India Water Week

• India celebrated India Water Week from April 10, 2012. The inaugural ceremony was chaired by the Prime Minister.
• The India Water Week is focussing this year on the important themes of water, food and energy security.
• The Ministry of Water Resources since this year has endeavoured to celebrate India Water Week annually as an international event to focus on water issues.
• It would provide a global platform for water related issues that will bring policy makers, industry leaders, experts, professionals and practitioners together to address the challenges, showcase technologies, discover opportunities, recognizing the excellence of professionals/organizations and celebrate their achievements. 
• The first international event in the series of India Water Week on “Water, Energy and Food Security: Call for Solutions” was organized during April 10-14, 2012 at New Delhi.

Water resource scenario in India

Challenges

• With around 17% of the world’s population but only 4% of its usable fresh water, India has a scarcity of water.
• Rapid economic growth and urbanisation are widening the demand supply gap.
• Climate change could further aggravate the availability of water in the country as it threatens the water cycle.
• Our water bodies are getting increasingly polluted by untreated industrial effluents and sewage.
• Groundwater levels are falling in many parts due to excess drawals leading to contamination with fluoride, arsenic and other chemicals.
• The practice of open defecation, which regrettably is all too widespread, contributes to contaminating potable water sources.

Initiatives

• The Planning Commission has identified the challenge of managing our water resources in a rational and sustainable manner as one of the critical challenges in the Twelfth Five year Plan. It will require action on many fronts and coordination across different sectors of our economy.
• India has launched a National Water Mission as part of Action Plan on Climate Change. The main objective of this Mission is to achieve integrated management of water resources by conserving water, minimizing wastage and ensuring its more equitable distribution both across and within various States of our Union. The Mission proposed a review of the National Water Policy and a draft of the new Policy has been put in the public domain for widespread public consultation.
• The draft National Water Policy recommends taking the river basin / sub-basin as a unit for planning and management of water resources and proposes that departments / organizations at the Centre and the States be restructured and be made multi-disciplinary.
• It also proposes the establishment of water regulatory authorities in each State and a national forum to deliberate upon issues relating to water and evolve consensus, cooperation and reconciliation amongst the various States.
• There is a suggestion that a broad over-arching national legal framework of general principles on water is necessary to pave the way for essential legislation on water governance in every State.
• The National Water Mission sets a target of 20% improvement in water use efficiency. This is particularly critical in the agricultural sector, which uses about three fourth of our water resources and where the water use efficiency is low compared to international standards.

Further steps to be taken

• Management of our irrigation systems should move away from a narrow engineering-construction-centric approach to a more multi-disciplinary and participatory approach
• We need to focus on command area development in a holistic manner in our irrigation projects.
• We need to move towards transparent and participatory mechanisms of pricing of water by the primary stakeholders themselves.
• On the supply side we have been working on watershed management, rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge. Over the next five years, we need to give renewed vigour to all schemes that involve water.
• Conserving our groundwater is now an urgent priority because we depend on it for more than two thirds of our water needs. The decline in the water table across the country is a matter of serious concern. The present legal situation gives every land holder the right to pump unlimited quantities of water from a bore well on his own ground. There is no regulation of ground water extraction and no coordination among competing uses. Inadequate and sub-optimal pricing of both power and water is promoting the misuse of groundwater. We need to move to a situation where ground-water can be treated as a common property resource.
• We need to map the aquifers of India to obtain basic information on ground water availability. This will be initiated in the Twelfth Plan.
• We also need to promote participatory management of aquifers to ensure sustainable and equitable use and promoting cropping patterns which are aligned with the groundwater actually available.
• Access to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation are basic human needs. They are fundamentally linked to the health and wellbeing of our people. Groundwater sources of drinking water often fail due to competition over the same aquifer between public drinking water systems and private irrigation. In the absence of sound legal framework, drinking water systems often lose the contest.