National Water Policy 2012

29 June 2024

The first National Water Policy was formulated by the central government in 1987, which was subsequently reviewed and revised in 2002. The National Water Policy 2012 was released in June 2012 by the Ministry of Water Resources. (In June 2019, the Ministry of Water Resources, the River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, and the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation were merged to be brought under a new unified ministry, called Jal Shakti.) The objective of the policy is to assess the existing situation and to propose a framework for a plan of action with a unified national perspective. One of the major policy innovations in the 2012 policy was the concept of an integrated water resources management approach that took the ‘river basin/sub-basin’ as a unit for planning, development, and management of water resources.

Concerns Expressed in the Policy

The National Water Policy 2012 takes into cognizance the concerns regarding water availability and management in India. Water scarcity could intensify because of greater demand rising from population growth, urbanisation, and changing lifestyles. Mismanagement of water resources has made the situation worse, leading to water-related disasters. Climate change will add to the problem. Skewed availability of water between different regions and different sections of population has the potential of causing social unrest. Groundwater is exploited inequitably. The various inter-regional, inter-state, and intra-state disputes in sharing of water hinder the optimal utilisation of water through scientific planning on basin/sub-basin basis. Poor maintenance of irrigation infrastructure has resulted in wastage and under-utilisation of available resources. Growing pollution of water sources, through industrial effluents and lack of sewage treatment, is affecting the availability of safe water besides causing environmental and health hazards. Access to water for sanitation and hygiene is a serious problem.

Low public awareness about the scarcity and economic value of water results in its wastage and inefficient use. Good water management is further constrained by the lack of trained personnel for scientific planning and utilisation of modern techniques incorporating information technology. A holistic and inter-disciplinary approach to water-related problems is missing.

Salient Features of the Policy

Principles to govern policy Water needs to be managed as a common pool community resource held by the State, under public trust doctrine, to achieve food security, support livelihood, and ensure equitable and sustainable development for all. For this, there has to be a framework law, a comprehensive legislation for optimum development of inter-state rivers and river valleys. This law would state general principles governing the exercise of legislative and/or executive (or devolved) powers by the Centre, the states, and the local governing bodies.

Scientific planning of land and water resources should be ensured, taking basin/sub-basin as unit with unified perspectives of water in all its forms, and ensuring holistic and balanced development of both the catchment and the command areas.

Water use Utilisation in various areas of water use should be optimised and an awareness of water as a scarce resource should be fostered. The Centre, the states, and the local bodies (governance institutions) must ensure access to a minimum quantity of potable water, easily accessible, for essential health and hygiene to all its citizens.

Ecological needs of the river should be determined through scientific study, recognising that rivers are characterised by low or no flows, and the flow variability should accommodate development needs. A portion of river flows should be kept aside to meet ecological needs ensuring that the low and high flow releases are proportional to the natural flow regime.

Community-based water management should be institutionalised and strengthened.

Adapting to climate change The strategies could include increasing water storage—in the form of soil moisture, ponds, ground water, small and large reservoirs, and their combination, which provides a mechanism for dealing with increased variability. There should be better demand management, particularly, through adoption of compatible agricultural strategies and cropping patterns and improved water application methods. Industrial processes should be made more water efficient. Stakeholder participation in land-soil-water management with scientific inputs from local research and academic institutions should be promoted.

Enhancing water availability for use Integrated watershed development activities with groundwater perspectives should be devised. Availability of water for utilisation needs to be augmented. Direct use of rainfall and avoidance of inadvertent evapotranspiration is one strategy. There is a need to map the aquifers to know the quantum and quality of ground water resources. Improved technologies of water use should be used to improve groundwater levels. Efficient water use should be incentivised, and community-based management of aquifers encouraged. Artificial recharging projects should be undertaken. Inter-basin transfers of water should be considered after evaluating the environmental, economic, and social impacts.

Demand management Water audit, institutional arrangements for demand management, reuse and recycling are considered. Recycling of canal seepage water through conjunctive groundwater use, and use of small local level irrigation and engineering methods and practices for watershed development, etc., need to be encouraged, but keeping in mind positive and negative side effects downstream.

Water as economic good Beyond basic needs (safe drinking water and sanitation, achieving food security, supporting poor people dependent on agriculture), water is to be treated as an economic good and priced accordingly.

