About Pune 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 Pune
Pune is governed by Pune Municipal Corporation, Water Supply Department with civic services under Pune Municipal Corporation (41 wards). Estimated daily city demand: ~1631.84 MLD.
Water sources tracked daily
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 Pune
Dashboard - where the water goes between the dam and the tap
Pune draws from four dams on the Mutha, lifts 1,681.5 MLD at a time, and treats it at eighteen plants rated 1,854 MLD. The headline on this page is not how long the water lasts. It is an arithmetic PMC publishes about itself, in a single table of its Draft Environment Status Report 2025-26.
PMC needs 21.03 TMC a year and is entitled to 16.36 - a shortfall of 4.67 TMC. In the same table it books 6.73 TMC as system losses, 32% non-revenue water. The entire entitlement gap sits inside the leakage, and closing it would leave the city 2.05 TMC in surplus without a drop of new water. That is a subtraction across two rows, not a model.
Meanwhile PMC's own service-level benchmark reports four hours of supply a day against its own 24-hour target, after Rs 1,557.89 crore of a Rs 2,818.46 crore equitable-supply project, with 67 of 82 service reservoirs built and 35 commissioned.
PMC reprinted the same benchmark table four years running
The 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 editions all report coverage 98%, supply 4 hours, NRW 35%, per-capita 250 LPCD, metered 30% and collection 88%. Only 2025-26 moves. We show that column as one observation, never as a four-year trend.
PMC's water budget also does not quite close: the demand rows sum to 1,110.18 MLD while its loss row implies 1,109.65. We publish both of PMC's figures as printed rather than quietly correcting one to make the arithmetic work.
Reservoirs - and why there is no days-of-water-left number
The Khadakwasla chain - Khadakwasla, Panshet, Warasgaon and Temghar - holds 29.15 TMC of live storage between them, read every morning from the Maharashtra Water Resources Department's Pravah dam-safety bulletin. We check those capacities against a second, independent government register: CWC's National Register of Large Dams agrees to the cubic metre on four of the six dams, and the chain total reproduces PMC's own published 825.43 MCM from a completely separate source.
We deliberately do notdivide that storage by the city's demand. The Khadakwasla Complex is an irrigation project with a drinking-water share inside it: of its 33.77 TMC of use, 22.55 TMC is the irrigation provision and 8.3 TMC was the drinking provision in the project's own planning. A runway computed from total storage would credit Pune with water that belongs to the canal - and the farmers downstream at Daund and Indapur are in front of a regulator arguing about exactly that.
Nine years, two orders, and no settled entitlement
In 2017 the Pune District Regulatory Officer fixed PMC's entitlement at 8.19 TMC. In December 2018 the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority set that aside, deemed 11.5 TMC an entitlement, and found PMC's use far in excess of the project's own drinking provision, with the Khadakwasla farmers "deprived of their share". PMC appealed; in May 2025 MWRRA found the officer who issued the order was not the competent authority and sent it back. It remains unresolved.
The 11.5 TMC figure that circulates is the Khadakwasla-onlyreservation, not PMC's total. The total authorisation is 16.36 TMC. Comparing 11.5 against total lifting compares one reservoir's share against every source the city draws on, and we do not repeat it.
Groundwater - by taluka, because the district average lies
The groundwater map shows Pune district's 14 talukas across six editions of the national Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment. This is the first city on the platform where we drill below the district, and the reason is simple: the district figure says the opposite of the finding.
Pune district totals 63.73% of its extractable resource and is categorised SAFE. Inside it, Shirur taluka is CRITICAL at 95.71%and has been in every published edition, never below 94.24%. 93% of Shirur's extraction is agriculture - this is an irrigation story, not a city one, and agriculture is above 90% of extraction in 8 of the 14 talukas.
Our figures reproduce CGWB's published National Compilation 2025 exactly. That took a correction: the portal's convenient total silently includes saline land that CGWB excludes, which would have put the district at 67.25% instead of 63.23%.
Six editions are not six years of measurement
The assessment recomputes what is available every edition while largely carrying the extraction and rainfall inputs forward. Seven of the 14 talukas carry a single rainfall figure across all six editions. Purandhar moves from semi-critical to safe on an extraction number that is identical in both editions - the denominator was revised, nothing was measured to have changed. So we do not draw this as an annual extraction trend.
120 monitoring stations in the district. One inside the city.
The station dots on that map are the finding. Maharashtra runs 120 telemetric groundwater stations across Pune district - genuinely dense - and exactly one, at Shivajinagar, stands inside the municipal boundary. The rest instrument the eastern irrigation belt around Baramati, Indapur, Purandhar and Daund. Interpolating a per-ward depth surface for the city from one station would manufacture precision that does not exist, so we do not offer one.
PMC publishes no groundwater figure at all, and says so: its supply accounts explicitly exclude borewells and private tankers, and its 2025-26 report recommends creatingthe monitoring and licensing that would produce one. The only independent estimate is ACWADAM's (2019) - roughly 4 TMC a year from perhaps 80,000 to 125,000 borewells, about a quarter of formal municipal supply. We carry that as a research estimate, never as a measurement.
Rivers - what CPCB measured, next to what CPCB concluded
The rivers page carries the Mula, Mutha, Mula-Mutha, Pawana, Indrayani, Bhima and Ghod from the Central Pollution Control Board's October 2025 polluted river stretches assessment - and it shows two things from that report side by side, because they disagree.
