Jal Shakti Ministry Launches Punah Bharan Mobile Application

Groundwater planning in India gained a new digital tool on 28 October 2026, when the Union Minister of Jal Shakti launched the Punah Bharan Mobile Application. The name itself means refilling, and the purpose of the application is exactly that: to help plan the recharge of aquifers on a scientific footing rather than by guesswork.

Who built it

The application has been developed by BISAG-N, working together with the National Water Mission (NWM) under the Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation in the Ministry of Jal Shakti. It therefore brings a geospatial technology agency and the country's water mission on to a single platform.

What the application does

A user opens the application and can mark out the stretches around a location where water can usefully be sent back into the ground. The search runs within a radial distance of up to 3 km from the chosen point. Having found such a zone, the user can then look at which kind of recharge structure would suit that spot, because the choice depends on what the land, the soil and the rainfall of that area allow.

The web portal alongside it

A companion web portal carries village-level Artificial Recharge Structure (ARS) zonation maps, along with GIS tools and thematic layers. Planning at the village level matters because groundwater is drawn and refilled locally, and a map that stops at the district boundary is of little use to a panchayat deciding where to dig a recharge pit.

The data behind it

The platform works on geospatial datasets rather than on general assumptions. These cover rainfall, groundwater levels, groundwater yield, slope and drainage. Read together, these layers show where water is likely to percolate well and where an intervention would be wasted. In short, Punah Bharan takes scientific groundwater recharge planning forward through geospatial technology, and gives field officers, planners and village bodies a common basis on which to act.