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Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said that Uttar Pradesh was lucky to be blessed with natural resources like water – surface and ground – and it was a responsibility to conserve it for future generation.
Yogi said speaking on the concluding day of Groundwater Week function in Lucknow on Wednesday. He said, “When we talk about water, the state is lucky to have abundant natural resources. It is a valuable resource and it is our duty to conserve it. There has been mindless extraction of groundwater in the recent past. Now, we need to look for recharge of ground water.”
The chief minister said that in the last three-four decades, groundwater in rural and urban areas had been extracted abnormally. He said in 287 of 823 blocks of UP, water level had gone down by more than 20 centimetres resulting in decline in availability of groundwater.
“The need of the hour is to recharge groundwater and it can be done by the government only with the help of citizens. It is the duty of every citizen to ensure that rain water does not go waste and special awareness campaigns will be launched for this soon,” Yogi said.
The chief minister said that serious attempts were made to conserve water in the last three years. “Old water bodies were revived, check dams were built in water-scarce Bundelkhand region and new irrigation methods like sprinklers, which uses less water, were used to irrigate the land. Also quality of groundwater was also checked in river basins so that a master plan could be prepared,” he said.
Yogi appealed to the people to use rainwater harvesting mechanisms in their houses as a long-term solution for water conservation.
“The present BJP government is committed to groundwater conservation and management and hence UP Groundwater Management and Regulation Act, 2019 was enforced under which rainwater harvesting has been made mandatory in all government buildings,” he said.
Yogi further said, “Many regions in UP have saline or arsenic rich groundwater due to excessive extraction of groundwater. These areas should be identified and corrective steps should be taken immediately.”
The chief minister spoke to various water conservation experts of Kanpur, Jhansi, Banda, Meerut and Lalitpur through video conferencing on the occasion.