Background

For farming communities across India, water is not simply an agricultural input; it can determine whether a crop survives, a harvest is productive, and a season is financially viable. Yet managing water efficiently remains a major challenge. More than 80% of India’s available water resources are currently used for irrigation, while the efficiency of irrigation projects is estimated at only 30–35%. For farmers working with limited water availability, improving how effectively that water reaches and remains available to crops is therefore as important as increasing access to water itself.

The challenge becomes even more complex across India’s diverse agricultural landscape. Approximately 55% of the country’s net sown area is rainfed, meaning crop production in these regions depends substantially on the timing and distribution of rainfall. Dry spells, unpredictable rainfall, soil moisture loss, and rising pressure on groundwater can leave farmers having to make difficult decisions about when and how much to irrigate. For smallholder farmers in particular, adopting new technologies can also involve financial and informational barriers.

Jal Bandhan was founded with the belief that water conservation in agriculture needs to be approached from the ground up: by understanding what farmers actually need, developing solutions around those realities, and testing whether those solutions work outside the laboratory. Rather than asking farmers to simply change existing practices, the initiative seeks to explore how materials science and nanotechnology can make every unit of water more useful to the crop.