The water crisis: Better conservation and efficiency in use are a must

The think tank projects the crisis will escalate with the water availability dwindling to merely half of the effective demand by 2030

The NITI Aayog’s water management index, viewed alongside the simultaneously released report of a study sponsored by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) on water productivity of different crops, depicts the country’s water stress as more grievous than generally perceived. But these dissertations fail to offer practical and politically acceptable solutions to overcome it. Dubbing the current water crisis as the worst in history, the NITI Aayog maintains that about 600 million people (nearly half the population) face high to extreme water scarcity. About 200,000 people die every year due to lack of safe water. The think