Conservation of water bodies Over-exploitation, pollution, and infrastructure development that threaten water bodies and river corridors have to be tackled in the interests of conservation. There has to be protection of aquifer recharge areas and reservoir catchments, and maintenance of urban water bodies. Urban settlements, encroachments and any developmental activities that pose a potential threat of contamination, pollution, reduced recharge, or endanger wild and human life should be strictly regulated. System of third party periodic inspection should be evolved and stringent punitive actions should be taken against the persons responsible for pollution. Quality conservation and improvements are even more important for groundwater. Legally empowered dam safety services need to be ensured by the states as well as the Centre.

Project planning and implementation The speedy execution of projects through concurrent monitoring by the states and the Centre is necessary. Environmental clearance should be made time-bound to reduce ‘economic loss due to delay in implementation of projects’. Local governing bodies including water users associations should be involved in the planning of water projects.

Management of flood and drought It is important to develop structural controls for floods and disaster management plans. Land, soil, energy, and water management with scientific inputs from local, research and scientific institutions should be used to evolve different agricultural strategies and improve soil and water productivity to manage droughts.

Water supply and sanitation Incentives for decentralised and water-saving sanitation and sewerage systems could be made. Rainwater harvesting and desalination can be combined to increase water availability in urban and industrial areas. Subsidies and incentives should be implemented to encourage recovery of industrial pollutants and recycling/reuse, which are otherwise capital intensive.

Institutional arrangements There should be a forum at the national level to deliberate upon issues relating to water and evolve consensus, cooperation, and reconciliation amongst party states. A similar mechanism should be established within each state. A permanent Water Disputes Tribunal should be set up at the Centre to resolve the disputes expeditiously and equitably. Water resources projects and services should be managed with community participation. State governments or local governing bodies may decide to encourage the private sector to become a service provider in public private partnership model. Integrated water resources management, taking river basin/sub-basin as a unit, should be the main principle for planning, development, and management of water resources.

Efforts at Water Management

India has about 17.7 per cent of the world’s population, 2.4 per cent of the world’s land area and 4 per cent of the world’s fresh water resources. Every year, India receives on an average 4,000 billion cubic metres (BCM) of water mostly through rainfall and snowfall. However, considerable spatial and temporal variations are found in the distribution of rainfall. Out of the 4,000 BCM of water, about 1,869 BCM are available water resources. Out of this, only 1,123 BCM (690 BCM from surface water resources and 433 BCM from ground water) are usable water resources. The water demand in 2000 was 634 BCM which is expected to grow to 1,093 BCM by 2025. Therefore, efforts need to be made to increase the utilisable quantity and manage demand by conservation, improving efficiencies, and increasing supply sources.

Water is a state subject. As such, it is the state government that is expected to take steps for augmentation, conservation and efficient management of water resources. The central government helps with technical and financial assistance to supplement the efforts of the states. It does so through various schemes and programmes, some of which are discussed below.

Jal Jeevan Mission (Har Ghar Jal) is a partnership programme between Centre and states aimed at providing potable water in adequate quantity of prescribed quality on regular and long-term basis to every rural household, through tap water connection, by 2024. The water sources for drinking water supply schemes inter alia include groundwater, surface water, and rain water stored in small tanks.

AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation) is a water-focused national urban mission launched in 2015, the aim being to achieve universal coverage of water supply in 500 mission cities for five years, extended till March 2023 for projects to be completed. The mission covers 500 cities that includes all cities and towns with a population of over one lakh with notified municipalities. In October 2021, AMRUT 2.0 was launched to cover all statutory towns, up from 500 cities for a period of 5 years i.e., from 2021–22 to 2025–26. Its focus is on making the cities self-reliant and water secure. AMRUT 2.0 aims to promote circular economy of water through development of City Water Balance Plan for each city focusing on recycle/reuse of treated sewage, rejuvenation of water bodies, and water conservation.

Artificial recharge work has been undertaken by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) in select Aspirational Districts. Appropriate structures, such as check dams, percolation tanks, subsurface barriers, recharge wells, and recharge shafts, were constructed to harvest the runoff water in streams for storage at suitable locations so as to augment recharge of the ground water. The board had undertaken Aquifer Mapping and Management Programme during the 12th Plan.

