Even many parts across the States are facing one of the most serious water crisis, a new Government report has asserted that India is not a water deficit country but due to severe neglect and lack of monitoring of water resources development projects, many regions in the country experience water stress from time to time.
To plug the leaks, the report ‘Reassessment of water availability in India using space inputs’, prepared by the Central Water Commission (CWC) with technical support of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad has suggested imposing regulatory measures to prevent the misuse of water and introducing rewards and punishment to encourage judicious use of water, to conserve water.
“It is, therefore, necessary to prevent the crisis by making best use of the available technologies and resources to conserve the existing water resources, convert them into utilisable form and make efficient use of them for agriculture, industrial production and human consumption.
“Finally, awareness and orientation of all the water users to change their lifestyle to conserve water can help the country to tide over the water crisis. The challenge is manageable provided we have favourable policies and mechanisms to persuade our people to change their lifestyle,” said the report. It has, however, warned that further neglect will lead to water scarcity in future.
Asserting that the existing gauging sites (process of measuring water flow) are not enough, the report has called for developing and improving the hydrological observation network and making the data available through the common infrastructure using standardised formats.
“More gauging stations should be established at the terminal gauging sites of all the basins including composite basins of West Flowing River sand East Flowing Rivers, since the existing gauging stations are considered inadequate,” said the report which was conducted to assess the long-term average annual water resources availability in the river basins during 1984-85 to 2014-15 (30 years).
The total catchment area considered for the study was 32,71,953 square kilometres across 20 river basins in India. The study painted grim picture of water availability in major rivers like Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra river basins while in the rest of the basins, says the report, there is an increase in water availability with the largest increase in Barak and WFR (West Flowing Rivers) from Tapi to Tadri. The average annual water resource of the 20 basins of the country has been assessed as 1999.20 billion cubic metre (BCM).
The report pointed out that over-exploitation of groundwater is another concern. Presently, there are over 20 million wells pumping water with free power supply, provided by the Government. This has been depleting groundwater, while encouraging wastage of water in many States.
“As a result, the water table is dipping every year by 0.4 m. In many coastal areas, there has been heavy intrusion of sea water, making fertile agricultural lands unfit for cultivation.
By and large, the infrastructure development in the water sector has been extremely slow and investment has not been optimum,” it noted.
