Smart Groundwater Monitoring System

Nepal manages its groundwater largely without knowing how it responds to rainfall. Abstraction decisions, recharge assumptions and drought planning all rest on relationships nobody has measured locally — which is a tolerable position until a dry year, and an expensive one afterwards.

For the Water Resources Research and Development Centre, e2services installed a smart groundwater monitoring system across six districts — Sindhuli, Kaski, Kavre, Dhading, Makwanpur and Sindhupalchowk — specifically to establish empirical relations between rainfall and groundwater level.

Spanning six districts across contrasting hydrogeological settings was deliberate. A rainfall-groundwater relationship derived at one site describes that site; a network across varied terrain begins to describe the country. Site selection, installation and commissioning were carried out so that the resulting series would be comparable between locations.

This is long-horizon work by design. The value accrues as the record lengthens, which is why the assignment included provision for sustained observation rather than treating installation as the deliverable.