Strengthening Water Security in a Water-Stressed India

Context

India is experiencing an unprecedented situation of water security. While public discourse traditionally relies on the monsoon to replenish reserves, climate change has severely disrupted historical rainfall patterns. Monsoon is becoming more extreme, with intense short bouts of rain and long dry periods. This erratic distribution prevents effective soil absorption and natural aquifer recharge, proving that meteorological events alone cannot solve India’s structural water deficits. The country has about 18% of the world’s human population but only 4% of the world’s renewable freshwater resources.

Structural Drivers of India’s Water Stress

• Agricultural Distortions and Crop Choices: Agriculture is responsible for more than 80% to 85% of the usage of available freshwater in India. The legacy of the Green Revolution, supported by a set of distortive Minimum Support Price (MSP) procurement policies and highly subsidized or free electricity, encourages water-intensive crops like sugarcane and paddy cultivation in water-scarce areas like Punjab, Haryana and Western Maharashtra.
• Unregulated Groundwater Exploitation: India consumes most groundwater than all the other countries of the world together, more than 50% of the annual extraction in the country is unregulated. In the absence of firm legal title to underground resources, the competition for and unregulated drilling are common. This reckless extraction results in the depletion of huge aquifer bodies and creates geogenic contamination like widespread arsenic and fluoride poisoning in rural water supplies.
• Urbanization and Infrastructure Mismanagement: Rapid, unplanned urban expansion has led to the encroachment and destruction of natural recharge zones, wetlands, and floodplains. At the same time, the cities are releasing huge quantities of untreated domestic waste into the streams, to which the surface water is unsuitable, and have to depend on deep borewells and private tanker gangs.

Policy Shifts: Transitioning from Supply to Demand Management

Historical engineering solutions were largely concerned with expanding the supply of water through large dams, canals and ambitious river linking projects. Water governance needs a fundamental paradigm shift from demand management to resource efficiency and behavioural change in structures.

Agricultural Policy Alignment

• Incentivized Crop Diversification: For arid areas, State procurement policies must incentivize increased production of climate resilient crops like millets, pulses and oilseeds compared to water intensive crops like sugarcane.
• Micro-Irrigation Scaling: It is important to rationalize the scheme of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) – Per Drop More Crop and ensure that this is available to smallholder farmers without any bureaucratic delays.

Groundwater Governance and Community Ownership

• Participatory aquifer management: Scaling up community-led initiatives such as Atal Bhujal Yojana to map local aquifers and create village water security budgets.
• Legal Decoupling: Create reformed property rights based on the old colonial era law to separate ownership with the right to extract water underground without restrictions.

Creating a Circular Water Economy

• Industrial and Urban Recycling (IUR): Application of strict regulations to industries and mega-residential complexes to treat and use graywater for purposes other than potable water.
• Sponge Cities” Infrastructure: Nature based solution to restore urban wetlands, institutionalize rainwater harvesting and introduce permeable pavements.

Institutional and Legislative Frameworks

• The Challenge of Fragmented Governance: Water is a State Subject (List II, Entry 17) under the Indian Constitution, and the Central Government has limited power to enforce uniform national measures. In addition, there is policy friction and delays in implementation due to the fragmentation in water administration across multiple overlapping ministries and departments.
• Critical Legislative Reforms: 
  • National Water Framework Bill: Adoption of a single, all-encompassing bill to provide a common set of guiding principles for equitable and sustainable inter-state water sharing.
  • Empowered River Basin Authorities: Beyond political conflict, from administrative boundaries to ecological boundaries, by establishing independent, scientific Basin Authorities.

Way Forward

India needs to move away from the perception of water as an infinite free good of nature and towards water as a limited and valuable economic asset. Sustainable water security requires a combination of bottom-up community engagement and top-down policy enforcement, including enforcing water auditing for industries and pollution penalties. Resilience of water infrastructure is not only a matter of the environment, but a key precondition for macro-economic stability, industrial development and food sovereignty in India.

Source: The Hindu

Download as PDF