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Rainwater harvesting (RWH), the small-scale collection and storage of runofffor irrigated agriculture, is recognized as a sustainable strategy forensuring food security, especially in monsoonal landscapes in the developingworld. In south India, these strategies have been used for millennia tomitigate problems of water scarcity. However, in the past 100 years manytraditional RWH systems have fallen into disrepair due to increasingdependence on groundwater. This dependence has contributed to accelerateddecline in groundwater resources, which has in turn led to increased effortsat the state and national levels to revive older RWH systems. Critical to thesuccess of such efforts is an improved understanding of how these ancientsystems function in contemporary landscapes with extensive groundwaterpumping and shifted climatic regimes. Knowledge is especially lackingregarding the water-exchange dynamics of these RWH tanks at tank andcatchment scales, and how these exchanges regulate tank performance andcatchment water balances. Here, we use fine-scale, water-level variation toquantify daily fluxes of groundwater, evapotranspiration (ET), and sluiceoutflows in four tanks over the 2013 northeast monsoon season in a tankcascade that covers a catchment area of 28 km<sup>2</sup>. At the tank scale, our results indicate that groundwater recharge and irrigation outflows comprisethe largest fractions of the tank water budget, with ET accounting for only13–22 % of the outflows. At the scale of the cascade, we observe adistinct spatial pattern in groundwater-exchange dynamics, with the frequencyand magnitude of groundwater inflows increasing down the cascade of tanks.The significant magnitude of return flows along the tank cascade leads to themost downgradient tank in the cascade having an outflow-to-capacity ratiogreater than 2. At the catchment scale, the presence of tanks in thelandscape dramatically alters the catchment water balance, with runoffdecreasing by nearly 75 %, and recharge increasing by more than 40 %.Finally, while water from the tanks directly satisfies  ∼ 40 % ofthe crop water requirement across the northeast monsoon season via surfacewater irrigation, a large fraction of the tank water is "wasted", and moreefficient management of sluice outflows could lead to tanks meeting a higherfraction of crop water requirements

The socioecohydrology of rainwater harvesting in India: understanding water storage and release dynamics across spatial scales