CPCB classifies the Mula as improved, Priority I down to Priority II. An annexure to the same report gives measured BOD at the same stations in 2024, and the Mula at Bopodi reads 102.5 mg/L - the sixth-highest of 756 locations in India, higher than the worst Yamuna station CPCB publishes for Delhi and higher than the Mithi at Mahim. Both are shown; neither is averaged into the other.
The Mutha's gradient is the second story. It leaves Khadakwasla dam at 4.1 mg/L, reads 32.5 at Deccan Bridge, 35.0 at Sangam and 50.2 at Veer Savarkar Bhavan. The river does not arrive polluted. And PMC generates 980 MLD of sewage against 477 MLD of operating treatment capacity, so about half of what the city produces reaches this channel untreated.
The Mutha Right Bank Canal is drawn alongside the rivers even though it is not one. It carries Khadakwasla water east to the Daund and Indapur command, and it is the other claimant on the same water -Pune's entitlement argument is unreadable without it.
What the monitoring does not include
CPCB names its stations but publishes no coordinates for them, so readings appear in the panel while the stations get no map marker. We would rather carry the numbers than invent positions.
Per-station COD is collected by the state board and not published, and no surfactant measurement exists for the Indrayani - which matters, because MPCB attributes the recurring foam at the Alandi ghats to detergent while PCMC attributes it to the Chakan, Dehu and Talegaon industrial estates. Neither has published a measurement, so the page states the dispute rather than settling it.
Water bodies and wards
The water-bodies map draws 791 polygons, 84 of them named, from OpenStreetMap. That source choice is itself a finding: PMC publishes no lake or tank layer at all. Its only water-body file is twelve polygons of river channel. Katraj, Pashan, Jambhulwadi and Bund Garden are in OpenStreetMap and in none of the municipal datasets we could reach.
Seven features that OpenStreetMap tags as water are excluded, and the count above is after that: three swimming pools, a gym pool, a service reservoir, a rainwater-harvesting sump and one pool carrying no water tag at all. The exclusion is kept narrow on purpose, because talavis a real water body here - Ganesh Talav and Lakaki Talav are lakes, and a broader match for “tank” would have deleted them.
OpenStreetMap is not a register, and no register exists
Maharashtra publishes no open vector lake layer. MRSAC, the state remote-sensing centre that would be the equivalent of Tamil Nadu's open GeoServer, does not resolve publicly; Bhuvan answers a vector request with Service WFS is disabledand serves raster tiles only. The Government of India's First Census of Water Bodies does cover Maharashtra and enumerates 3,680 in Pune district, but only ten of those fall inside PMC, and its condition columns are near-uniformly unfilled defaults - 3,679 of 3,680 recorded as not encroached. It is a rural minor-irrigation tank census, and it is not a substitute for this layer.
Ward boundaries are the 41 electoral prabhags of the 2025 delimitation, used for the 2026 PMC election. The published boundary file carries no ward names at all - only numbers - so the names come from PMC's own election results, joined 41 of 41. PMC separately runs 15 administrative ward offices, which are a different geography and are what its operational records key to.
Pimpri-Chinchwad is not covered, and cannot honestly be
PCMC is a separate corporation of 181 sq km on its own Pavana source, and it publishes its own environment reports. But no PCMC ward boundary exists in any public form - no open dataset, a login-walled GIS server, and no corporation polygon in OpenStreetMap. Rather than draw a two-corporation region with one corporation missing, this place is scoped to PMC and says so.
Rainfall
Long-term rainfall comes from IMD's 0.25-degree gridded dataset, 1970 to 2025, with recent months filled provisionally until IMD publishes. Which grid cell we use was a real decision rather than a default: Pune district carries a fourfold rainfall gradient from the Western Ghats to the eastern rain shadow, so a quarter-degree matters. The cell that looks nearest sits 11 km west, up the gradient, and runs 31% above IMD's own Pune observatory normal. The cell we use is within 4.3% of it.
What is not here yet
Every absence below is a decision with a reason, recorded in the repository so an omission is never indistinguishable from a bug.
No flood-risk page
The event register is not the problem - the 1961 Panshet dam breach, the 2019 Ambil Odha flash flood, and the July and August 2024 releases are all dated and sourced. The hazard layer is. Maharashtra WRD publishes Pune's red and blue flood lines as 518 scanned map sheets and no vector files. There is nothing to draw without digitising paper.
No tanker page - yet
This one is buildable and is the largest piece of work outstanding. PMC publishes a genuine daily tanker register: hundreds of spreadsheets since April 2026, one per filling point per day, each row carrying the ward, the recipient society, the address and the tanker's vehicle number. One filling point logged 424 deliveries in a single day - in the monsoon. The producer is not written.
No allocation ledger
The instruments are unusually well documented, but the ledger's whole point is entitled against received, and no measured annual draw has been published since 2017-18 - a year for which PMC and the state water department disagree by 4.15 TMC. A ledger whose received column is eight years old and contested would be worse than none.
Intelligence & AI narratives
Daily AI briefings, longer-form weekly narratives, and per-ward AI profiles are pending for Pune- 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 Pune
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
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 Pune.
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 CMWSSB advisories 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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