Which State of India has launched the country's first digital water data bank 'Aquarium' for clean water and water security in April 2022 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Karnataka. The platform the question calls 'Aquarium' is AQVERIUM — note the spelling, which the paper has anglicised — and it was launched in Bengaluru in April 2022 by Karnataka's Minister for Information Technology and Biotechnology, Science and Technology, Dr C. N. Ashwath Narayan. It was billed as India's first digital water data bank: a curated aggregation, built on blockchain, of water-related data drawn from many different institutions and sources, meant to serve as a hub for water innovation and social entrepreneurship. One precision worth carrying, because it is the kind of thing an interview or a mains answer will test: AQVERIUM is a product of AquaKraft Group Ventures, a private company, launched at a state event by a state minister. It is not a Government of India scheme and not a Karnataka government programme, so the accurate phrasing is that it was launched in Karnataka rather than by Karnataka. The state named in the question is nonetheless Karnataka, and the key marks (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Uttar Pradesh is the default guess on a UPPSC paper, which is exactly why it is planted here. The April 2022 launch of the digital water data bank took place in Bengaluru, not anywhere in Uttar Pradesh, and the platform was developed by a Bengaluru-based venture.  (b) Tamil Nadu is prominent in water policy — it was an early mover on mandatory rainwater harvesting — which makes it a plausible-sounding answer. But it had no part in this launch; the event and the platform belong to Karnataka.  (d) Punjab is associated in the news with groundwater depletion rather than with water-data platforms, and it was not the venue of this launch. The distractor works only on a candidate reaching for any state with a water problem.

Concept: Water governance in India is chronically short not of water data but of usable water data: rainfall, groundwater levels, river flows, water quality and utility supply figures are collected by different agencies, in different formats, at different intervals, and rarely sit in one place. A 'water data bank' is an attempt to solve that aggregation problem — pull the scattered datasets into a single curated repository so that planners, researchers and start-ups can build on them. AQVERIUM was pitched on exactly this logic, using a blockchain ledger for provenance and integrity of the contributed data, and its promoters attached to it a training ambition in water, sanitation, hydro-geological and data sciences and a stated goal of helping make India water-positive by 2030.

State PCS 2022 Q39 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q39 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer