Smart Groundwater Management: Affordable IoT Based Solutions for Rural Water Supply

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual model for affordable Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled rural groundwater service assurance, where decisions must remain consistent under sparse telemetry and fragmented governance. Existing smart water monitoring approaches are largely tuned to urban distribution systems and rarely provide an operational mapping from rural context to intervention choices with testable propositions. The proposed framework defines decision-relevant constructs and boundary conditions, paired with a compact coding rubric whose unit of analysis is a telemetry configuration, separating 1 s sensing from 15 min uploads to represent latency and dropout mechanisms. Evaluability is enforced through a programmatic cohort validation design for the Rural Groundwater Service Telemetry Cohort using grouped holdouts by geography, entity, and context, with baseline comparisons against logistic regression, random forest, rule-based monitoring, and manual logbook classification. Uncertainty reporting is specified via bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap intervals over 10 seeds and 2000 resamples (alpha 0.05), and applicability is restricted to settings where pumping measurably alters connected streams or storage (about 20% and 16%, with end-of-century shifts toward 30% and 12%). The framework supports community operators and district water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) engineers in selecting low-cost interventions with auditable decision logic under resource constraints.