Watershed Development and Management in India: Brief and Significance Overview
India is endowed with many natural and water bodies, including beautiful lakes and rivers. These lakes serve an essential function as water reservoirs and promote ecosystem balance. Unfortunately, many of these natural bodies have dried up, been filled with development, or become extremely polluted as a result of rapidly deteriorating human activities and climate change. All land-based services are influenced by the area's topography, soil type, available biomass, and water. So, necessitating an integrated management approach, which can be better developed within a natural domain, may help with deteriorating effects like the watershed. Ngo like WOTR is working towards saving the ecosystem in rural areas.
What are watershed management and its development?
Watershed management is a comprehensive approach to halting environmental deterioration and maximizing land productivity. Watershed management entails the rational use of land and water resources for optimum and long-term productivity while posing the least amount of risk to natural resources. Watershed development means the preservation, restoration, and appropriate use of all-natural resources within the watershed, including land, water, plants, animals, and social development. It is a holistic approach to stopping and limiting utilization and managing natural resources for necessary reasons.
Water Resources Exploitation in India ● The Indian economy relies heavily on groundwater. It meets around 85% of rural demand, 50% of urban requirements, and more than 60% of our irrigation requirements. In several sections of the country, unregulated groundwater extraction has resulted in overuse, causing the groundwater table to plunge and dry springs and aquifers. ● According to the Central Ground Water Board report of the year 2017, 256 of India's 700 districts have declared 'critical' or 'over-exploited' groundwater levels. ● In developing countries like India, almost 80% of raw sewage is released into aquatic bodies such as lakes and oceans. ● The quantity of lakes is also steadily decreasing. For example, there were 250 lakes in Bangalore 6 decades ago, and now there are only 80. According to data from 2001, Ahmedabad has about 135 lakes. Within ten years, the number had dropped to just 75. In the last 12 years, more than 3,200 hectares of wetlands have been lost in Hyderabad. In a country like India, which is currently facing water scarcity, It is vital to implement watershed management, and it's also critical to boosting water supply in water-rich areas that lack infrastructure and control water demand in water-scarce regions.
NGO Work for Watershed Management in India Watershed Organization Trust, referred to as (WOTR) is a Pune-based NGO that has stretched its wings throughout nine Indian states, benefiting over 3,750 villages. WOTR is widely recognized as a premier institution in the fields of participatory watershed development and climate change adaptation.WOTR, founded in 1993, is a non-profit organization that works at the intersection of practice, knowledge, and policy at various scales and in collaboration with stakeholders from various sectors.
WOTR has launched a number of initiatives aimed at conserving India's water bodies. WOTR has carried out and implemented development work in over 3700 villages across seven states of India, like Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh. WOTR's unique strength lies in its participatory approach in a systematic manner and on-field experience. WOTR was initiated to support a large-scale multi-actor, multi-level, multi-sectoral, community-led watershed development program for poverty reduction called the Indo-German Watershed Development Program. They've initiated "water budgeting" to ensure optimal, rightful, and efficient water consumption. These appointed Jal Sevaks are in charge of water conservation in their own village and the surrounding 3–4 villages. They hope to inspire and enable rural populations to engage in water harvesting and conservation.
Significance of Watershed Management Every action within a watershed has an impact on the natural resources and water quality of that watershed. All human activities can have an impact on the quality of the resources within a watershed. Watershed management planning evaluates all activities that have an impact on the watershed's health and gives recommendations for how to effectively treat them so that pollution's negative effects are minimized. Watershed management aids in the control of contamination of the watershed's water and other natural resources. It identifies and regulates actions that are harmful to the environment. All activities within a watershed have an impact on its natural resources and water quality in some way. Watershed management planning identifies such activities in detail and gives recommendations for how to effectively address them so that their negative consequences are minimized. It's also a practical technique to prioritize the implementation of watershed management plans when resources are scarce. Watershed management is essential for long-term, inclusive growth; for example, it has shown the potential to double agricultural production and support rural families by increasing water availability and diversifying planting and farming systems, resulting in varied sources of income in drought-prone rainfed areas.