This report deals with environmental assessment and environmental management framework for the World Bank supported Jalanidhi-2 programme of the Kerala Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Agency (KRWSA), an important player in rural water supply and sanitation sector of the state.
The agency was constituted to implement “Jalanidhi” Project and has successfully developed a viable alternate model for service delivery, based on the principle of cost recovery.
The main components of the porgramme include community based water supply schemes, rehabilitation of single GP KWA schemes, sanitation, groundwater recharge, rainwater harvesting and special emphasis on water supply to quality affected habitations.
The study identifies the critical environmental concerns in the RWSS sector and puts forth a mechanism to address these issues, through an Environmental Management Framework (EMF). It is based on secondary data collection, field visits and focus group discussions in 14 gram panchayats in nine districts.
The main source of water for Kerala is rainfall, which is estimated to be 3000 mm on an average. Kerala has 44 rivers with a total annual discharge of 77900 Mm3. The net groundwater availability the entire Kerala State is 6229.55 million cubic meter (MCM).
An analysis of the baseline environmental situation, points to the following key environmental issues.
- Inadequate or disrupted water supply
- Bacteriological contamination of surface and ground water quality
- Presence of salinity, iron and fluoride concentrations exceeding the permissible levels in drinking water
- Lack of sanitation facilities
Mitigation measures for each of the issues noted above have been identified during the environmental assessment and consultation. These include: water availability, using scientific methods to identify groundwater source locations, targeted groundwater recharge measures, designing scheme service levels (per capita supply) in line with water availability, roof water harvesting techniques, promoting integrated management of local water resources, and enacting and enforcing ground water legislation.
In order to ensure that the environmental issues are systematically identified and addressed in the various stages of the implementation of schemes, an Environment Management Framework (EMF) has been developed for this project.
In order to facilitate the effective implementation of EMF the schemes are classified as Category I (low impact), Category II (medium impact) and Category III (high impact) according to pre-specified classification criteria. The set of procedures to be followed for this is outlined in the report.
The classification of the water supply schemes is an essential component and it requires the data on source of water supply, water quality problem, proposed water treatment, sanitation facilities, sullage conveyance, treatment and disposal, solid waste disposal etc.
The overall institutional structure responsible for environmental management has also been presented in the report.
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