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Stockholm Water Prize for Sunita Narain

Special Correspondent

Water will define if we remain poor or become rich, says CSE Director

NEW DELHI: King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden presented the 2005 Stockholm Water Prize to Sunita Narain, the Director of the Centre of Science and Environment (CSE), at a gala ceremony at the Stockholm City Hall on Thursday. The award, instituted by the Stockholm International Water Institute, comprised a crystal sculpture and $ 150,000. The ceremony was part of the ongoing World Water Week in Stockholm.

Dynamic advocate

Describing Ms. Narain as a dynamic advocate — nationally and internationally — for water and the environment, human rights, democracy and health, the Institute said the prize had been awarded for efforts made by her and the CSE that included fighting powerful, top-down bureaucratic resource control, empowering women in water and rejuvenating traditional rainwater harvesting.

In her acceptance speech, Ms. Narain said, "I accept this award on behalf of thousands of water engineers and water managers all over the world, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These people are discounted in the formal knowledge system of the world."

Ms. Narain has been with the CSE since 1982 and is also the chief of the Society for Environmental Communications and the publisher of the widely acclaimed environmental magazine "Down to Earth." She recently headed a Tiger Task Force in India. "CSE's own work and belief has been based on the imperative of change," Ms. Narain said. "It is also based on the arrogance that we can bring about change because we are working our democracy.''

Ingenious ways

She said it was clear that water management, and not water scarcity , was the problem in many parts of the world. CSE's work on rainwater harvesting had shown the many ingenious ways in which people learnt to live with water scarcity.

The solution, practiced diversely in different regions, lay in capturing rain in millions of storage systems — in tanks, ponds, step wells and even rooftops — and to use it to recharge groundwater reserves for irrigation and drinking water needs. "Water is not about water. Water is about building people's institutions and power to take control over decisions," she said.

The world faces a challenge to improve the productivity of rainfed and marginalised lands. Water can turn a large part of the country's currently parched lands into productive lands, reduce poverty and increase incomes where it is needed the most. The CSE has shown through its advocacy that localised water management is a cost-effective approach. It has also shown that local water management — harvesting and storing water where it falls — can only be done through community participation. The work of CSE had highlighted that water could not become everybody's business until there were fundamental changes in the ways we do business with water. Policy would have to recognise that water management, which involved communities and households, had to become the biggest cooperative enterprise in the world.

The CSE argued that the prevalent mindset that water management was the exclusive responsibility of the government must give way to a paradigm built on "participative and local management" of this critical life source. "Water will define if we remain poor or become rich," Ms. Narain said.

The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) is a policy institute that contributes to international efforts to find solutions to the world's escalating water crisis.

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