Quoting the NITI Aayog’s 2018 report that highlights the water crisis facing the country, with 21 cities expected to run out of groundwater this year, WOTR says this underscores the need to evolve a NWP that “not only addresses imminent challenges but also establishes a framework and pathway to sustainable, efficient and equitable management of surface and groundwater resources”.

WOTR proposes that ‘water for ecology and the environment’ must be the second-most important priority after water for drinking and domestic needs. The environment and its ecology, it says, are what provide the essential and crucial ecosystem services like water, food, fuel, wood, and fibre, as well as balancing the climate.

The survival, sustenance, and progress of the human race and civilisation itself, all depend on this, and securing these ecosystem services is of utmost importance – especially with the climate change and rising global temperatures which will adversely affect India.

With three water-intensive crops – rice, wheat, and sugarcane – consuming almost 80 per cent of irrigation water, a reduction in the area under these crops, together with crop diversification and use of micro-irrigation, can significantly contribute to alleviating water scarcity and making additional water resources available for other needs, especially in rainfed and drought-prone regions. This move can change the overall cropping pattern and free up water resources for other needs.

Re-prioritising public investments in the water and agriculture sectors to promote water use efficiency and infrastructure development, accelerating and augmenting programmes for watershed and catchment development as well as soil and water conservation works, an ecosystem-based adaptation approach, developing catchments of dams on a priority basis and pricing groundwater use and making its contamination a punishable offence are among the other measures the new NWP should include, WOTR hopes. Is the committee listening?