Sixth India Water Impact Summit 2021 deliberates river resource planning

The five-day India Water Impact Summit (IWIS-2021) that commenced on December 9 and will go on till December 14 is being held in the national capital.

Its plenary session on 'River Resource Allocation- Planning and Management at the Regional Level Upper Segment' focused on the uppermost segment of the Ganga river in Uttarakhand wherein a multitude of Himalayan headstreams combine to form the Ganga river before it enters the Indo Gangetic plains.

The segment provides immense scope for hydro-power generation, tourism, and recreation, irrigation, sand mining, etc. and there is a need to develop and strategize planned interventions to fulfill the river's own needs, especially at the middle and lower segments.

The Summit is being organized by National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) and cGanga in a hybrid mode - online and physically at the NMCG office, New Delhi and IIT, Kanpur.

The India Water Impact Summit (IWIS-2021) is a five-day event from December 9 to December 14 and this year's theme is 'River Resources Allocation: Planning and Management at the Regional Level'.

The day began with the session on 'Challenges for Policy, Law, and Governance for River Resources Allocation and Planning' which deliberated upon the need for identification, assessment, monitoring, valuation, pricing of river resources, and the impact of abstraction of river resources locally.

G Ashok Kumar, Mission Director, National Water Mission presiding over the session, gave an overview of the 'Catch the Rain' campaign and apprised the audience about its impact and quantifiable results. Jal Shakti Abhiyan-2: 'Catch the Rain, Where it Falls, When it Falls,' was launched on 22nd March 2021 on the occasion of World Water Day by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kumar said that the National Water Mission collaborated with Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan (NYKS) to make Jal Shakti Abhiyan-2 a peoples' movement across 623 districts of the country. D.P. Mathuria, ED, Technical, NMCG discussed the planning and management at the regional level of river resources allocation in the Upper Segment of River Ganga.

The special address was given by Dr Guillermo Mendoza, International Program Manager, Institute for Water Resources, US Army Corps of Engineers. He also shared his experiences of the recently conducted workshop by the US Army Corps on 'Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA)' for the water sector which concluded on December 10, 2021, in which NMCG also participated.

Mendoza is the lead author of the UNESCO publication 'Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA)', which is technical guidance for bottom-up decision scaling in the planning of water resources. Unlike most attempts to consider future climate risks in water resources planning, the CRIDA process does not begin with climate models or a selection of future scenarios to be used in the planning and design of a project.

Instead, CRIDA uses a bottom-up approach to identify planning objectives and problems that need to be solved. Then the planning team addresses how the uncertainties affect the choices of options and trade-offs.

Over the last few years, the CRIDA Tool has been applied in several countries like Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Thailand, and the USA. This workshop was organized to train participants in the knowledge and application of this tool so that it can be applied in the Indian context.

He also met Rajiv Ranjan Mishra, DG, NMCG along with a team of experts led by Col Evan Ting, Senior Program Manager, Interagency and International Services and several areas of cooperation between US Army Corps of Engineers and NMCG along with NIUA were also discussed.

The 2nd and 3rd sessions of Day 2 focused on 'Roles and Responsibilities for River Resource Assessment and Monitoring' and 'Economics and Financing of Sustainable Agricultural Finance.'

The discussion of the session on 'Roles and Responsibilities for River Resource Assessment and Monitoring'pertained to the importance of developing a systematic assessment and inventorisation in order to conduct a comprehensive plan for river resource management.

The session brought attention to the need to identify the roles and responsibilities of various government agencies and stakeholders for this purpose.

The session on 'Economics and Financing of Sustainable Agricultural Finance' deliberated upon how technological innovation can bring about a disruption in the agricultural sector and the potential impact of water-efficient solutions in the overall water balance of the country.

The last session of the day was the international session and focused on the Government of India's collaboration with the European Union and its member states.

The session highlighted the multi-faceted partnership with EU with managing water resources and extends to river basin planning, circular economy principles, data and information systems, sustainable energy transportation, amongst others.

During the session, Rajiv Ranjan Mishra, Director General, National Mission for Clean Ganga said that more than the shortage of water, today managing water is a bigger challenge. There is a need to work on multiple aspects such as technologies, sustainability of the global environment, continuous flow of rivers, and others. He also informed about the recent launch of the River City Alliance in which representatives from Germany and Denmark had also participated.

The international session was marked with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The first MoU was signed between the Innovation Centre Denmark (ICDK) India and IIT Kanpur, wherein synergies between Denmark and India will be developed in the water sector to share knowledge and increase multifaceted collaboration and participation of the water and environment sector industry from Denmark in the River Basin Restoration and Conservation program.

The second MoU was signed between IIT Kanpur and UPS, Hugary with the aim to encourage the sharing of knowledge and increase participation of the Hungarian industry in the Ganga River Basin Restoration and Conservation Program.

The second day of IWIS was streamed live on the social media handles of the Namami Gange viewed by thousands of stakeholders including students, experts from the technical and financial community, civil society, government and non-government organizations, and various other partners.

( With inputs from ANI )