Successive national water policies have had no impact whatsoever on India’s water management


Today is World Water Day. It is imperative that politicians and general public do some soul searching on the impacts of poor water management for decades on the country’s future social and economic development.

Take its National Water Policy (NWP). India was a pioneer in developing NWP in 1987, when such a policy was rather uncommon. Since then the Indian NWP has been revised twice, in 2002 and in 2012. However, more than 30 years after the first NWP, far from helping India in modifying her water management practices to achieve the desired social, economic and environmental outcomes, successive NWPs have had no impact whatsoever on water management.

Driven by a compulsion to be politically correct, while also being influenced by fashionable ideas paraded in international water seminars, all the versions of NWPs have promoted ideas that are un-implementable in the Indian context. For example all the NWPs have endorsed basin as a unit for all planning, and have recommended establishment of River Basin Organisations (RBOs) as the platform where all the stakeholders in a basin are represented, and where such basin planning can be done. NWP 2012 went a step further and stated that comprehensive legislation needs to be enacted to establish RBOs. However, after three decades of espousing basin as a unit for all planning, no basin is being planned or developed thus, and there isn’t even one inter-state RBO......Read more

 

Source web page: Times of indiaNational Water Policy, RBO, IWRM, PPP


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