The SahiFasal campaign launched under the National Water Mission in 2019 is aimed at persuading farmers in the water-stressed areas to grow crops which are not water intensive, but use water efficiently, even as they are economically viable. A series of workshops have been organised in the water stressed areas for this purpose.

Jal Shakti Abhiyan is a campaign launched by the Ministry of Jal Shakti for water conservation and water security. The first phase, launched in 2019, covered 256 water-stressed districts of the country. Officers, groundwater experts, and scientists from the Government of India worked with state and district officials in these areas to promote water conservation and water resource management. The focus was on five target interventions: (i) water conservation and rainwater harvesting; (ii) renovation of traditional and other water bodies/tanks; (iii) reuse and recharge of bore wells; (iv) water shed development; and (v) intensive afforestation.

The second phase of the Jal Shakti Abhiyan, Catch the Rain, launched in March 2021, had as its tag line “Catch the rain, where it falls, when it falls”. It is aimed at nudging the states and all stakeholders to create rain water harvesting structures suitable to the climatic conditions and sub-soil strata before the onset of monsoon so that rainwater can be stored. The active participation of people is envisaged as part of the programme. The programme is for all districts (rural as well as urban areas) of the country.

The third phase of the Jal Shakti Abhiyaan: Catch the Rain-2022 has been launched on March 3, 2022 to cover all the blocks of all districts (rural as well as urban) across the country during March 29, 2022 to November 30, 2022.

Government has made a policy that a portion of river flows ought to be kept aside to meet ecological needs. To this effect, in 2018, the government asserted that minimum water levels had to be maintained in the Ganga all through the year, so hydropower projects had to refrain from hoarding water beyond a point. At the same time, a minimum quantity of potable water for essential health and hygiene was to be made available to all citizens within easy reach of the households.

In a policy tweak in 2020, the government made new rules for industries extracting ground water, according to which “no new major industries” would be given no objection certificates to extract ground water in over-exploited assessment blocks.

Draft National Water Policy 2020

On November 5, 2019, the Ministry of Jal Shakti set up a committee to draft a new National Water Policy (NWP). A new water policy was considered necessary mainly in the light of technological innovations available now for better management, the growing threat posed by climate change, and consciousness of the need to maintain river flow and prevent/control pollution.

While the earlier NWPs of 1987, 2002, and 2012 were drafted entirely within the government system, this time the government decided to set up a committee of independent experts to draft the policy. The 11-member committee was chaired by Mihir Shah, a former Planning Commission member and a water expert. It heard and received several submissions by experts, academics, practitioners, and stakeholders, which included submissions by governments of 21 states and 5 union territories and 35 presentations and submissions by departments and ministries of the Government of India. The committee submitted its draft to the Ministry of Jal Shakti in December 2020.

Proposals in the Draft

Recommendations on demand and supply According to Mihir Shah, the chairman of the committee, there are two major recommendations in the draft.

(i) Shift focus from increasing supply of water towards demand-management measures. This involves the following in the main:

Diversify cropping pattern to include less water-intensive crops, in line with regional agro-ecology. Some 80–90 per cent of water is consumed by irrigation in India, most of which goes to cultivation of rice, wheat, and sugarcane.
Diversifying public procurement operations to include nutri-cereals, pulses, and oilseeds would provide an incentive to farmers to diversify their cropping patterns and save water.
Lower the industrial water footprint (among the highest in the world) by reducing fresh water use.
Shift to recycled water. It must be made mandatory for cities to use treated waste water for all non-potable uses, such as flushing, fire protection, vehicle washing, landscaping, horticulture, etc. Treatment of sewage and eco-restoration of urban river stretches must be done, as far as possible, through decentralised waste water management.

(ii) Shift the focus even within the supply side. This becomes necessary as the country is running out of sites for further construction of large dams, even as water tables are falling and the quality of ground water is deteriorating in many areas.

