Getting More from Less: Story of India's Shrinking Water Resources

Ashok Gulati (), Bharat Raj Sharma, Pritha Banerjee and Gayathri Mohan
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Ashok Gulati: Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER)

Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) Report from Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi, India

Abstract: India is facing an unprecedented stress on her water resources arising from changing pattern of Indian monsoon, declining per capita availability and changing sectoral allocation of water demand. The most challenging situation for the policymakers to tackle is, however, shrinking of per capita availability and also the water resources per se, in India. The available resources are shrinking quantitatively due to infrastructure inadequacies and exploitative extractions and weak policies, regulations and insufficient funds; and qualitatively due to widespread pollution, contamination and decay of rivers, water bodies, wetlands and groundwater resources. The gap is widening at all the three levels- gap between availability and utilization of the resources, gap between potential created and utilized, and gap between demand and supply of the resources. Possible policy measures suggested in the report with hope of assisting policymakers to implement proper management practices in order to make the irrigation water sector more efficient and sustainable. In this background, this report, in two parts, addresses main challenges in agricultural water through ground water and canal water- covering almost 87 percent of India's net irrigated area. The cost of ground water and canal water (creation and utilization) has been computed and time and cost-over runs of selected canal irrigation projects evaluated in this report. It also highlights fast depleting groundwater resources in certain regions of India.

Keywords: groundwater; irrigation; icrier; nabard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 170 page
Date: 2019-10
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdc:report:19-r-15

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