Webinar – New Groundwater Guidelines: Government & Industry Perspective – Challenges & Way Forward: G Asok Kumar, MD, NWM

G Asok Kumar, IAS, Additional Secretary & Mission Director, National Water Mission, Ministry of Jal Shakti, Government of India

New Delhi: Ground water management is one the important aspects for effective water resource management. We have been extracting groundwater much more compared to what we are using. In India, extraction of groundwater is quite high compared to groundwater extraction in the US and China combined. But somehow groundwater management was not given that much importance. But now the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) has come up with a set of new guidelines which will be of help for effective usage of groundwater. That is why also, the National Water Mission focuses on auditing of water. Specially for the industrial sector. Industry will have some apprehension but we have to convince them for effective usage of groundwater and encourage using technology and innovation for the same.

What is measured can only be monitored. I have been supporting the continuous measurement of water flow just to keep the data. There is an apprehension that the government would charge for the water but what is more important is we need to have knowledge of how much water is being used. To have the idea of total water used, we need to meter our water sources, it is very essential. There should be no human intervention anywhere in the meter reading to online data collection. The meter data should be transmitted to an online cloud server automatically using cellular network based telemetry. The entire process of centralised data collection should be tamperproof.