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 watersuffers 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-stakeholderNational 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.