In India, the increasing population and ensuring its food security and changing social values made it very difficult to manage available surface and groundwater supplies in many areas due to competing economic and ecological demands on water. There are challenges of unpredictable climate, old and often inefficient infrastructure, lack of data and information regarding infra, water supplies and demands, etc.. To effectively develop and manage water resources from the local to the national level, there is a necessity for stronger collaboration and cooperation across institutional, political and geographic boundaries at river basin level.
Integrated water resources management (IWRM) is the systematic and holistic approach for sustainable socio-economic development that encompasses water, land and ecosystems as the physical environment. To forge different developmental activities without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems, the concept has been in vogue world over, over four decades as a framework to implement for better coordination amongst operating and management entities within a water resources system. Also, the National Water Policy (NWP) also emphasises the need of planning water resources in an integrated manner on the lines of IWRM. Under UNGA resolution 2015, every nation is to implement SDGs and as per SDG 6.5 which focuses on water management, the constituent nations need to implement IWRM at all levels to address sustainable water resources development and management by 2030.
Challenges of managing Water Resources
In the middle of 20th century, responsible agencies built a system of reservoirs, canals, pumps and pipelines to store water and deliver it to agricultural and urban users in dry areas. Also, significant investments were made in flood protection projects to build flood banks and to divert flood flow canals. These changes to the physical infrastructure have resulted in unintended consequences for natural systems. Moreover, climate change’s impact on these sources is a worrying aspect. Most groundwater aquifer systems are not properly managed. Inconsistent and inadequate tools, resources make managing groundwater difficult in a given river basin and impede our ability to address problems such as overdraft, seawater intrusion, land subsidence, and water quality degradation. Central and state fisheries agencies now list many species of fish as endangered and threatened. Also, wildlife habitat is being lost at a rapid pace, due to the reduction of flows into wetlands.
Importance of Data and Information
In the name of development schemes, each Institution is taking up programmes and projects to suit its primary objective and overlooking the detrimental effects that may even harm its primary objective in the long term. With regard to water resources schemes or projects, some of the pertinent questions for which getting a proper answer is not easy. Who is the custodian of records to understand the geographical changes due to human interventions, like irrigation works, aquaculture, industrialisation and urbanisations, SEZs, etc.? Is there any review of the effects on natural river systems because of ignoring watershed hydrology in existing irrigation systems? Are there any scientific reports on damage to hydro-ecology in a river basin? Are there any reports on restoration to safeguard watershed hydrology in the existing irrigation systems? For such questions most of the time easy answer is negative. Sharing of general basin-wide data and information, and further sharing of more specific information regarding proposed projects, programmes and policies, will assist basin partners to more readily develop trust and respect for one another.
Decision-making risks
Over decades, IWRM-based projects are being implemented with little seriousness, though mandated by national and international funding agencies. Some are mostly managed by the participation of a particular community/beneficiary under NGO’s monitoring. Reports and information collected by many stakeholder agencies, monitoring the river was not in the knowledge or access to modellers. Water is the state subject. The network of data stations was sparse due to manual observations to record hydrological and meteorological parameters. Most of the stations were for investigation purposes and were not monitored once the purpose was over. Due to limited data, model results tend to be more uncertain and decision- making tends to go awry. Stakeholders were in isolation and interaction was poor. The data was in registers and reports. So, this used to result in poor outcomes during IWRM planning and implementation. So most inland and coastal ecosystems perished due to projects launched till the 1980s.
Coping with the stress on river by IWRM
Subsequent projects were implanted and concerned to adapt IWRM approach but decision-making was challenging. Though technology advanced, it was not so affordable to remotely sense, log and transmit the data till 2000s. But, the effect of projects is monitored and evaluated frequently, and remedial measures were advised suitably. There is a need to cope with stresses on a given river basin. This is because basin water resources are committed and there are challenges posed by water quality and its scarcity. Stakeholder societies respond to water shortages at basin scale and local scale in many ways, at both the individual and community levels in different basins. While the main emphasis is on the coping strategies advocated by Central, State and technical experts, the real responses at different levels of society are often not noticed. Integration across different organisational levels is essential for IWRM to be fruitful.
Data-driven decision making
According to NWP, it is important to make every effort to develop, conserve, utilise and manage this important natural resource in a sustainable manner with a national perspective. Thus, recognising the criticality of high-quality and consistent water data for a sound IWRM framework, National Water Information Centre (NWIC) under the Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation (DoWR, RD & GR) is now functional as part of Ministry of Jal Shakti (MoJS), Government of India to undertake data-driven decision making at different levels. NWIC collects, collates and processes hydrologic data regularly from agencies that monitor surface water and groundwater all over India. It has data on surface water from 17,000 locations and on groundwater from 75,000 locations. NWIC under its purview is handling the operations and maintenance of two IT Platforms – India-WRIS and WIMS. NWIC also supports the establishment of State Water Information Centres (SWIC) creating opportunities to build water information products and services based on the data being collected by local agencies.
Also Read | SDG 6.5 – Implement Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)
Since the launch of Hydrology Projects I, II, and the present National Hydrology Project, there has been a revolution in both surface and groundwater data monitoring. Network density is better, and temporal resolution on water quantity and quality of supplies and uses is improving. Technology is also affordable and data flow is fast and is disseminated in a tailor-made mode. It is also available as GIS to directly input Integrated Water Resources Planning and Management linked to Decision Support Systems. So, decision-making can be made more accurately now to better IWRM strategies.
Views expressed by S. V. Vijaya Kumar, Scientist G, National Institute of Hydrology, North Eastern Regional Centre, Guwahati.