Delhi has finished at the bottom of the Composite Water Management Index, an assessment by the Niti Aayog on how States and Union Territories manage their water.
The assessment pans nine themes, each having an attached weight, and assesses how well States have done on criteria such as groundwater and surface water restoration, implementing major and medium irrigation projects, watershed development, participatory irrigation management, on-farm water use, rural and urban water supply, and policy and governance.
These indicators were broken down into 28 objective indicators. These, for instance, were questions such as ‘Did the State have structures for rainwater harvesting?’, ‘What percentage of irrigation potential was realised?’, etc.
‘Poorly managed’
The maximum possible score is a 100 and Gujarat, for the second year in a row, was the topper with 75 points.
“Delhi, assessed on the index for the first time this year, scores the lowest with 20 points. This is alarming, considering Delhi’s position as the country’s capital territory, and its population of two crore people whose water, arguably, is being poorly managed,” the report underlines.
Delhi and Puducherry were the only Union Territories included in the rankings. A key reason for Delhi’s lacklustre performance was that it did not provide data for several indicators. It failed to report data on 12 indicators and reported nil figures on few others. It thus scored zero on 4 themes which collectively made up about 40% of the maximum score. “This limits the potential to understand Delhi’s water management performance through the Index and compare it with other State, UTs,” the report added.
Delhi faced several water-related challenges such as water access for the urban poor residing in slums and discharge of untreated sewage and industrial waste into rivers, such as the Yamuna.
It also ranked second in the list of 20 largest water-stressed cities in the world in 2015. A key recommendation by the NITI Aayog for Delhi was to establish an integrated data centre for water resources that could help institutionalise these practices.
