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Shri Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, Minister for Water Resources has stressed on the need to strike a balance between large projects, where we should look at environment and social issues as opportunities and the need to revive community-based traditional practices. Apart from giving a greater fillip to Artificial Recharge and Water Harvesting, widely varying successful experience at community level should be studied for gleaning out successful elements to be used in policy making, he added. “We should constantly endeavour to learn from peoples’ experience and feed these into policy making and for facilitating their wider adoption and practice”, Shri Dasmunsi further added. He was inaugurating a 2 day National Workshop on “Challenges in the Development and Management of Water Resources and future strategies”, here today. Shri P. Chidambaram, Finance Minister, Shri V.K. Duggal, Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources, Shri R.Jeyaseelan, Chairman, Central Water Commission, Shri Michael Carter, Country Director, World Bank and Representatives from various State Governments were also present on the occasion.
Stating that the UPA Government is focusing on completing major and medium sized water projects in a time bound manner, the Water Resources Minister stressed on the need to operationalise the National Water Policy by developing a suitable strategy and action plan. “Special attention needs to be paid in such a plan for exploiting the huge potential in the North Eastern region”, he said.
Cautioning the water experts present at the workshop on the future challenge that lie in addressing the issues on water allocation and management in an appropriate manner, Shri Dasmunsi observed that the country faces serious problems in water and what has compounded the problem is the inability to store it. As has been seen that India has one of the lowest per capita storage capacity in the world, Dasmunsi said.
Noting that the workshop may deliberate on the principles that should influence allocation and management, the water resources Minister stated that our ability lies in going beyond irrigation and flood control and address water resources concerns in a holistic manner and in an over-arching framework will determine the efficiency with which we are able to deal with the issues of water allocation and management.
Shri V.K. Duggal, Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources said that there is a need for a long term policy for water and sustained funding by multi lateral agencies. So far the funding by the World Bank in various states in the country has been done in a piece-meal manner and there is a need for evolving a continuous funding mechanism, Shri Duggal added.
RKJ/AM
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