Net Water Positivity in the Indian Context
Through our new Insight Article, we propose a framework for exploring industrial pathways to water sustainability.
Read the full Insight Article here.
Ishita Jalan, Mukta Deodhar and Veena Srinivasan
With India’s economy accelerating to become the world’s third largest by 2030, there is increasing pressure on the country’s natural resources. The industrial sector is the second largest contributor to India’s GDP. The sector is also the second largest consumer of freshwater after agriculture.
Most of the freshwater is sourced from groundwater, which is rapidly declining. Increasing recognition of freshwater risks to business on one hand and tightening regulations on the other are spurring interest in conserving freshwater. To this end, many companies have made public commitments to net water positivity.
While ‘within the fence’ activities such as rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling are common, companies are realising they need to do more.
Water is a common pool resource and their own facilities can only be water secure if the resource base as a whole is secured.
Consequently, corporate water stewardship programmes have begun to extend to ‘outside the fence’ efforts. These are largely directed toward drinking water supply projects in neighbouring communities and watershed programmes for rainwater harvesting.
The problem is the impact of such initiatives is questionable. Government spending on similar projects outstrip such efforts by an order of magnitude and quantification is fuzzy. It is not clear if any water harvested is actually reaching the aquifers the industries are tapping.
What is needed is to actually bring aquifers back into balance by increasing recharge and reducing abstraction. The question is how?
Most drier regions are already using every drop of water available. Building additional harvesting structures often just results in ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’.
We argue that there is an opportunity by converting negative water that would otherwise be destructive, to a utilisable form.
First, we make the case for Flood Managed Aquifer Recharge or Flood MAR, i.e. designing retention basins to hold excess flood water that can be tapped for recharge. Second, we make the case for investments in public wastewater treatment plants in low resource settings to improve reuse rates.
Finally, we argue that to effectively drive collective action towards these large investments we need a system of water credits.
This system can unlock financing bottlenecks, allowing companies to offset water abstraction through water credit trading and simultaneously reducing the burden of demand on groundwater.
If you are a private corporation interested in understanding more about how you can become a net water positive company or create ‘new water’, please reach out to us: csei.comms@atree.org.
We are keen to understand your needs better and collaborate with you.
