About Gurugram 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 Gurugram
Gurugram is governed by Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority with civic services under Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (36 wards).
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 Gurugram
Home / dashboard
Gurugramowns no water. It impounds nothing, it has no river, and it treats no source of its own. What it has is a canal from the Yamuna, an aquifer it draws down faster than any district around it, and a tanker market. So the "days of water left" question every other city on this platform answers has no answer here - there is no stored volume to divide. That is the shape of the city, not a gap in the data.
The headline is treatment capacity: 572 MLD installed across two plants, Chandu Budhera at 300 and Basai at 272. Both numbers are read out of GMDA's own asset register when the page is built, so they cannot drift from what the authority publishes. Raw water reaches both through the Gurgaon Water Supply Channel from the Yamuna at Kakroi, roughly 70 km away.
The number we deliberately do not publish
No demand figure, and therefore no deficit. Peak demand for Gurugramis widely quoted at 675-700 MLD, which against 572 MLD of capacity would make a headline. Every one of those figures traces to press reporting rather than to a published document. GMDA's Final Development Plan and its Social Infrastructure Development Plan would settle it, and both are scanned PDFs with no text layer.
A supply-minus-demand gap computed from a number we cannot source would be the most quotable thing on this page and the least defensible. So the page shows capacity and says what is missing.
Groundwater
This is Gurugram's signature issue and the page draws it at districtresolution: six districts, four assessment years (2021-22 through 2024-25), from the Central Ground Water Board's IN-GRES assessment. Gurugram district sits at 194.6% stage of extraction - it withdraws close to twice what recharges - alongside Faridabad at 175.4% and Rewari at 133.2%, all three categorised over-exploited. Palwal is critical at 92.0%, Nuh semi-critical at 72.3%, and Jhajjar safe at 49.6%.
The neighbours matter here, which is why the map is not clipped to Gurugram alone. An over-drawn district ringed by other over-drawn districts has nowhere to borrow from.
Why there is no water-level map
Chennai's groundwater page shows measured depth interpolated across wards. Gurugram has no equivalent and we could not build one honestly. The India-WRIS level series for this district is 37 stations that stop in June 2020, and Haryana's telemetry network does not cover Gurugram at all - a 95 MB state export returns zero rows for it.
So the page reports the assessment, which is current and official, and does not report the level, which has not been published for five years. A contoured depth surface drawn from 2020 readings would look authoritative and mean nothing. This is a live watch: if the Haryana Water Resources Authority or a CGWB Year Book publishes post-2020 levels, the page gains a layer.
Water bodies
824 water bodies across 2,851 acres, from the register GMDA compiled for the National Green Tribunal. This is not an OpenStreetMap trace: each body carries its village, tehsil, recorded area, ownership and the authority's own remark.
Ownership is the finding. Gram panchayats hold 392 of the 824 and private owners 208, while the Municipal Corporation holds 62. Only 163 of the 824 fall inside the Corporation's boundary at all, against 454 inside the wider GMDA area. The body most residents would petition about a filled pond is responsible for a fraction of the register, and that is usually the thing worth knowing before writing the letter.
The lost-bodies layer is derived from the publisher's own cross-survey attribution rather than from a spatial join of ours. GMDA flags each body against the 1956 record of rights, the 1976 Survey of India sheets, 2012 WorldView imagery, a drone pass and Google Earth. Of the 283 bodies it can match to a 1956 revenue plot, 29 were not seen in the 2012 satellite pass, and one of those is absent from Google Earth as well.
Three things this layer does not claim
It is a floor, not a total. The register is the 2012-known population, so a pond that existed in 1956 and had already gone by 2012 is not a row in it at all. The real loss is larger and this layer cannot size it.
Absence from imagery is not proof of destruction.A seasonal johad photographed dry, or one under tree cover, is missing from a satellite pass for reasons that have nothing to do with being filled. Every entry reads "not seen in 2012 imagery", never "lost".
The vintage counts are not a time series. The three surveys count 640, 519 and 824 bodies respectively - the number rises at the end, because satellite imagery picks up construction pits and seasonal water that a revenue clerk never listed. Charting those three numbers as a trend would be false, so we do not.
Tanker water
Gurugram is the only city on this platform where the tanker economy is a ledger rather than a story. GMDA publishes its own bulk-water booking MIS, and it is granular: 29,284 bookings, 1.72 billion litres and Rs 8.72 crore over 36 months from January 2019 to December 2021, across 259 buyers, 5,287 delivery sites and 7 filling stations.
