Conservation - Reducing Water Usage

The challenges to sustain groundwater dependency in India are many where groundwater over extraction is not only leading to rapid depletion of the resource, but also giving rise to water quality issues in a situation where the response at the level of policy continues to be lukewarm.

This library collates capacity building content on groundwater maangement that has been made openly available by various programmes and organisations. 

How to use the content library:

1) Content on groundwater management is arranged per programme lifecycle on this grid - starting from sensitisation and awareness generation to monitoring and evaluation.

2) You can sort through the content, search for key words and filter by conditions that are appropritate for your programme (e.g. Stakeholder/ language).

Common pool resources, popularly known as “commons”, are those resources which are accessible to the whole community or village and to which no individual has exclusive ownership or property rights. Commons have two essential characteristics: non-excludability and high-subtractability. Non-excludability means that it is impossible or very costly to restrict a user from using the resource, and subtractability or “rivalness” means that use of the resource by one user will diminish benefits for other users.

The use of reverse osmosis (RO) purifiers has become a contentious issue, mainly because of the amount of water that is wasted following its use. Last May, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) issued an order to ban RO purifiers in cases where the total dissolved solids in the water source were less than 500 mg/litre.

After independence, India was largely food insecure but post Green Revolution around the 1970s, foodgrain production increased manifold consequently reducing food insecurity and poverty in the country, in spite of rapid population growth. Its ability to achieve targeted results was largely dependent on the explosion of groundwater abstraction mechanisms like tubewells.

A committee has been constituted to draft a new National Water Policy (NWP) and make key changes in the water governance structure and regulatory framework. It is chaired by Mihir Shah, who is a former Planning Commission member and a water expert. The committee is expected to produce a report within six months. The Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture (RRA) Network, a pan India network working on evolving operational processes for planning and convergence to facilitate the revival of rainfed agriculture has made its submission to the committee drafting the NWP.

The recent trade war between the United States and China was, among other things, about virtual water - the hidden water in products. Producing anything, whether it is soyabean or clothes, uses water, and has a water footprint. Even after production, shipping and trading also have a hidden water cost.

A new study finds that introducing coarse cereals such as millet and sorghum could improve India’s national food supply in many ways. The study by the Data Science Institute at Columbia University found that India’s agricultural policies have largely focused on the single objective of maximizing production, and not enough attention has been given to nutrition, climate, and environment.

The National Mission for Cleaning Ganga was set up in 2014 and the Namami Gange programme was launched the year after, with a budget outlay of Rs. 20,000 crore. The implementation of the flagship programme was followed by the framing of a draft National River Ganga (Rejuvenation, Protection and Management) Bill, 2019 to be introduced in the winter session of Parliament.