Application of an innovative and holistic water resources management instrument at a decentralized administrative level - A case of Maharashtra, India

Water resources planning and management (WRPM) ideally is a holistic exercise covering the dimensions related to water resource availability, it's use, access, institutional capacity to manage the resource and flow of the resource back to the environment to ensure sustainability. However, traditionally, WRPM has suffered from inadequate attention to the issues related to access, capacity and environment and the focus has been on creating infrastructure to harness the resource. Water Poverty Index (WPI) is a managerial innovation which considers all the five dimensions in an integrated manner and has the potential to overcome this mismatch. This paper examines alternative ways to deal with the methodological challenges in applying WPI at sub-national scale in India, such as data reconciliation, identification of appropriate indicators, aggregation and allocation of weightage.WPI has been applied for one of states of India, i.e., Maharashtra, at district level. The state was selected because of water resource variability across the state; increasing water demand for intensive agriculture and industrialization; and pro activeness of stakeholders’ involvement in WRPM. Striking results are obtained in the case of differential weights of the components; the highest WPI estimate is approximately 0.67 (highest attainable value is 1), which suggests that there is further scope for improvement even in the water wealthy districts of Maharashtra. In the case of Maharashtra, district-specific interventions are needed to enhance the access to, and human and financial capacity to use the available water in an efficient manner in the worse- off districts, i.e., Yavatmal and Jalna.