Manisha Shah

Wicked problems need congruent efforts by multiple stakeholders from multiple disciplines and approaches. The water crisis in India is evident and expected to grow with the increasing population and limited available resources. For many years, water, being a public good, was managed and governed by the active participation of government, academia, and NGOs.

India has only 4 percent of the world's freshwater resources that must meet the demands of 16 percent of the global population that resides in the country.

World Water Day 2024 couldn’t have a better timing, at least for Bengaluru, which is facing one of the worst water crisis in its history, and there is no respite in sight at least for a few more months. We need more discussions and focus on water now, and not just from sector experts but from every user of the resource.

When it comes to water management, we have predominantly covered the work of civil society actors and government in the past. But in recent years, we have seen several highly innovative, market based approaches to solving India’s water security challenges.

Background

Recent data shows that the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) has covered more than 70 percent of the habitations in terms of connecting households, and the need for understanding the field implementation issues particularly in terms of long-term sustainability of this exercise is enormous. 

Jharkhand State is on the journey of ensuring the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) accreditation of their laboratories and recently completed the accreditation of 29 labs in the state for water quality testing on a mission mode.

The context

What was your water consumption today?

If I were to quickly calculate this, I would add up the litres of water I drank, the water I used up in cooking, washing, cleaning, and bathing; and quickly tell you that I used up around 80 litres of water. Your total would also be somewhere in the ballpark.

Any large-scale water security program by the government needs two things: [i] continuous data - given the dynamic nature of water - its annual replenishment depends on how much rainfall occurs and what farmers decide to grow in that agricultural cycle; and [ii] people who understand this data and continue to maintain the implementation post-intervention.

Kalyani Dash, Soudamini Rout, and Gita Rani Satpathy are three women from Odisha w