The Hindu : National : WORLD WATER DAY: Start acting, Government urged

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 23, 2005

National

National

WORLD WATER DAY: Start acting, Government urged

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, MARCH 22. Even as the Union Water Resources Ministry held an official meeting at the Vigyan Bhavan here today to commemorate World Water Day, several civil society organisations, environmentalists and non-governmental organisations working in the water sector took to the streets asking the Government to stop indulging in rhetoric and start acting. The groups were demanding clean water, quality water, better water supply and community rights over water.

"Availability or lack of water has now become a universally accepted indicator for development," the UNESCO Representative in India, M. Tawfik, pointed out at the meeting organised by the Water Resources Ministry.

He said the triumphs were still shadowed by a few "sordid" facts: There were more than 1.2 billion people without access to safe drinking water; 2.3 billion people without proper sanitation. And, according to him, more than 80 countries still did not have a proper plan for water resource management and development and required help.

`Water as life'

World Water Day was earmarked as such by the United Nations in 1992. In December 2003, the U.N. General Assembly agreed to proclaim the years 2005 to 2015 as the International Decade for Action. This year the theme is "Water as Life." The U.N.'s global agenda has underscored water issues as: provision of safe drinking water to all, implementation of integrated water resources management, strengthening water monitoring programme, meeting financial challenge and moving towards a framework of action.

Mr. Tawfik said attaining drinking water and sanitation goals would underpin other U.N. Millennium Development Goals, including economic poverty, health and education.

Stressing the need for water conservation and preservation, the Water Resources Minister, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, said one of the potent difficulties in managing the global water resources was uneven distribution with regard to the geographical size and the population. "India, with a share of four per cent of the world's water and 2.45 per cent of the world's land resources has to support about one-sixth of the world's population. In the face of rapidly dwindling per capita water availability, the country has little option other than to explore new avenues of development of utilisable water resources. Simultaneously the restoration of traditional water bodies also is a priority."

`Exciting possibilities'

Seeking the cooperation of from NGOs non-government organisations and water users associations, he said the interface between the government ance and the civil society offered "exciting possibilities" and if "handled properly" could yield rich dividends. "This is even more true in the case of water sector where the feedback from the end users are imperative for devising future planning and strategies," he said.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National