Niti Aayog recently announced that India was going through its worst water crisis in history
A week after Niti Aayog admitted that India was going through one of its worst water crisis in history, its chairman Amitabh Kant while writing a piece for The Economic Times stressed on the need to improve water management.
He said that the governing body could facilitate the targeted dissemination of findings to states and support them in improving their water management policies and plans through workshops and discussions. “The critical need for each state to improve its water management and, therefore, its ranking makes this a task that is imperative,” he wrote.
“The eventual goal is to broaden the participation parameters and allow sector experts to share innovation and create innovative products that tackle the problems. And because this is real time and dynamic, improving performance by a state is reflected on an ongoing basis,” he added.
Earlier, Niti Aayog said that the water management index ranked 24 states on the basis of nine broad indicators, based on data for 2015-16 and 2016-17, and Gujarat topped the index, the report stated. Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra followed Gujarat on the index while Tripura ranked as the best among Northeastern and hill states.
While Niti Aayog's water ranking index ranks how well the states have developed, a DNA report earlier this year also highlighted the grim situation. At the time, Himanshu Thakkar of India Water Portal, South Asia Network on Dam, Rivers and People, admitted that while he didn’t want to sound like an alarmist, the situation was grim in India. “We will only know how the crisis pans out in summer. Take one of India’s most prosperous states, Gujarat, for example. A disaster is already developing in the downstream areas of the Narmada basin. We already witnessed what happened in Maharashtra in the past four out of six years. Keeping this in mind, also know that even in the best of times, sections of the poor do not have access to clean drinking water. None of the river plains in India have potable water, as the groundwater levels are depleting and quality is deteriorating,” he said.
Anshu Sharma, the co-founder of SEEDS, in the same report added that the average Indian is grossly unaware of the imminent water crisis that most Indian cities (and villages) will face in the coming times. "Common perception is limited to local authorities supplying water in pipelines, and it arriving at the taps at home or in the community. Where this water is sourced from, what are the gaps, and what it takes to clean and transport this water is something that most of us are blind to. These aspects need to be understood in order for us to adequately value this critical resource that we so often take for granted,” he said.
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