Part 2: How We Studied Problems Affecting India’s River Basins
The Water Resilience Coalition, an initiative of the United Nations Global Compact CEO Water Mandate, aims to preserve the world’s freshwater resources through collective action in water-stressed basins and ambitious, quantifiable commitments. As part of this initiative, the Water Resilience Coalition has undertaken analyses to understand the status of water-stressed basins across the world in order to drive water-related collective action among companies and create a positive impact in 100 basins across the world.
Rashmi Kulranjan, Vidhyashree Katral, Ganesh N Shinde and Shashank Palur
Given the push for investments in the water sustainability space, businesses need to be better informed about where the big problems lie so that projects can be properly planned and executed. But there’s a data gap.
CSEI-ATREE’s comprehensive study of three important river basins — the Cauvery, Ganga and Krishna — aims to address this gap that limits effective action on a large scale. We detail some of our findings, limitations and next steps in this second part of our blog series.
Read | Part 1: We Need Better Metrics to Track Progress on India’s Water-Stressed River Basins
There are multiple water challenges affecting river basins, making this a complex field to intervene in. Identifying performance metrics and targets can enable businesses to take steps that are tailored for the unique context of each basin. It would also help them align their efforts with those of other stakeholders. An example of such a metric would be the proportion of households that have access to functional tap connections (the images below are of the Ganga basin).
Another example could be the proportion of water bodies that have good ambient water quality that does not adversely affect ecosystems or human health.
Our approach involved an analysis of GIS map layers and extensive literature review
First, we started with identifying the basin boundary and the administrative bodies that fall within it. A set of indicators were then chosen to assess different water challenges in the basin.
After collecting data for each indicator from government websites, it was represented spatially using GIS maps. This helped identify areas that are most distressed.
The current state of each indicator was compared with the desired state to identify where and why these gaps exist.
We collated data based on key indicators shared by the WRC
The Water Resilience Coalition (WRC) had set the parameters for our research by specifying indicators around access to water, sanitation and hygiene, water quantity, water quality, water governance, water crisis and other important water-related areas. We’ve provided two examples below of the Cauvery (left) and Krishna basins.
We also identified shared challenges and baseline conditions related to water in the three basins, based on secondary data analysis of material including government reports, research papers, and delivered a report for each of the three basins.
We mapped the policies and institutions (national and state-level departments) involved in water governance in the three basins. This exercise helped us get a better sense of the government’s priorities in the water sector, which allowed us to identify areas where CSR investments could be better leveraged by working in conjunction with state actors to ensure most impact.
We found existing partnerships in the basin working towards solving these water challenges. These can be used as starting points for companies looking to participate in collective action initiatives locally.
Finally, we developed a set of recommendations for businesses looking to engage in the water sector. This qualitative list will be further developed based on discussions with the WRC. We split these recommendations across funding, training, and implementation activities for each indicator mentioned above of water quantity, quality, access, governance and water crisis.
The types of issues in the three basins vary with some common challenges.
In the Cauvery and Krishna basins, located in southern India, water stress and water quality were identified as the major challenges. In the Upper Ganga basin in the north of the country, the main issues were found to be mostly around access to WASH and water quality.
Water quality stood out as a major issue in all three basins. The lack of proper monitoring systems, illegal dumping of sewage and effluents, and insufficient treatment capacity are the primary causes.
The government does spend a significant amount of money on sanctioning treatment facilities but the problem has still persisted. The major reason for this was found to be the lack of funds for the maintenance of treatment plants, the low skill level of the maintenance staff, and insufficient data on the amount of sewage being generated to plan for treatment capacity.
Over-abstraction of groundwater was another problem found across the three basins. Even though some states have groundwater acts, monitoring and regulation of groundwater abstraction are not being implemented.
Planning for water allocation schemes disregard linkages between surface and groundwater, betraying a very poor level of understanding of the system as a whole.
This has resulted in reduced base flow in many regions because of the overpumping of groundwater. Growing water-intensive crops in dry regions and leakages in ancient water supply infrastructure compounds water shortage woes. Low level of water availability coupled with contamination also have a major impact on access to WASH services. Poor maintenance of infrastructure makes the problem worse.
There are some limitations with the data we collected
- Some SDG indicators were not appropriately representing the situation in the sub-basin, prompting us to use alternatives to understand the problem better. For example, the percentage of households with access to toilets did not indicate if they were being used or were functional. We instead used the percentage of people using safe sanitation services.
- The Pollution Control Board is the regulatory body that monitors water quality and makes this data publicly accessible. However, many water bodies in the basins were found missing in the database due to insufficient monitoring, which results in them being neglected.
- For many indicators, data was not available on one platform and had to be obtained from each state’s website separately. The capacity of effluent treatment plants is one such example. While this did not affect the quality of the data in any way, we felt that it made the process more challenging to reciprocate.
- Some datasets like the water crisis were available only at the state level, making it difficult to understand the severity of the situation at local levels.
- Flood and drought vulnerability index data were not properly available. Web Map Service (WMS) maps that existed for the whole country had to be downloaded and processed at the basin level.
- For water quality standards, a difference was found between the standards specified by the SDG and those followed in India, which were found to be lower than the SDGs.
A big problem we identified in the course of our study was that water-related data is currently collected at the administrative boundary level (like the district of the state). The failure to take the hydrological boundary into consideration has resulted in the absence of basin-level institutional arrangements that can undertake the monitoring of operations undertaken as part of inter-state river-water agreements.
Mechanisms for coordinated planning and management of water resources across sectors that can bring together the state institutions and private actors from the agricultural and industrial sectors as well as citizens do not exist. Additionally, because of limited platforms for stakeholder participation, only bureaucrats make management decisions resulting in a top-down approach to water-related challenges.
This siloed manner of governance is far from ideal for a sector like water where all indicators, as our study found, are interlinked. Solutions for any one water challenge cannot be looked at in isolation.
This also highlights the importance of collective action by different sectors to be able to bring together local knowledge, capabilities, and innovative financing mechanisms to solve problems affecting different communities and ecologies. The growth in private sector investments and public-private partnerships must be leveraged to solve water challenges at a decentralised level. CSEI’s work with WRC will help companies plan and execute projects better to solve water challenges in river basins.
The full report will be published shortly.
With inputs by Veena Srinivasan, Anjali Neelakantan and Sonali Abraham (Pacific Institute). Edited by Kaavya Kumar.
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We would love to hear from you. To collaborate with us, write to csei.collab@atree.org.
