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India must urgently shift to climate-resilient, integrated water governance to tackle worsening scarcity, floods, and institutional fragmentation
Image Source: Getty Images
This article is a part of the essay series: World Water Week 2025
In recent weeks, India’s water realities have been thrown into stark relief. In Jodhpur, a city renowned for its arid landscapes, swelling groundwater levels necessitated a relocation of the Independence Day venue. Hundreds of kilometres away, Karnataka’s Tungabhadra Dam, a lifeline to vast irrigation networks, saw its effective storage capacity shrink from 133 to just 80 tmcft due to decades of siltation and the breakdown of a crest gate, with upgrade plans stalled by administrative delays. Meanwhile, in Delhi, water scarcity has escalated into political brinkmanship, with neighbourhoods receiving erratic supply as heatwaves drive consumption spikes. These are not isolated misfortunes—they signal a systemic crisis that climate change is aggravating.
Two questions dominate the national conversation: how can India escape the recurring cycle of deadly floods and crippling “Day Zero” moments in its cities? And how can governance shift from reactive crisis management to proactive climate adaptation? This essay argues that the answers lie not in engineering our way out of scarcity or abundance, but in overhauling the way we govern water—moving away from fragmented and supply-driven approaches toward integrated, basin-aware, data-rich, and ecosystem-rooted resilience.
Erratic monsoons, which now bring longer dry spells punctuated by intense downpours, are disrupting both river flows and aquifer replenishment.
The urgency is underscored by the numbers. India’s per capita water availability has already fallen from 1,486 m³ in 2021 to a projected 1,367 m³ by 2031, well below the water stress threshold of 1,700 m³. Over 1,000 administrative blocks are now classified as “over-exploited”, where groundwater extraction exceeds recharge. Erratic monsoons, which now bring longer dry spells punctuated by intense downpours, are disrupting both river flows and aquifer replenishment. In 2024, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand recorded multiple cloudbursts and flash floods in a single monsoon season, while districts in Marathwada and north Karnataka declared drought before the year was out. The duality of too much and too little water—sometimes in the same basin within months—is fast becoming India’s hydrological baseline.
A key part of the vulnerability lies in how India’s water institutions are structured. The Ministry of Jal Shakti, state irrigation departments, municipal water utilities, and disaster management authorities all have overlapping but poorly coordinated mandates. Much like India’s earlier approach to heatwaves—limited to alerting citizens without integrating urban planning or healthcare—water governance is siloed, treating irrigation, drinking water, urban drainage, and flood control as separate domains. This fragmentation has real consequences: during the Assam floods last year, embankment maintenance fell through bureaucratic cracks, delaying preventive dredging and amplifying damage.
Climate-resilient water governance must start by recognising that water systems follow hydrological boundaries, not political ones. Basin-level governance—where upstream and downstream interests are balanced, ecological health is monitored, and water use is planned for multiple sectors—remains more rhetoric than reality. Existing basin boards, like those for the Cauvery or Godavari, are primarily dispute-resolution bodies. They need to evolve into empowered climate-adaptation platforms, with legal authority, multi-state financing, and real-time hydrological data.
Basin-level governance—where upstream and downstream interests are balanced, ecological health is monitored, and water use is planned for multiple sectors—remains more rhetoric than reality.
That data gap is another structural weakness. Despite advances in remote sensing and AI, India’s groundwater monitoring network remains sparse, and river flow data is often restricted or outdated. Without granular, timely, and publicly accessible data, it is impossible to model climate risk accurately or make agile operational decisions. In heatwave planning, some Indian cities are now using AI-integrated dashboards to coordinate healthcare and energy responses; water management needs a parallel revolution. From AI-driven flood forecasting in the Brahmaputra to evapotranspiration mapping in Rajasthan’s arid zones, technology must inform both seasonal allocation and emergency protocols.
In urban India, the water crisis is compounded by scale and neglect. Cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, and Shimla have all come close to “Day Zero” in the past decade.. Much of their supply often comes from distant sources— pumps water over 300 metres uphill at massive energy cost—while local lakes and aquifers are degraded or encroached upon. Less than 30 percent is treated; the rest flows into rivers, contaminating potable sources. Urban water planning remains linear: import, distribute, dispose. A climate-resilient model would integrate stormwater capture, wastewater reuse, and aquifer recharge into a closed-loop system, reducing dependence on brittle external sources. The pilot projects for wastewater recycling into potable supply are a promising start, but they remain small in scale relative to the demand gap.
In rural India, irrigation consumes more than 80 percent of all freshwater, yet water-use efficiency remains low. The dominance of flood irrigation, coupled with crop patterns incentivised by procurement policies—paddy in Punjab, sugarcane in drought-prone Maharashtra—exacerbates depletion. While micro-irrigation under the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana has expanded, adoption remains uneven, with smallholders facing upfront cost barriers. Climate-resilient governance must link agricultural policy, energy pricing, and crop insurance with water outcomes, rewarding efficiency and penalising waste.
The dominance of flood irrigation, coupled with crop patterns incentivised by procurement policies—paddy in Punjab, sugarcane in drought-prone Maharashtra—exacerbates depletion.
Groundwater, the silent foundation of India’s water economy, is under acute stress. It supplies over 80 percent of rural drinking water and 60 per cent of irrigation.. The Atal Bhujal Yojana has demonstrated that decentralised groundwater management works when local water user associations monitor extraction and plan recharge. Scaling this model, with digital well-level sensors feeding into state dashboards, could enable both enforcement and community ownership. However, this requires political will to enforce limits even in politically sensitive farm belts.
Ecosystem restoration must be embedded into governance, not treated as an NGO-led afterthought. Floodplains, mangroves, and urban lakes are natural infrastructure that modulate extremes—storing floodwaters, recharging aquifers, and filtering pollutants. Yet they are routinely sacrificed for real estate or infrastructure. Bengaluru’s decision to shrink lake buffer zones from 30 metres to as little as 3 metres may boost construction, but it invites flooding and contamination. A legally enforceable national mission to restore and protect urban and peri-urban water bodies could lock in ecological resilience alongside engineered solutions.
Financing is the final pillar. Water projects—whether for treatment plants, metering, or embankment strengthening—are expensive, and municipal budgets are chronically inadequate. Blended finance models, combining public funds, climate finance, and private capital, could underwrite major upgrades. Tariff reforms must reflect the true cost of service while shielding low-income households through targeted subsidies. Without sustainable financing, even the most sophisticated governance designs risk remaining paper plans.
Community watershed committees, citizen-science groundwater monitoring, and participatory water budgeting can foster accountability and embed conservation in daily practice.
Public participation must bind all of these reforms together. Water is both a right and a responsibility; resilience grows when citizens co-manage it. Community watershed committees, citizen-science groundwater monitoring, and participatory water budgeting can foster accountability and embed conservation in daily practice. Successful models exist—from Pani Panchayats in Maharashtra to lake revival committees in Rajasthan—and they show that when governance is decentralised, adaptive capacity rises.
India’s water challenges in 2025 are not merely about scarcity or abundance; they are about volatility, inequity, and institutional inertia. Climate-resilient water governance offers a pathway to stability—if it can transcend political boundaries, embrace data transparency, integrate ecosystems, and invest in both infrastructure and people. The choice is stark: adapt governance to a changing climate, or let climate variability dictate the terms of our development. In securing the flow, India secures its future.
Aparna Roy is a Fellow and Lead Climate Change and Energy at the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy.
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Aparna Roy is a Fellow and Lead Climate Change and Energy at the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy (CNED). Aparna's primary research focus is on ...
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