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HomeOpinionThirsty Gujarat got its priorities wrong, needs better management of Narmada water

Thirsty Gujarat got its priorities wrong, needs better management of Narmada water

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State govt mismanaged scarce water after a bad monsoon in MP last year, and now, Gujarat won’t have any water to spare for irrigation till July at least.

Yet again, the Sardar Sarovar project on the Narmada river is failing to fulfil its promise of providing sufficient water to the arid state of Gujarat. Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has already announced that farmers may not get water for irrigation this year.

The Narmada’s annual flow is 28 million acre feet (MAF), of which Gujarat is supposed to get 9 MAF each year. However, the rainfall in the upstream state of Madhya Pradesh was less than normal last year, because of which the Narmada only had 22 MAF water, leading to a reduced share for Gujarat.

This, in turn, has led to the Narmada drying up downstream, allowing seawater to enter 20 kilometres inside its channels, affecting drinking water supply to shore villages and towns like Bharuch and Ankleshwar.

However, Gujarat’s dire situation is not just due to natural causes – it’s a case of bad water management.

Gujarat’s mistakes

In July 2017, as part of the flood disaster management exercise, the Gujarat government released canal water in the desert of Kachchh, which made a wetland about 100 square kilometres in area. This was not just a waste of rich water resources for water-scarce Gujarat, but also spoilt the salt pans of small salt workers. Even today, one can see the wetland.

By the end of October, the authorities should have grasped that this is a lean year. But even then, the state irrigation department opted to fill up ponds and lakes under the Saurashtra Narmada Avataran Irrigation scheme (SAUNI), months before the assembly elections.

And if even this was not enough, the authorities continued to fill up the Sabarmati riverfront with Narmada water for tourism and irrigation purposes.

Temporary solution

For now, a temporary solution has been adopted, which can procure drinking water up to July, but not water for irrigation. The water level at the Indira Sagar reservoir behind the Sardar Sarovar Dam is 110 metres right now, below which is ‘dead storage’ (the volume of water stored below the minimum supply level). But the good old engineers had visualised this sort of crisis, and have arranged a bypass tunnel from where water can be taken to the main canal, up to a water level of 88 metres.

This contingency will be put into practice this year, and drinking water can be procured up to July, but not water for irrigation.

Is there a permanent fix to this problem?

Speedy urbanisation has raised potable water demands in urban as well as rural areas. As per the original plan, the Narmada was to supply potable water to 8,000 villages and 135 cities. But now Narmada provides potable water to more than 10,000 villages and 175 towns and cities. This will proportionally reduce intake for irrigation. This has made it necessary to find other sources of potable water.

My research indicates that wherever the government manages irrigation, the efficiency remains limited to 30 per cent. However, if people manage their water, the efficiency rises to 65 per cent.

If Narmada irrigation has to be successful, it has to be operated by farmers’ associations. Only 50 out of 3,300 farmers’ ‘water users associations’ are active. The rest put pumps on canals and draw water. Putting diesel pumps on canals weakens them, resulting in breakage and wastage of water.

This writer had requested the then-managing director of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam, now-chief secretary J.N. Singh, to make drip irrigation compulsory for Narmada water. This required political will, and was not done; the neighbouring Rajasthan, on the other hand, has made this compulsory.

Moreover, we need scientific water management along with crop management, and to give priority to farms and not to industry. The scarcity that has arisen this year may happen again if we do not learn scientific water management.

The writer is a water expert and author of Submerging Villages: Problems and Prospects.

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