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7.4 Water-related trade-offs
and win-win options
Opportunities for improving water use
efficiency or productivity in the study
mandals fall into four categories
(after Seckler, 1996):
· Increasing output per unit of
evaporated water;
· Reducing pollution and
degradation that diminishes
the value of usable water;
· Reallocating water from lower
to higher value uses;
· Reducing losses of usable water
to sinks.
All the options listed in Section 8 fall
into one or more of the categories listed
above. Wherever possible APRLP should
promote win-win options. However, when a
range of scales is considered, there are few
options that can be classified as being winwin,
regardless of the physical and social
setting. Hence, minimising trade-offs by
matching options to a given setting is
crucially important.
Using IWMI’s terminology, most of the
river basins in southern Andhra Pradesh are
now approaching the status of being closed
basins whereby utilisable outflows are, on
average, fully committed. Hence, there is
only limited justification for attempting to
augment water resources by creating
additional storage in the form of, say, check
dams with high crest heights, nala bunds
and small dams. There is, however, a strong
argument for ensuring that water is
impounded where it provides the highest
value range of goods and services. In some
cases, achieving this objective might involve
installing new structures along drainage
lines and removing existing structures,
lowering their crest heights or installing
sluice gates that are left open during at least
part of the rainy season.
Vegetable market
Watering livestock from a domestic water point in
Manirevu, Kalyandurg
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