Dr. Himanshu Kulkarni works at ACWADAM, a not-for-profit knowledge institution and think-tank working on groundwater since 1998. He is a hydrogeologist by qualification – PhD from Pune University in 1987 – and has been working on aquifers and groundwater across India’s diverse groundwater typology for nearly 40 years. He has been a CSIR research scholar, UNESCO scholar and a Fulbright Fellow during his career.

ACWADAM has partnered with a variety of organisations on piloting and mainstreaming the ideas of participatory groundwater management and springshed management across India, in neighbouring Nepal & Bhutan, and in other parts of the world. ACWADAM’s work under Dr. Kulkarni has followed the principle of bringing communities closer to their aquifers and managing groundwater as a common pool resource through the process of Aquifer-based Participatory Groundwater Management. He has, through ACWADAM, steered the concept of hydrogeology based ‘springshed’ management that has now become so important from local to national levels in India and its neighbouring regions. Dr. Kulkarni has, before co-founding ACWADAM, worked at Pune University for 13 years, after which he also worked with the corporate sector for a couple of years.

Through ACWADAM’s collaboration with educational institutions, Dr. Kulkarni has worked as adjunct faculty and course advisor at Shiv Nadar University for the post-graduate course on Water Science and Policy. He is also visiting faculty and a member of the Board of Studies at TISS, Mumbai. He will begin as visiting faculty at Centre for Water Policy and Governance at IIT-Bombay from the current academic year. He has supervised 2 PhDs at SPPU and many post-graduate dissertations across various institutions where he has taught and mentored students. He has been part of various post-graduate and PhD examination committees, apart from refereeing projects and research papers, both in India and overseas. He continues to advise Government of India and has held many advisory positions on various committees of the Government. Dr. Kulkarni has anchored several international action research collaborations in the subject of groundwater, particularly in his lead role at ACWADAM.