Water bodies

The water resources ministry's reported proposal to invest as much as Rs 5,000 crore in 32 districts affected by farmer suicides, with a view to ensuring water security, is a move in the right direction as water holds the key to preventing recurring crop losses. What is hard to understand is the time taken by the ministry to conceive this rather obvious measure. Also found wanting is the manner in which the relief package announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for these areas, has been implemented. This package, too, has a strong water management component, but implementation has been poor. This apart, the water resources ministry has with it the reports of several committees that have recommended promoting technologies like sprinkler and drip irrigation to optimise crop productivity per drop of water in all the water-scarce areas of the country. But little has been done on this front barring, of course, continuing with the subsidy being given for drip and sprinkler irrigation equipment.

The record of failures on the water front gets longer. There has been little action on rainwater harvesting, though this is critical for managing water resources, especially in the drought-prone and rainfed areas. The other failure concerns the management of groundwater. What is relevant here is that the availability of water in rivers and canals, being rain-dependent, is seasonal and generally available in abundance when needed the least. Groundwater, on the other hand, is more reliable provided it is managed well. In any case, canal irrigation accounts only for about 31.5 per cent of the present total irrigation capacity, while groundwater's share through wells and tube-wells is almost twice that, at 58.7 per cent. Besides, over 80 per cent of the water requirement of the domestic sector and nearly half of that of the urban and industrial sectors is met through groundwater.

What needs to be realised is that while almost the entire canal water supply network has to be financed by public investment, much of the infrastructure for tapping groundwater can be and is funded privately. Equally important is the point that the per-hectare cost of creating irrigation capacity through the canal system, as also the gestation period of such systems, is far higher than that of wells-based water supply. Of course, the indiscriminate exploitation of groundwater, as has been happening in Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and in pockets elsewhere, is a cause for concern and needs to be curbed.

Perhaps the Prime Minister had all this in mind when he mooted the idea of setting up a National Rainfed Area Authority (NRAA), in his Independence Day address in August 2005. This new authority was supposed to bring about convergence and synergy when dealing with the numerous ongoing and proposed programmes for rainwater harvesting, and to achieve optimal utilisation of the available water in the vast rainfed tracts. However, 17 long months later, this authority is yet to become operational though the dispute over which minister should head it (which initially had held up its creation) was resolved several months ago by naming both the agriculture and rural development ministers as co-chairmen of the proposed body. Considering the urgency of the matter, the government should not lose any more time in making this authority functional, and in arming it with the necessary powers to make water management and the development of water resources an area of success rather than one of abject failure.