Water crisis: Hazare village shows way

Social activist Anna Hazare may be engaged in a bitter battle with the government over corruption but his village in Maharashtra has provided a national solution to depleting underground water levels.

Updated on: Jun 16, 2011, 24:19:54 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Social activist Anna Hazare may be engaged in a bitter battle with the government over corruption but his village in Maharashtra has provided a national solution to depleting underground water levels.

The Ashok Chawla committee on how to manage natural resources had recommended that the Central government should adopt the Ralegoan Sidhi and Hiwri Bazar model, where the local community has imposed self regulation on extraction of underground water.

The recommendation comes in wake of the committee’s finding that 60 % districts in India have a problem related to quantitative availability of quality of groundwater. Most districts in northern India are under stress for ground water recharge.

The proportion of unsafe districts in India for underground water exploitation has increased from 9 % in 1995 to 31 % in 2004. The areas under these districts have gone up from 5% to 33 % in the same time period and number of affected people has increased from seven to 35 %, the report said.

The possible solution to aggravating ground water problem could come from unique model adopted in Hazare’s village Relegoan Sidhi in drought prone Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. The erstwhile barren village inspired by Hazare has metamorphosed into a unique model of rural development due to its effective water conservation methods, which made the villagers self-sufficient. Earlier, the same village witnessed alcoholism, utter poverty and migration to urban slums.

“In Relegoan Sidhi, the community agrees to drilling of new irrigation borewells only if the farmer installs drip or sprinkler irrigation,” the report said, adding that farming community can achieve both higher agriculture productivity and drinking water security through careful garnering of water resources.

Setting an alarm on availability of ground water in future, the Chawla committee had recommended that the government should set up public trust doctrine as done in case of surface water. It means that access to groundwater should be ensured to all by terming it public resources and the government should have power to charge a fee for the same.

For this, it has recommended a national legislation which the states should adopt. “What is intended is a kind of umbrella legislation under which laws will be enacted, policies frames, rules and orders issued, and executive actions taken, at different levels,” the committee said.

To improve ground water management in India, the committee has asked the government to increase monitoring of water sources and do periodic checks on the quality, which was found to be deteriorating in majority of Indian districts.

The committee has suggested the Gujarat model to check over-exploitation of groundwater by having a separate electricity feeder for tubewells. In Gujarat, the government provides eight hour continuous power supply to tubewells, thereby restricting the use of ground water.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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