NEW DELHI (Commodity Online): Better late than never is an idiom found in proverbial books and very well implemented by Indian government authorities.

India’s hide and seek with water is legendary. This is a country, which faces flood and drought at the same time. This is also a country, which distributes relief to drought victims and immediately follows it up with rescuing flood victims.

According to experts, this embarrassing situation arises because of the lack of coordination between various ministries, central and state government feuds, late disbursal of funds and misuse of funds once it reaches the states or agencies that is created to help create projects to avoid water related issues.

So better late than never practicalities are now implemented by Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), which has now realized to its horror that there is scarcity of water in the country and overexploitation of ground water resources have become alarming.

The Board which functions under the ministry of water resources was sitting on many reports that simply asked the government to implement recharging of underground resources. Acting late, the board is now considering implementing artificial recharge projects across Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

The ministry has scheme for supporting artificial recharge to ground water and rain water harvesting by construction of various structures like percolation tanks, check dams, subsurface dykes, recharge shafts/trenches, injection wells, gabion structures, etc.

A ministry note said the dug wells will be part of farmers participatory action research programme which is aimed at creating awareness about water conservation practices. Building bylaws will be modified to make rainwater harvesting compulsory. Already some states have implemented this while some are waiting for the worst to happen.

According to a government release, the Recharge to the aquifers from monsoon rainfall has been estimated as 248 billion cubic metres (bcm) as per the assessment of ground water resources carried out by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) jointly with States in 2004. Considering the annual precipitation in the country as 4000 bcm, monsoon rainfall recharge works out to be 6.2% of the annual precipitation for the country as a whole.

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