Atal Bhujal Yojana, a community-led groundwater management initiative, was implemented as a pilot across 8,203 priority water-stressed Gram Panchayats in seven States — Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The scheme sought to improve groundwater management through community participation and demand-side interventions, reinforcing sustainability by strengthening institutions, governance frameworks and offering incentives for conservation at grassroots level. Under the Jal Shakti Abhiyan: Catch the Rain (JSA: CTR) campaign, overseen by the Ministry of Jal Shakti, one of the core activities involves enumerating, geo-tagging and cataloguing water bodies to support the creation of scientific conservation plans. District Collectors and Magistrates have been instructed to identify and record water bodies using old revenue records, remote sensing inputs from the National Remote Sensing Agency and GIS-based mapping. These datasets are integrated with information from the National Water Informatics Centre and State Water Resources Information Systems to facilitate evidence-led planning. A significant technological development supporting this effort is the GIS-based sub-portal ‘Jal Dharohar’, operational in beta since 1 November 2023 under the India-WRIS platform. The portal provides a consolidated geo-tagged database of water bodies across India, drawing data from multiple national programmes including Atal Bhujal Yojana, Minor Irrigation Statistics, the First Census of Water Bodies, the Jal Shakti Abhiyan and the National Water Informatics Centre. It offers a spatial and visual tool for awareness, planning and monitoring. As water is a State subject, the Union Government plays a complementary role by supporting States through technical, financial and policy-level initiatives. To this end, the government uses a broad suite of digital and technological tools to map, monitor and plan water resource interventions. Key tools include the National Aquifer Mapping and Management Programme, implemented by the Central Ground Water Board using remote sensing, GIS technologies and heliborne geophysical surveys to undertake aquifer mapping, identify recharge zones and assess groundwater sustainability. Groundwater levels are monitored in real time through a nationwide network of around 23,000 Digital Water Level Recorders equipped with telemetry systems, enabling near real-time data transmission to a central server and supporting targeted conservation efforts. The Central Ground Water Board has also developed the India-Groundwater Resource Estimation System, a standardised web-based platform for groundwater assessment, forming the scientific basis for schemes such as MGNREGA, Atal Bhujal Yojana and the Jal Shakti Abhiyan. The JSA: CTR dashboard further supports monitoring and evaluation of the Catch the Rain campaign by serving as a centralised digital hub for data collection and analysis. The National Water Informatics Centre functions as the central repository of hydrological data, maintaining spatial and non-spatial datasets including rainfall, river levels, discharge, groundwater levels, water quality, soil moisture and climatic information. The ‘Flood Watch India’ mobile application, developed by the Central Water Commission, applies satellite analytics, mathematical modelling and real-time monitoring to produce timely flood forecasts. It provides updates from 592 flood monitoring stations as well as storage conditions in 150 major reservoirs nationwide. Several water conservation and irrigation structures created under programmes such as PMKSY-SMI, RRR and Atal Bhujal Yojana are monitored through GIS-based platforms. The Ministry also collaborates with institutions like BISAG-N and the Space Application Centre in Ahmedabad to harness remote sensing and satellite data for mapping and surveillance. These efforts are supported by the extensive use of digital dashboards, web portals and mobile applications for data gathering and performance monitoring across schemes including PMKSY, NMCG, Atal Bhujal Yojana and the Minor Irrigation census. The information was provided by the Minister of State for Jal Shakti, Shri Raj Bhushan Choudhary, in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.