Gupta, Nidhi

Rural and urban water conservation research in India
Most water conservation research in India continues to focus on rural practices, notwithstanding the rapid pace of urbanisation. We thus proceed from rural conservation practices to those connected with urban development.
Watershed conservation. Rural water conservation programmes are linked in part with forest and pastoral land management and associated fields of applied vegetation and soil science. Search results reflected the fact that watershed management has been a key topic in water conservation research for decades (Farrington and Turton, 2000). Although largely rural, its emphasis on governance could link it with analogous movements in urban and regional planning, as has occurred in the U.S.
Irrigation and drainage have been primarily associated with agricultural water conservation in South Asia. The Indian committee of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) cites few urban projects in their website and publications. Even progressive irrigation initiatives, e.g. participatory irrigation management, are conceived as rural development programmes, the drip irrigation sector, led by organisations such as the Irrigation Association of India and multinational irrigation companies. At the same time, India has been the locus of innovative social research on irrigation systems in recent decades under the auspices of organisations such as the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), which has researched the links between irrigation research and reuse of treated municipal wastewater (e.g. Celio et al., 2009).

Connections between rural and urban water harvesting systems were curated in the Centre for Science and Environmentʼs Dying Wisdom: The Rise, Fall and Potential of Indiaʼs Traditional Water Harvesting Systems. A follow-up volume on Making Water Everybodyʼs Business was explicitly structured into urban and rural case studies (it also includes some international examples though not formal comparisons across case studies, or North American cases). These movements have had policy adoption at the urban (e.g. Chennai) and state levels (e.g. Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh). Productive scientific debates have focused on the performance and potential of water harvesting at different scales of water planning.