“The need of the hour is a national river restoration policy. Not linking of rivers,” says eminent water conservationist Rajendra Singh who won the Stockholm Water Prize for 2015 and also a recipient of the Magasaysay Award.
Expressing the confidence that restoration of rivers would be the best solution for water scarcity, he added that we should ‘Make Water in India’ as the first step of ‘Make in India’.
Mr. Rajendra Singh was talking to The Hindu in Coimbatore during his stay here this weekend, to take part in water conservation related programmes in and around the city.
According to him, linking of rivers will not be the solution for floods or drought but will only aggravate inter-State tension.
The conservationist adds that this divide is in addition to the divide in sharing water for irrigation and industrial use and the rural and urban divide. “We have been talking about interlinking of rivers for the past 44 years but we are unable to implement it as it is not feasible,” he claimed.
At this juncture, he pointed out the decades of fighting between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over sharing the River Cauvery. But, he was confident that a solution could be arrived at in a few months if farmers from both the States interacted without political intervention.
He was of the opinion that linking minds and hearts of people and community-driven decentralised water management could only be the key to water conservation. He said that this was the key to restoration of seven rivers in Rajasthan. “Decentralising water management can solve both drought and flood as they are sides of the same coin,” he said.
Categorising water into five groups – rain water, sewage without chemicals, sewage with chemicals, effluents mixed with sewage and heavy metal industrial wastes – he said differentiating them and using them judiciously would be the solution for water crisis.
“Sadly, 84 per cent of good water is used for irrigation and the rest 16 per cent was nothing but the above said four types of polluted water which in turn pollutes the good water,” he lamented. On improper usage of water, he added that drilling borewells for irrigation and industrial use was the reason for fast depletion of the groundwater level.
He observed that people had started realising the importance of conserving nature and water and shifted their focus from making money in the last four years, recalling interaction with youth and industrialists who wanted to save the environment in various places across the country.
He said that they had realised despite being taught by the institutions to exploit nature by extracting available resources.
