WOTR – Water Stewardship Initiative
The Water Stewardship Initiative in Rural India – A How to Manual was released today by the internationally renowned nonprofit organization Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR). By facilitating stewardship at the local level, the manual offers a step-by-step approach to water management and builds on WOTR’s extensive expertise of over 27 years in building and implementing systems to safeguard and nurture water resources.
The Water Stewardship Initiative (WSI) is founded on the idea that dialogue and discussions among different community stakeholders are inevitable when they come together and are given realistic information about their climate, water resources, the productivity associated with them, and their socioeconomic context. As a result, they have a shared systemic awareness of their circumstances and are inspired and mobilized to take sustained action to achieve water governance.
The Water Stewardship in Rural India – A How to Manual draws from lessons learned and experience in creating and implementing the WSI programme in 250 villages across several Indian states, including 100 pilot villages in Maharashtra, while highlighting WOTR’s ecosystem-based approach. The manual offers a reliable and scientifically validated methodology that practitioners in rural development and climate change can use to manage water resources in the country’s groundwater-dependent, arid, and semi-arid regions.
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Water Stewardship Initiative
Prakash Keskar, Executive Director of WOTR, commented on the manual, saying, “The WSI manual captures our learnings and experiences from the Water Stewardship Initiative’s pilot project. Since the project’s 100 trial villages in Maharashtra, it has grown to 250 villages throughout other Indian states. We want to encourage more widespread action across the nation by disseminating this handbook. India urgently needs more water managers or stewards to provide water sustainably and equally to everyone while safeguarding her ecosystems. We anticipate the support of other organisations in advancing our cause and strengthening the water crisis resistance of our rural areas.
According to a 2018 Niti Aayog research, 600 Indians are thought to have severe water stress. India is also the world’s biggest groundwater user, using more of it than China and the US combined, the next two biggest users of groundwater. Water resources require an efficient governance structure to maintain their sustainability in the face of a worrying decline in groundwater tables and an increase in disputes related to water. WOTR seeks to unite the diverse stakeholders with the WSI programme in order to comprehensively handle water-related challenges at the community level. The National Water Policy, the PMKSY, the Atal Bhujal Yojana, and several groundwater regulations are all strongly supported by the WSI.
