Prime Minister of India - Dr. Manmohan Singh

PM's speech at the meeting of the Advisory Council on Artificial Recharge of Ground Water

"I am truly delighted to inaugurate this first meeting of the Advisory Council on Artificial Recharge of Groundwater. This is because, I sincerely believe that the management of water is going to be a key determinant of our ability to pursue such viable strategies for sustainable development in the twenty-first century. I am, therefore, very grateful to the members of this Advisory Council for sparing their time for this truly national duty. As I said, the issue of groundwater depletion and its recharge requires our utmost attention and urgent action. It is a matter truly of great national priority.

Groundwater irrigates the bulk of our farmers' fields. It is also estimated that roughly 80-90 per cent of drinking water comes from groundwater sources. Therefore, the management of this resource will determine the sustainability of water use in our country and holds the key to our water security.

Every country has to evolve a viable and sustainable water policy suited to the needs of its people and its resource endowment. In our sub-continent, where water resources are scarce, the management of ground water is of critical importance. Good water conservation will determine our future. It will ensure the food and livelihood security of millions of our people, particularly, those who live on the edges of subsistence.

The challenges are truly manifold. We have to augment our water resources - build large and small reservoirs to store water. We have to minimise our water use - invest in science and technology to ensure that we can grow crops, which use less water. In other words, we have to find ways of valuing the crop per drop of water. We have to ensure that the available water is not degraded or polluted in processes of its use.

We must find new ways in which urban households use water and discharge wastewater in a more economical way. We have to tackle the problem of water-waste even as we improve the efficiency of water use. These are modern challenges for water engineers, scientists, agriculturists and people to work together on. As Dr. Swaminathan has rightly remarked we need a judicious combination of regulation, education and social mobilisation. Therefore, you have a very challenging task ahead of you. We need your guidance in each one of these three areas - how to get the country moving at a sufficient pace to meet this growing national challenge.

India, of course, has had a rich tradition of water harvesting to meet local needs. Some of these practices are more than two millennia old. We must revive the community based water management concepts, like Paani Panchayats. Unless there is equity in water sharing, there will be no cooperation in water saving.

The lack of institutional support for small and marginal farmers in augmenting rural infrastructure and their dependence on private finance is turning out to be a key cause of farmer indebtedness and poverty in many parts of our country particularly areas which suffer from acute water stress. We have seen in Vidharbha, for instance, that debt incurred by small and marginal farmers to dig wells and augment water supply for cash crops has often contributed to their indebtedness. Debt, in turn, has driven them to desperation.

Vast areas of our country remain without irrigation and probably we will never be able to educate more than 50 per cent of our cultivated areas. Therefore, the use and conservation of water that we have is of critical importance. Despite the huge investments made in irrigation, the country remains predominantly rainfed. Water availability for agriculture therefore, remains the most critical and perhaps the most limiting factor on its growth. Investment in surface irrigation systems has created islands of prosperity but they have done not enough to improve local food scarcity in many parts of our country.

The problem as I see it is less that of availability and more that of utilisation. Water management strategies will therefore need to be carefully designed so that they contribute to a more equitable and more inclusive growth process. We need new forms of institutional management of water that ensure more equitable access to it. Our government is setting up the National Rainfed Area Authority. I hope your Council will interact with this new body and come out with constructive guidelines for future management.

It is important to think of groundwater like a bank account - we need to live off its interest (that is the water we recharge) and not its capital (i,e the stored water). Currently, without adequate attention to recharge, we are in many areas of our country literally mining our groundwater reserves.

We know that groundwater levels across the country are declining alarmingly. The water level in 306 districts has fallen by over 4 metres during the past 20 years, with many blocks in these districts categorised as over exploited or in critical stages of resource development. Technology is allowing for deeper and deeper penetration and extraction. But not with unmixed blessings.

We need to regulate this use. But we also know that it is an enormous challenge, perhaps an impossible challenge, to control the use of groundwater. It would mean new forms of licensing and lead to more problems than solutions in the poorest regions of our country.

But we cannot get away from the problem of overuse and depletion. We therefore, need different policies and strategies to deal with the issue. We need location specific strategies to tackle this problem. On the one hand, we need to develop ways of restricting and regulating large users of groundwater, often found in our urban and industrial sectors. On the other, we need ways of providing state of the art knowledge about this hidden resource. This will help us target policies to critical regions and communities. Science and technology must make a greater contribution for promoting the cause of equitable and sustainable development.

But even as we develop strategies for regulating use, we need strategies for augmenting the resource, through a massive, nationwide campaign for recharge. The fact is that groundwater is a replenishable asset and what is needed is a comprehensive approach to recharge wells, so that the annual abstraction is limited to what is truly sustainable.

Recharge of groundwater is about the development of thousands, perhaps millions of disaggregated water structures across the country. It is of concern to us that minor irrigation systems - tanks, ponds and all other community-based and decentralised water harvesting systems have declined in importance over time. These systems played a critical role in the recharge of groundwater as they stored the monsoon rainwater, which in turn recharged underground aquifers.

These diverse community structures were the key to irrigation in the pre-British years. During Colonial rule, state policy neglected these structures. We therefore need to learn from our own past experience and from the global best practices today. Science and modernity must be used to tackle vital social and economic progress. Traditional water systems were designed to ensure that rainwater was stored in millions of disaggregated and diverse structures, which would in turn lead to local recharge of water into the ground. It is this distributed water harvesting that will build water security for all in the years to come.

In the campaign for water recharge we must therefore mobilise the inventiveness, knowledge, wisdom and experience and energy of our common people. The government must be an enabler. It can provide information about the state of the resource. It can inform people on the methods that are used to conserve water, to harvest rainwater and to do watershed development. It can provide financial resources. But the work belongs to people. The artificial recharge movement is first and foremost a people's movement. If it is not, must become one to succeed.

Let me put forward two suggestions for your consideration:

One, since water is everybody's business and various arms of the Government deal with water policy, we must create institutional arrangements to bring coherence into policies and practice. It is feared that this Council can play a role. It can deliberate on these inter-linkages and influence the programmes with its knowledge and insights about using water as the starting point for livelihood and national security for India's teeming millions.

Two, we need ways to improve the assessment of groundwater and to ensure that this information truly reaches to the people in villages. Understanding of the availability of groundwater is linked critically to the formulation of an appropriate policy.

Our government has different key initiatives, which will impact on water. One, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has the potential to change the future of India. It will invest in the labour of people to build genuinely productive assets for social and economic change. The scheme has made water conservation the top priority. Your Council must help us to understand how we can do this task better and more effective.

We also have the Bharat Nirman Programme. We will invest in rural infrastructure for the poorest districts of our country. But we also know that water infrastructure will require new ways of thinking and new ways of working with rural communities. We know that this infrastructure is critical as even today the lack of clean water and sanitation lead to high rates of mortality in rural India. This is simply not acceptable.

We also have programmes for watershed, for afforestation, for tank renovation and for rainfed areas. I sincerely believe money is not the most important constraint on pushing the various programmes that we would like to see on the ground. What is missing and what is probably lacking is effective coordination, effective conceptualisation and the adoption of a holistic approach to deal with this big national task that lies ahead. Your Council can deliberate on ways in which these and other such initiatives can work for inclusive water secure future for our people.

Water, not oil, it is said will be the cause of future wars. I am sure this will not be the case if we learn from the traditional wisdom of our communities on how to value each drop of water and by using modern science to increase efficiency of utilization. Water then will be a cause not of conflict but of peaceful progress and prosperity. "