INTERNATIONAL NEWS

To hold up a formal challenge against proposition to bring it under another association 

The Central Water Commission will formally challenge against a proposition to subsume it into another association. The suggestion that came about because of a report — A 21st Century Institutional Architecture for India's Water Reforms: Restructuring the CWC and CGWB — of a powerful advisory group drove by Mihir Shah, individual from the recent Planning Commission, was submitted to the Water Resources Ministry in July. 

The proposed National Water Commission will be a science-drove organization to prompt the States on how much water they can use without influencing streams and groundwater, taking surface-and groundwater-utilization as a solitary substance. The CWC, set up in 1945, is responsible for surface water and making stockpiling structures, for example, dams and medium-scale repositories. The Central Ground Water Board is entrusted with overseeing groundwater. 

The new body ought to be an extra office of the Ministry, working with both full self-sufficiency and imperative responsibility; ought to be going by a Chief National Water Commissioner; and ought to have full-time magistrates speaking to Hydrology (present Chair, CWC), Hydrogeology (present Chair, CGWB), Hydrometeorology, River Ecology, Ecological Economics, Agronomy (with spotlight on soil and water) and Participatory Resource Planning and Management, the report said. 

States' grumbling 

"CWC and CGWB experience the ill effects of an absence of experts," says an outline of the Shah report. "A few State governments affirmed that colossal postponements in techno-monetary examination by the CWC had turned into a matter of concern." The Ministry is slated to have its initially meeting on August 24 to consider setting up the National Water Commission, a top authority told The Hindu. 

Nonetheless, a high-positioning authority in the CWC told The Hindu that the five-part board of trustees drove by Mr. Shah, entrusted with setting up the report over a year, had disregarded the CWC's perspectives and they would be formally enrolling their dissent with Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti inside a week. "A large number of the arrangements in the report on having various experts, having more State-level directorates are now set up," the authority said. "There is just the same old thing new in this supposed outlook change. Dams were still basic for national water security and habitually dam ventures were frustrated due to resistance from the States." 

This is the third time following 2000 that reports have been put for rebuilding the CWC and it is still misty how genuinely the administration is liable to proceed with rebuilding. However the late water emergencies notwithstanding dry spells in 2014 and 2015 and developing worries with groundwater pollution have given a new trigger, a senior Ministry official said. 

Mr. Shah is learnt to have made a presentation at the Prime Minister's Office. "This will be what might as well be called the 1991 changes in water that we've never had," he told The Hindu. "We are carrying groundwater administration comparable to surface water."