A New Paradigm For Water

Context: New Water Policy of India calls for multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to water management.

Issues associated with India’s water management policy

• Water intensive agricultural practices: Irrigation in India consumes 80-90% of India’s water, most of which is used by rice, wheat and sugarcane.
• Degradation of Rivers: Rivers primarily being seen as a resource to serve economic purposes, has led to their terrible degradation.
• Poor water quality: Widespread use of reverse osmosis has led to huge water wastage and adverse impact on water quality.
• Over exploitation: Water sources are drying up because of over-extraction of groundwater, which reduces the base-flows needed for rivers to have water after the monsoon.
• Issues in water governance:
  • Governance of water suffers from three kinds of “hydro-schizophrenia”: Between irrigation and drinking water, surface and groundwater, as also water and wastewater.
  • Government, working in silos, have generally dealt with just one side of these binaries.

Recommendations of New Water Policy of India

• Effective and efficient demand management: Need to bring radical changes in water demand pattern.
  • Crop diversification, public procurement rationalisation with ideal of saving water.
  • Reduce-Recycle-Reuse: Integrate urban water supply and wastewater management, with sewage treatment and eco-restoration of urban river stretches, through decentralised wastewater management.
• Augmenting supply-side: The NWP majorly emphasize on supply of water through “nature-based solutions” such as rejuvenation of catchment areas, through incentives and compensation for eco-system services.
  • Blue-green infrastructure, such as rain gardens and bio-swales, restored rivers with wet meadows, wetlands constructed for bio-remediation, urban parks, permeable pavements, green roofs etc are proposed for urban areas.
• Prioritise sustainable and equitable management of groundwater: Participatory groundwater management is the key.
  • Information on aquifer boundaries, water storage capacities and flows shall be provided in a user-friendly manner to stakeholders would enable them to develop protocols for effective management of groundwater.
• Steps to restore river flows: Re-vegetation of catchments, regulation of groundwater extraction, river-bed pumping and mining of sand and boulders.
  • Draft a Rights of Rivers Act, including their right to flow, to meander and to meet the sea.
• Improve water Quality of India: Adoption of state-of-the-art, low-cost, low-energy, eco-sensitive technologies for sewage treatment.
  • Task force on emerging water contaminants to better understand and tackle threats they are likely to pose.
• Creation of a unified multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder National Water Commission (NWC): Solving water problems requires understanding whole systems, deploying multi-disciplinary teams and a trans-disciplinary approach.
  • The indigenous knowledge of our people, with a long history of water management, is an invaluable intellectual resource that must be fully leveraged.