India, Dec. 1 -- The Government of India has issued a release:
Atal Bhujal Yojana, a community led participatory ground water management scheme, was implemented as a pilot scheme across 8,203 priority water stressed Gram Panchayats of seven states viz. Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The key objective of Atal Bhujal Yojana was to improve groundwater management in selected states through community participation and focusing on demand-side interventions, ensuring sustainability of the resource. The scheme aimed to achieve this objective by strengthening institutional and governance frameworks and by incentivizing states to implement groundwater conservation measures at grassroots level.
Under the Jal Shakti Abhiyan: Catch the Rain (JSA: CTR) campaign, implemented by the Ministry of Jal Shakti, one of the key interventions is the enumeration, geo-tagging and inventorization of water bodies to facilitate the preparation of scientific water conservation plans. District Collectors and Magistrates have been requested to enumerate water bodies using old revenue records, remote sensing data from the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping technology to mark boundaries, geo-tag structures and integrate data from the National Water Informatics Centre (NWIC) and State Water Resources Information Systems. This approach enables the development of data-driven scientific conservation plans.
In addition, a notable initiative in this regard is the development of the GIS-based sub-portal "Jal Dharohar", operational in its beta version since 1st November 2023, under the India-WRIS Portal. This portal presents a consolidated and geo-tagged database of water bodies across India and integrates data from multiple national programmes and sources, including the Jal Shakti Abhiyan, Atal Bhujal Yojana, Minor Irrigation Statistics, the First Census of Water Bodies, and the National Water Informatics Centre (NWIC). It serves as a visual and spatial tool for awareness creation, planning, and monitoring of water resources.
Water being a State subject, the Central Government plays only a supportive role by supplementing the efforts of the States through various technical, financial, and policy-level interventions.
In this direction, the government employs a range of state of the art digital and technological tools not only for mapping and monitoring water resources of the country, but also for planning precise policy interventions and evaluating performance of schemes. The following are a few noteworthy ones:
The information was provided by THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR JAL SHAKTI SHRI RAJ BHUSHAN CHOUDHARY in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today.
Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.
