day, because the three sources that date it disagree; no count of tankas, because published estimates run from about five thousand to ten thousand and nobody has counted them; and no single date for the first Narmada release, because August 2002 is AMC's date for its own works, not a date for the water.
What is not here, and why
Each absence below is a decision with a reason, recorded in the repository so that an omission is never mistaken for a bug.
No allocation ledger
The ledger compares what a city is entitled to with what it receives, and no public order states AMC's base allocation from the Narmada or the Mahi. AMC's draw by source is on the dashboard instead.
No tanker page
AMC publishes no tanker delivery register, booking ledger or price survey. The tanker documents we found are AMC's own vehicle purchases, which say nothing about who receives water by tanker or at what price.
No shoreline or climate-risk page
Ahmedabad is about 100 km inland from the Gulf of Khambhat, so there is no coastline. The climate-risk surface is buildable, since the global basin data it rests on also covers the Sabarmati, but it has not been built yet.
Intelligence & AI narratives
Daily AI briefings, longer-form weekly narratives, and per-ward AI profiles are pending for Ahmedabad- the underlying summary stores aren't yet multi-city. Until those land, the page surfaces raw data without an AI commentary layer.
Data sources for Ahmedabad
All operational data is collected by the Python pipeline and supporting scripts that power the dashboard. Raw source data and Earth Engine summaries are upserted into Supabase (PostgreSQL) and then exposed as small, readable product signals.
Reservoir & weather
The corporation's only current statement of its water sources, treatment plants, sewage plants and lake programme. The dashboard's source table is from the 2026-27 budget, printed pp.63-64; the 2023-24 budget is where AMC says supply runs two hours a day through unmetered connections. AMC's Water Project web page has carried the same older table since early 2022 and is not used.
AMC's own 48-ward, 7-zone map, linked from 'Know Your Ward' on the corporation's site. The boundaries are read from the map app itself, since no ward download service exists. Two of its area attributes are wrong, so areas are recomputed from the shapes.
The final order that drew the 48 wards and 192 seats, used again for the 2026 polls. Its schedule gives each ward's Census 2011 population, 5,664,062 in all.
The Narmada, Water Resources, Water Supply and Kalpsar Department's daily report: level, storage, inflow and releases for Sardar Sarovar, Kadana and Dharoi, and the Narmada Main Canal's flow at its head regulator. One PDF a day, kept as issued from 7 June 2019. Each row is accepted only if its own storage arithmetic holds. CWC's weekly bulletin uses different capacities for the same dams and is never mixed with it.
The national Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment for the district's ten talukas, five editions from 2021-2022 to 2025-2026, drawn on IN-GRES's own unit boundaries. Volumes leave the saline tract out, as CGWB publishes them.
Six-hourly readings from 139 piezometers in the district, run by Gujarat's Surface Water and Ground Water Department and CGWB, shown as monthly means. Wells are placed by their coordinates because district tags follow old boundaries.
Annual river tables: ten Sabarmati stations from Kheroj to Vautha and the Khari at Lali village, each year's lowest and highest value as CPCB prints it. One station's coordinate is withheld because CPCB's list places it inside the city.
The Sabarmati's and the Khari's Priority I class in all three editions. CPCB's website policy requires its approval for any use beyond download and print, so the report is cited here, not copied.
Station 020-MAHGAND, read every hour against a warning level of 44.09 m and a danger level of 45.34 m. The only live public reading of the river inside the city we have found, and the flood-risk page's trigger.
Where AMC's storm figures are published: rainfall by zone, waterlogging spots flooded and cleared, pumps running. The July 2026 flood record is built from four of these releases, in Gujarati.
The state's daily 24-hour rainfall report by taluka, with a row for Ahmedabad City, and the city disaster management plan 2026 with its alert levels by river flow.
The riverfront company's own account: the Vasna barrage holds water for 15 km upstream, the Narmada canal replenishes it, and interceptor sewers on both banks take sewage from 38 discharge points. Undated pages.
The court's own case on Sabarmati pollution, taken up on 6 August 2021, with a Joint Task Force under CPCB from 14 September 2021; its orders carry AMC's sewage-plant dates. The court's case-status site sits behind a captcha, so orders are read as annexed to NGT filings and, for the Chandola Lake orders of 2002 and 2025, on Indian Kanoon.
The state's sewage compliance affidavits in OA 606/2018, which give Ahmedabad's sewage generation as 'Calculated as per 80% of Water Supply' and its reuse as 26%; AMC's reply in OA 91/2023 (WZ); and OA 79/2025 (WZ) on the city's vanished water bodies.
As-on status lists for AMRUT 2.0 water projects: row 182 of the 2 March 2026 list is AMC's 400 MLD Kotarpur plant. The portal's AMC project list gives different figures from AMC's budget for several lakes; both are shown.
Dated status for two commitments: the Kharicut canal's phase 1 at 80% (11 March 2025), and the riverfront's three Gandhinagar phases (4 to 6) by the end of 2027 (6 June 2026), with progress restated on 11 August 2026 through the Information Department.
The state's targets of reusing 70% of treated wastewater by 2025 and 100% by 2030. Read from the FAOLEX copy of the signed policy, since no copy was found on a gujarat.gov.in site.
