Shrinivas Badiger

The proceedings of the Consultation on “Emerging Water Regulatory Frameworks and Related Reforms in Water Governance in Karnataka” that was held on 02 September 2009 at Bangalore. Please do send us your comments.

In continuation with our efforts within Karnataka we have taken up two initiatives:

1. Review of the ongoing reform processes in Urban Water Governance, with a special focus on the establishment of the Karnataka Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Council.
2. Preparation of a general reader on water governance in the form of a booklet with a special focus on regulatory reforms in Karnataka, available both in Karnataka and Kannada (targeted at non-academic audiences such as NGO's and CSO's).

 This study by CISED and NIVA aimed at the development of a comprehensive database on the status of water sector and the development of integrated hydro economic model for selected water services in the study area of the Malaprabha basin. The study focused on exploring the feasibility of Payment for Watershed Services (PWS) to improve the water availability through a detailed analysis of the historic hydrologic data and development of a framework of hydrologic and water allocation model. A hydro-allocation model was developed using the software - ArcView SWAT (AVSWAT) and MIKE-BASIN models.

This report by FoRWARD deals with the reorientation of the watershed development programme in India. The government is apparently committing larger resources for watershed development and plans to bring most of the dryland, degraded lands under the coverage of the programme over the next 25 years or so.