Unravelling water sustainability: a decentralised, data-driven model for water governance

Despite global efforts, many communities fail to deliver water sustainability due to lack of context-sensitive solutions, community awareness, stakeholder coordination, and reliable ground-level data. To combat this, this study proposes a geo-enabled, participatory, digital governance platform—“Mera Gaon Hamara Jal”—for decentralised water management through empowered multi stakeholders. It integrates a multi-level, multi-stakeholder decision module (MMDM) that utilises 50 water sustainability indicators to perform evidence-based diagnostics. The module operationalises water security as a composite outcome, derived from two complementary dimensions—water poverty, which captures multidimensional deprivation across resources, access, use, capacity, and environment, and water quality, which reflects the physicochemical and microbial integrity of drinking-water sources. It uniquely integrates localised indicator development approaches, heterogeneous data collection approaches and data driven decision models to derive threshold-based risk classification, index computation, and composite risk scoring. Validated across ten rural communities (1,039 households), Alappad emerged as the highest-risk cluster (~ 37% risk). The platform identified spatial and thematic vulnerabilities, mapped hotspots, and enabled real-time decisions, context specific intervention, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and actionable strategies for water sustainability, contributing to advancing SDG 6.