The huge amounts of water stored in big dams are not reaching the farmers for whom they are meant. The demand-supply gap can be met by deploying pressurised closed conveyance pipelines, combined with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and pressurised micro-irrigation.
Emphasis should be on supply of water through the rejuvenation of catchment areas, which needs to be incentivised through compensation for eco-system services, especially to vulnerable communities in the upstream, mountainous regions.
There has to be a renewed thrust on local rainwater harvesting to catch the rain where it falls, when it falls. This must be combined with demarcation, notification, protection, and revival of traditional local water bodies in both rural and urban areas. This would form part of urban blue-green infrastructure for improved water levels and quality, as also flood mitigation, through specifically curated infrastructure such as rain gardens and bio-swales, restored rivers with wet meadows (where they can meander), wetlands constructed for bioremediation, urban parks, permeable pavements, sustainable natural drainage systems, green roofs, and green walls.
Sustainable and equitable management of ground water must be given great attention, and for this participatory ground water management is the key. The stakeholders (to be designated custodians of their aquifers) must be helped to develop effective ground water management protocols by providing them with information on aquifer boundaries, water storage capacities, and flows.
Rivers may be a resource to serve economic purposes, but their protection and revitalisation is of primary importance. In this context, it may be necessary to draft a Rights of Rivers Act, which would include their right to flow, to meander, and to meet the sea. Restoration of river flows would involve revegetation of catchments, regulation of groundwater extraction, and river-bed pumping and mining of sand and boulders.

Other points made by the draft policy There have to be reforms in the governance of water, which suffers from ‘hydro-schizophrenia’. This hydro-schizophrenia or considering separately what should be seen in a holistic manner is evident at three levels: irrigation and drinking water; surface water and ground water; and water and waste water. Treating these as separate entities creates problems and does not resolve anything.

Water quality has to be improved and maintained at a high level. State-of-the-art, low-cost, low-energy, and eco-sensitive technologies should be adopted for sewage treatment. The widespread use of reverse osmosis (RO) has led to huge wastage of water and an adverse impact on water quality, so RO units must be discouraged where the total count of dissolved solids in water is less than 500 mg/l.

There needs to be a graded fee system to help the government recover operations and maintenance costs. Water found in its natural form is very different from water available in a household tap, an irrigation channel or a factory. It takes physical infrastructure and management systems to make water a usable resource wherever and whenever one wants it. Service fees should be regarded as a facilitator to ensure affordable water as a right to cover basic needs, while achieving financial sustainability by generating revenue through charging more for commercial and luxury uses. Economic services (like industrial and commercial use) could be charged at a higher rate, even as concessional rates should be provided for vulnerable social sections. Care must be taken not to price out the poor from basic water services. Independent water resources regulatory authorities must be set up with a clear mandate to fix water charges. A unified multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder National Water Commission (NWC) should be set up, which would become an exemplar for states to follow.

Transboundary rivers Developing bilateral agreements while maintaining national interests is necessary in the matter of international or transboundary rivers.

Database All hydrological data, except for those classified in the interest of national security, should be in the public domain. A separate authority should be set up to manage data related to water allowed in the public domain. A periodic review should be undertaken to declassify data. Intensive data collection should be undertaken for studying climate change.

Research and training Continuing research and advancement in technology should be promoted to address the issues in water sector in a scientific manner. Adequate grants to the states must be allowed for updating technology and for planning and management practices.

Implementation of the policy The National Water Board should prepare a plan of action based on the National Water Policy, as approved by the National Water Resources Council, and regularly monitor its implementation. The state water policies may need to be drafted/revised in accordance with the national policy. It is recommended that a water regulatory body be set up.

Actions Taken

According to the central government, it has taken some action in accordance with the principles indicated in the National Water Policy of 2012. These are as follows:

The Inter-State River Water Disputes (Amendment) Bill, 2019 was introduced in the Lok Sabha in the July 2019 and was subsequently passed by the house.
The Ministry of Jal Shakti has prepared a draft National Water Framework Bill, 2016, and draft River Basin Management Bill, 2018, which have been circulated to states and union territories for comments.
The Dam Safety Bill, 2019 was prepared and introduced in the Lok Sabha and was subsequently passed by both the houses.
The National Water Informatics Centre has been established under the National Hydrology Project.
The Central Water Commission has completed a study, Reassessment of Water Availability in India using Space Inputs.
The Central Ground Water Board prepared a conceptual document titled Master Plan for Artificial Recharge to Ground Water in India in 2013, which envisages construction of different types of artificial recharge and rainwater harvesting structures in the country.
A web-based Water Resources Information System (India-WRIS) has been set up and all unclassified data of the Central Water Commission and the Central Ground Water Board have been uploaded on the website.