The page leads on composition, not volume. Non-potable water went from 29.7% of litres sold to 51.2% in three years while the three tariffs held flat - potable at about Rs 70.5 per kilolitre, recycled at Rs 30, CETP-treated at Rs 8.
Read carelessly that looks like recycling taking hold. It is not. The share moved because the potable side collapsed 64%, from 562 to 202 million litres, while non-potable fell too, by about 10%. The whole market contracted. What the series is really measuring is construction stopping, which is also why the volume line carries its caveat rather than leading: these are the COVID years.
What we do not republish, and what we are waiting for
gmda.gov.in asserts all rights reserved and publishes no reuse policy, so this artifact carries aggregates only - counts, sums and shares. No upstream row is republished, the delivery-address column is dropped at build time, and the full buyer list is not shown; the concentration is the finding, not the names.
The publisher stopped after 2021. A 2022 file appearing is the event we watch for, and until it does this page is a closed three-year window rather than a live series.
Origins
Six chapters on how a place with no river became a city of three million. The spine is one comparison: the municipal limit grew from 20.1 to 297.3 square kilometres between 1985 and 2020, and the Central Ground Water Board notified the block a dark zone in 2008 - roughly two-thirds of the way through that expansion, with most of the building still to come.
The last chapter is about where the water goes rather than where it comes from. Gurugram's surface runoff drains north into the Najafgarh jheel and then into Delhi's Najafgarh drain, which is the Sahibi river under another name. The city is upstream of somebody.
Four images, all Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA or public domain, with licence and photographer recorded in a manifest beside the files. Every candidate was opened and looked at before selection and the alt text describes what is in the frame rather than what the Commons caption claims, because one candidate's caption advertises towers that do not appear in it. Two were fetched and then rejected: a johad that turned out to be geotagged 90 km away in Charkhi Dadri, and an aerial whose identification rests only on its uploader's title. Chapters 3 and 5 carry no image at all - there is no Haryana borewell or water-tanker photograph on Commons, and borrowing one from another state would be worse than a gap.
What is not built for Gurugram yet
Six of the platform's sixteen routes are live. The rest are switched off rather than shipped empty, and each has a stated reason and a removal condition in docs/cities/gurugram/parity-audit.md.
Rivers is not a gap. Gurugram has no river: every national monitoring station in the district is a lake or a borewell. There is nothing to build.
Flood risk is the largest thing we could build next. Gurugram floods by waterlogging on a paved catchment rather than by a river breaking its banks, and the inputs are reachable: 117 mapped waterlogging sites, the master storm-water network, natural flow direction and ten watersheds. Only the drain legs are harvested so far.
My Ward is blocked on data, not geometry.All 36 municipal ward polygons are harvested, but nothing is joined to them yet - and GMDA's ward layer publishes a number and a zone code with no ward name, so any ward surface here will label by number.
Treatment compliance is buildable. The Haryana State Pollution Control Board publishes inlet and outlet BOD, COD and TSS for 18 Gurugram sewage treatment plants and one common effluent plant against consent limits. It is not wired up yet.
The graded comparison against Chennai, the reference build, is in docs/cities/gurugram/parity-scorecard.md, alongside the provenance file at docs/cities/gurugram/data-sources.md. Where Gurugram carries less, the reason is stated; where the feature cannot exist here at all, it is marked as such rather than counted as a shortfall. What is live is at the Gurugram dashboard.
Intelligence & AI narratives
Daily AI briefings, longer-form weekly narratives, and per-ward AI profiles are pending for Gurugram- 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 Gurugram
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 authority's own GIS: treatment plants with capacities (Chandu Budhera 300 + Basai 272 MLD), the network, ward boundaries, and the water-body register with its own 1956/2012 cross-survey flags. Capacities are read from this register at build time rather than transcribed, so the dashboard cannot drift from what GMDA publishes; where the press says 670 MLD, both figures appear with their sourcing. No licence is served with the directory and gmda.gov.in asserts all rights reserved - open to read, unlicensed to reuse, so derived aggregates only.
Every tanker load GMDA sold - date, buyer, volume, price - one XLSX per year across three years. Aggregated on build and never republished row-for-row: counts, sums and shares only, the delivery-address column dropped, buyers as a ranked top-15 by volume.
Extraction against availability, stage and category per district across every published assessment year. This is not depth-to-water - measured levels are a separate India-WRIS series.
CGWB observation-well depth readings for the point map.
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 Gurugram.
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.
No personal data collected. Neer Vazhvu does not collect, store, or process any personal information. There are no user accounts, cookies, or analytics trackers.
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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