How Gujarat sanctions raw water to cities each year, with a 25% band either side. The quantity sanctioned for Ahmedabad is not in it, or in any public document found.
Ahmedabad district: 1,964 water bodies, 176 of them urban, 19 encroached (all urban). The 176 matches AMC's own lake count; neither source shows whether they are the same lakes.
Grid cell 23.0 N, 72.5 E, 1970 to 2025. Checked against IMD's own Ahmedabad observatory normal of 783.6 mm (1991-2020): this cell gives 800.4 mm over the same years, the cell to its east 868.3 mm. Months after IMD's last published month come from Open-Meteo's reanalysis (CC BY 4.0) and are marked provisional.
Every lake, pond and river polygon on the map (232, 52 of them named) and the Sabarmati, Khari, Kharicut and Narmada Main Canal lines (ODbL 1.0), because AMC publishes no lake register or lake layer.
The 1868 rains and the 1875 flood on the flood-risk page, the old feeds of Kankaria and Chandola, and much of the origins page. Public domain, read through the Internet Archive.
Free, no-auth daily weather data: precipitation, temperature, humidity, ET0, wind. ECMWF / ERA5-Land base. For cities with the provisional-rainfall layer, its archive API also fills the months IMD's gridded series hasn't published yet - rendered as asterisked provisional months that IMD supersedes automatically.
India Meteorological Department 0.25-degree gridded rainfall, 1970-present. Used for monsoon-context overlays.
Groundwater
Daily and seasonal manual + telemetric (DWLR) groundwater readings from the Central Ground Water Board's National Hydrograph Network.
Annual block-level Dynamic Groundwater Resource Assessment (Safe / Semi Critical / Critical / Over Exploited).
Water bodies & restoration
Base geometry for water-body polygons and the rivers polyline.
Rivers & pollution
Flood & civic infrastructure
Satellite & remote sensing
Base geometry & AI
AI city narratives and per-ward profiles. Live for Chennai; pending for Ahmedabad.
Data quality & limitations
How we classify river health
CPCB publishes two parallelriver-water-quality classification systems, and they don't always agree. Knowing which one we use - and why - matters for reading our river status badges honestly.
Designated Best-Use classes (A-E)
Computed from current dissolved-oxygen, BOD and coliform thresholds at each NWMP station. Updates every reading. Class A = drinking with disinfection only; Class B = outdoor bathing; Class C = drinking with conventional treatment; Class D = fisheries/wildlife; Class E = irrigation only. Below E = practically dead.
Polluted River Stretch (PRS) Priority I-V
A historical, multi-yearstretch-level designation reflecting cumulative pollution. Slow to update; once a river stretch is on the Priority list it tends to stay there even if recent readings improve. Priority I = worst (BOD > 30 mg/L sustained); Priority V = least bad of the polluted stretches.
Our status badges ("dead", "severely degraded", "degraded", "stressed", "healthy") are computed from current readings via the Designated Best-Use thresholds- not from the PRS Priority list. We take the worst classification across a river's monitored stations and surface that as the river-level status.
Practical consequence: a river on CPCB's PRS Priority list (e.g. the Madurai-Manamadurai stretch of the Vaigai is Priority III) won't automatically render as "severely degraded" here. If the underlying NWMP readings show only Class C/D conditions, the badge reflects that. The PRS designation belongs in the river description as historical context, not as the live status.
Status thresholds follow CPCB's published Designated Best-Use criteria; readings are from CPCB NWMP annual River Water Quality reports.
Known Limitations
- Estimates are approximations. Actual water availability depends on factors not modeled (groundwater extraction, Krishna water transfer, distribution losses, industrial use).
- Utility-published feeds may occasionally be stale (weekends, holidays, portal outages). Each surface shows a freshness indicator, and the freshness registry names any feed that has stopped updating.
- Groundwater data from OpenCity may lag by months. The map always shows the most recent available period.
- Forecasts use ARIMAX (AutoARIMA with inflow/outflow as exogenous regressors) and work best with 2+ years of daily data.
- Risk scores are relative indicators for comparison between wards, not absolute measures of water safety.
- Satellite spread is a summary of surface water extent, not a direct measure of storage volume, water quality, or inflow source. A lake can look broad and still hold less usable water than expected.
- Reservoir catchment polygons are reviewed operational geometries for rainfall context, not official legal boundaries. This matters especially in Chennai's managed canal and transfer system.
- Current satellite context relies on optical Sentinel-2 observations. During persistently cloudy periods, some water bodies may temporarily lose this insight until a radar fallback is added.
About the project
Disclaimer
Not an official government tool. Neer Vazhvu is an independent, open-source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any water utility, municipal corporation, pollution control body, or other government agency whose published data it cites.
Informational purposes only. All data, estimates, and forecasts are provided “as is” for general awareness. Always refer to official advisories from your city's water utility and disaster-management authorities for critical decisions.
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Open Source
Neer Vazhvu is fully open source. The code, data pipeline, and methodology are transparent and available on GitHub. Contributions, bug reports, and data corrections are welcome.
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