India serves up a counter-intuitive report on looming water crisis
Published on by Trudi Schifter, CEO and Founder AquaSPE in Government
Within a span of a week, two interesting reports on the state of national water situations were made public. Indians have heard of NITI Ayog’s first-ever report on Composite Water Management Index, trying to determine the state of water management in India. Not many here would have heard of the United States Geological Survey (USGS)’s once in five-year-report on water consumption for various activities and states in the US. The US report was published on June 19, 2018, five days after the NITI Ayog report was launched on June 14 by Union Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari.
Both reports were by a federal agency, based on water information from various states, trying to give a picture of national, along with state-level water situation. While the scope of both the reports was not exactly identical and while the level of per capita income and consumption by two countries is very different, there are certain things that stand out when we compare the two reports.
What is the USGS? In its words: “As the Nation’s largest water, earth, and biological science and civilian mapping agency, USGS collects, monitors, analyzes, and provides science about natural resource conditions, issues, and problems.”
“Created by an act of Congress in 1879”, while USGS collects, monitors and analyses the water data from all over the country, it puts practically all of it promptly in public domain. Secondly, USGS is not a development organization, it does not sanction, monitor, finance or advocate any development project. So its complete focus is to generate high-quality data, without any conflict of interest.
NITI Ayog, in contrast, is a government institute that is involved in a large number of roles and is not involved in any focused activity on water issues. In NITI’s words: “NITI Ayog is the premier policy ‘Think Tank’ of the Government of India, providing both directional and policy inputs. While designing strategic and long-term policies and programs for the Government of India, NITI Aayog also provides relevant technical advice to the Center and States.” There is a clear conflict of interest involved in these various duties of the Ayog, when one compares with what it set out to achieve in the CWMI report it came out with now.
As USGS report says, “This report, “Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015,” is the 14th in a series of US Geological Survey (USGS) Circular reports that have been published every five years since 1950.” On the other hand, the NITI report says: “This pioneering work of NITI Aayog in developing a Composite Water Management Index is perhaps the first of its kind in the world.”
Leaving aside the baseless claim of the index being the first of its kind in the world, the NITI report was clearly overachieving when it states: “The Composite Water Management Index (CWMI) is a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive scorecard for identifying, targeting, and solving problems in the water sector across the country.”
The first step of achieving such a transformation is having robust water data. But the Ayog accepts that water data system in India is limited in coverage, robustness and efficiency and available data is of inferior quality, is inconsistent and unreliable. Unfortunately, NITI Ayog does not even mention that India’s top hydrological data gatherer is the Central Water Commission which is responsible for the pathetic water data situation in India. And that CWC, unlike USGS, suffers from a conflict of interest with respect to various other roles it performs.
The NITI Ayog report has many serious draw backs. For such a report to have credibility, its process needs to be pre-determined, pre-declared, transparent and managed by a credible independent team. There is no involvement of civil society or communities in this whole exercise.
Taxonomy
- Integrated Water Management
- Water Supply
- Water Integrity
- India
1 Comment
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The NITI Aayog Index rightly indentifies the issues with water data in the country and should be lauded for the same. However, at the core of the water crisis is the disruption of the normal functioning of the hydrological cycle of the country and the need for restoring this cycle. The index has failed to identify this critical issue.
Although the index is targeted at instilling a sense of competitiveness in states for better water use and management outcomes by incentivizing such outcomes, the index doesn’t mention what these incentives are/will be and if they will be tangible. In the absence of tangible incentives for better performances, how can one expect the states to improve water management practices when we see the state of things as of now?
Irrigation potential statistics provided at the time of project approval doesn’t hold good for long. It does not help in measuring the actual irrigation achieved. It will be better to compare the net irrigated area with the gross irrigated area to incentivize further improvement.
One of the indicators asks the states whether any regulatory framework for groundwater has been passed. This is a simple yes or no question. It will not yield any information on the implementation of such acts. Such questions need to be reframed.
Creating new projects for filling up the gap between IPC and IPU will not be helpful as stated above. It would be better to find out why this gap exists in the first place.
Farmer Producer Societies with 30-50 hectare land area should be encouraged to reduce input costs, increase mechanization, expand area under micro-irrigation, and improve water-use efficiency.
To improve water use efficiency in irrigated agriculture, the distribution to farmers from canals should be modified and integrated with groundwater. Moreover, existing structures should be maintained properly.
A possible incentive for states is increased allotment of funds for O&M of irrigation assets. These funds should be provided in the form of reimbursement to the states after the selected works have been completed.
Incentives can also be provided in cases where there has been an increase in area cultivated after adoption of cropping patterns suited to agro-climatic zones.
The spread of micro-irrigation should also be incentivized by allocation of more funds for the same. Again, the allocation of funds should be in the form of reimbursement after a stated target for a particular FY has been achieved.
Subsidies for micro-irrigation and other farm equipment should be provided to the farmer societies and not to the manufacturers of such equipment. Similarly, subsidies provided on electricity and water should be withdrawn to avoid over-use and wastage of water.
Desalinization has now become cheaper with improved technology and desalinized water is now being used by the heavy industries in coastal areas. It would help in reducing the use of groundwater. This should be added to the water availability statistics.
The focus of NITI aayog should be on the following:
The regulation of water and land resources based on primary requirements of domestic use and food security for the year 2050 when the population is expected to reach 1600 million.
The regulation of resources for livelihood security for which the key sectors are services, industry, and agriculture.