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Integrated River Basin Planning: India and the EU share experience on policy and practice
Prioritisation of Issues
system that can be reused to reexamine the problems and, importantly, to measure
the effects of actions taken to address the problems.
6 Prioritisation
of Issues
6.1 Methodology
The general philosophy in the process towards Integrated Water Resources
Management is, under the given conditions, to establish a balance between the
requirements relating to water, of the economic/social environment and of the
effects of human activities on the water resource.
This balance will be established through a system of management functions
targeted to solve the identified problems of the resource with respect to their
importance. With a technical description of the current situation of the resources
and their exploitation (availability/quality/demand/pollution), a general analysis of
the current problems of the various management levels as well as a systematic
analysis of the importance of the basic problems, it will be possible to identify the
relevant measures for establishment/improvement of the management functions
that will form the contents of an action plan.
In short: «Knowing where you are in order to find out where you are going or
where you can go».
The state is subdivided into hydrographical basins, but the method can also be
used to assess the issues at the national level as a whole. Relevant issues are
then assessed and ranked (prioritised) against a set of predefined criteria used
to assess the importance of a given situation. In order to structure the issues,
the method operates with impact issues relating to quantity and quality of the
resource, user requirement issues and risks imposed by the resource.
This tool was used in the Pamba River Basin to reach a consensus on the priority
issues through extended dialogue and discussions. Representatives drawn from
the water resource department (irrigation, groundwater), agriculture department,
forestry, pollution control board, water service delivery agencies (Kerala Water
Authority), electricity department, local self government departments, district
collectors, other technical departments, bio-diversity board, NGOs and CBOs
across the basin discussed various issues that are relevant to IWRM and ranked
them based on their experience. The participants were taken through the key
issues described in the tool and asked to consider the cause of the problem
based on their first-hand experience and collectively rank them on a five-step
scale (light problem, problem, important problem, very important problem and
major problem). The open debate and collective ranking process neutralized
the probability of individual biases influencing the ranking. A total of 104 water
resources issues were ranked and thereby prioritised as part of a participatory
consultation session performed in May 2010. Out of the 104 issues ranked 51
issues were assessed to be of different degree of importance. The results are
given in the following sections and a full list of the 104 issues ranked is given in
Annex 2
6.2 Impact issues affecting quantity
and quality of the Pamba water
resources
Table 7 below shows the identified and ranked impact issues to be of importance
in the Pamba River Basin. With respect to surface water, it appears that issues
of major problems in the basin consist of reduced availability, water loss,
turbidity, pathogenic contamination and organic pollution caused by sand
mining, encroachment, sedimentation of reservoirs and excreta. Impact issues of
importance for groundwater consist of reduced availability due to climate change
and contamination of the quality of the resource due to excreta.
Table 7
Water resource issues and causes
In order to prioritise the water resources issues for the Pamba Basin, the Water
Resources Assessment Method (WRIAM) was applied during a stakeholder
working session conducted in May 2010. The WRIAM method was developed as
part of a project concerning IWRM in Burkina Faso and has since been applied
in more than 20 countries as part of their IWRM process. The method has been
conceived to allow the attribution of reasonably qualified quantitative values to
more or less subjective judgements, thus offering at the same time a monitoring
Water Resource Issues
Reduced availability and loss of the water resource
Turbidity
Pathogenic and organic pollution
Resource availability and quality do not meet the demand for
ecosystems and pilgrims
Soil erosion and loss of crops
Causes
Sand mining
Encroachment
Sedimentation of reservoirs
Contamination from excreta
Climate change
Floods and intensive pluviometry
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