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Failure to master groundwater game will bring serious ecological, socio-economic consequences, say researchers.

Coalition of leading water and development researchers meets in Gujarat to look at options to tackle India's water crisis.

Anand, Gujarat, 16th February 2002. If India fails to master the game of groundwater aquifer recharge, the over-use of this resource will have disastrous consequences for much of western and peninsular India. It will create serious ecological problems and put the brakes on socio-economic progress in the region. These are the findings of researchers from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and a coalition of Indian research partners, which will be presented in a special conference in Anand on 19-20 February 2002.

The meeting brings together a group of renowned economists, hydrologists, sociologists and development specialists from India and the international research community, with government officials, to examine these findings and make recommendations for the policy actions to be taken. The meeting, hosted at the Institute of Rural Management (IRMA) in Anand, focuses on communicating a set of new research findings to a wider audience. It will make public a series of actionable and implementable policy recommendations that can improve the groundwater situation in India.

"India manages less than 10% of its total available water, that flows into rivers and reservoirs" says Dr Tushaar Shah, Indian groundwater expert who leads IWMI-Tata Water Policy Research Program from the institute's office in Anand, Gujarat. "To fight its growing water scarcity, India needs to focus more on managing its rainfall - most of which arrives in the three-month monsoon period. And underground aquifers are our best allies to capture and store this water for later use," Shah emphasizes.

Irrigation from groundwater pumped by an estimated two crore wells and tubewells contributes some Rs. 13,200 crore to India's annual agricultural production. To sustain this booming economy, India must manage its aquifers better, and double the annual rate of recharge to the aquifers.

The research that has generated these facts and options has grown out of the IWMI-Tata Water Policy Research Program. It is a research and policy communication initiative that aims to translate the results of water resources research done in India, into practical solutions that policy makers can take up. And into concepts that help the public better understand what the water crisis is and how it can be lessened.

The Program is building a coalition of Indian water resources researchers and institutes, who are studying the pressing water scarcity issues facing communities in India today. "There is much excellent work being done in the water sector in India. Our endeavor is to present the results of this work in such a way that a villager or city dweller can directly benefit from our research," says Shah. In its first year of operation, marked this month, the program has worked with over 60 researchers, including some 35 college teachers in Gujarat, 25 scientists from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and a dozen scientists from South India and Sri Lanka and the international research community.

Conclusions of this first year's research under the IWMI-Tata Program will be presented at the Anand workshop. Researchers will highlight lessons that can benefit a broad audience of water stakeholders in India and add to the body of international research knowledge on water resources management. These include:

• Wastewater use in peri-urban areas of Vadodara sustains a booming agricultural economy of Rs 82 crore; but its health and environmental impacts need to be better understood.
• Research in the Lower Gangetic Plains suggests that advancing rice transplantation by a month could increase productivity of the crop by 3-5 times, and control the problem of water logging during post monsoon months.
• In the Punjab and Haryana, where groundwater depletion and secondary salinization are big threats to agricultural production, another IWMI study suggests that channeling excess water through unlined canals for kharif irrigation is the best way of recharging groundwater.
• Fluoride-related health problems will cripple nearly a million Gujaratis in the coming decade. A majority of these will be from poorer households who cannot afford the treated water that is supplied by dozens of mineral water plants that have sprouted in North Gujarat in the past five years.
• Researchers IWMI-Tata Program researchers estimate that some 10% of upper-income households in North Gujarat towns are served by these private water suppliers at a cost of Rs. 2500/year for a daily supply of 20 liters of de-fluoridated water. As most households can not afford such high 'water budgets', they end up drinking tube well water with high fluoride content, and over years, face the threat of being crippled.
• Answers to this and other groundwater depletion problems may lie in a range of solutions, including decentralized water harvesting. Recent research at IWMI shows that artificially recharging rainwater into underground aquifers augments natural recharge by 4-13% even in the hardrock aquifers of Western India. Some 40 percent of open dug wells are likely to benefit from the ongoing mass recharge movement in Saurashtra this year.
• Another analysis by IWMI-Tata Program researchers shows that all the recharge structures created in Saurashtra increase groundwater availability after the monsoon of the order of one km3. Using satellite imagery, these researchers have concluded that there is a significant increase in biomass in Saurashtra and Kutch during 1988-99 due to decentralized water harvesting and groundwater recharge movement.
• In North Gujarat, which is emerging as the world's most serious groundwater disaster, IWMI has launched the North Gujarat Initiative for Sustainable Groundwater, in collaboration with Gujarat Ecology Commission, the Institute for Rural Management (IRMA), Banaskantha dairy co-operative union and local organizations. The objective of the Initiative is to experiment with alternative strategies for bridging the gap between demand and supply of groundwater.

For more details, visit http://www.iwmi.org/iwmi-tata.

About the International Water Management Institute

IWMI, with its headquarters in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is a Future Harvest research center, supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The Institute has offices in over 10 Asian and African countries and puts is water resources research into action in some 20 developing countries.

IWMI's India research program is operated through a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research of the Government of India. The India Regional Office is located in Hyderabad on the campus of sister institute ICRISAT.

The IWMI-Tata Water Resources Policy Program is based in a project office in Anand, Gujarat. The program is supported by a grant from the Sri Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai.