Ashok Chawla Committee on Allocation of Natural Resources - Recommendations on water - PIB release, May 2011

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The Committee on Allocation of Natural Resources (CANR) under the chairmanship of Shri Ashok Chawla submitted its report on 31^st May, 2011. The major recommendations of CANR on water are given below. The recommendations of CANR have been referred to Group of Ministers.

The major recommendations of the Committee are -

• The Committee sees an urgent need to have a comprehensive national legislation on water. This can be either done through bringing water under the Concurrent List and then framing the appropriate legislation; or, by obtaining consensus from a majority of the States that such a “framework law” is necessary and desirable as a Union enactment. The legal options in this regard need to be examined by the Ministry of Water Resources. The national legislation should clarify a common position on a number of issues, e.g., need to consider all water resources as a conjunctive, unified whole; water as a common property resource; principles of allocations and pricing and so on. The framework legislation should recognize that pollution also leads to conjunctive use of water, which makes the resource unusable for other purposes.
• In the meantime, the Committee recommends amending the River Boards’ Act, 1956 and include groundwater in its ambit, while assigning the River Boards Act (RBA) a managerial role in management of water resources. The process of seeking political consensus from States for making the Act more effective should be taken up pro-actively by the Union Government's Ministry of Water Resources.
• The Committee recommends aquifer level mapping, along with hydro-geological studies, and pilot projects to be initiated in different settings to address the problems of groundwater management urgently. 

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