Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Uma Bharti on Tuesday said that dissemination of data in public domain constitutes the most important aspect of water resources management.
Inaugurating the India Water Week - 2015 here today, she said, "to fulfill this objective, the Central Water Commission in collaboration with National Remote Sensing Centre of ISRO has launched the project Generation of database".
She said India has more than 18 per cent of the world's population, but has only four per cent of world's renewable water resources.
"There are further limits on utilizable quantities of water owing to uneven distribution of water over time and space.with a growing population and rising needs of a fast developing nation as well as the given indication of the impact of climate change, availability of utilizable water will be under further strain in future with the possibility of deepening water conflicts among different user groups," she said.
"Our country has wide variation in water availability across various river basins. While Ganga and Brahmaputra river basins are well endowed with water, the basins in peninsular India are relatively water scarce and most of the them have already reached the stage of full development," the minister said.
She said it is in this context that the inter-basin water transfer programme known as the interlinking of rivers has been conceived for transfer of water from surplus basins to deficit basins.
Bharti said, "The program is based on creating relatively large storage to build resilience in the system and also provide an aggregate storage capacity needed for the country in an area where the topography and geology provide favourable condition. We will adopt a win-win strategy for implementation of the programme".
Union Minister state for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Sanwar Lal Jat, Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh, Union Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu and Union Environment and Forest Minister Prakash Javadekar also addressed the gathering.
The theme of five day water week is "Water Management for Sustainable Development".
