43-Development versus Sustainable Development of Ground Water Resources in Indian Context.

Abstract

The accelerated growth in population, industries and agriculture has brought about many fold increase in the water supply. Groundwater contributes significantly to meet the ever increasing demand of water supply. Massive withdrawal of ground water in India commenced from late sixties since the onset of nationwide green revolution. Till late eighties, the main aim of so called ground water development in Indian context was restricted to the delineation of ground water resources and their exploitation without paying due attention towards its effects on quantity and quality of ground water. All these years, ground water development has been carried out and still continuing by private operators, who mostly do not have adequate understanding about the prevailing hydrogeological conditions and the dependencies and linkages of ground water with other constituents of hydrological cycles. For most of them, ground water is unlimited source, which is otherwise a limited source annually replenished by rain water. During all these years, inappropriate development of ground water resources has caused several kinds of problems such as declining of ground water level leading to failure of wells and ground water pollution, water logging and soil salinity in canal command areas. Since last 10-15 years attention has been paid in some areas by government institutions and NGOs towards achieving the goal of sustainable development by linking the management and governance policies to the development program. Sustainable development rejects all policies and practices which leads to quantitative and qualitative deterioration of ground water resources by fulfilling present needs ignoring the future requirements. This paper describes the impacts of development and sustainable development with the help of case studies to highlight the necessity of integration of management and governance schemes with the development programs.