Water demand in drought-prone areas of jalgaon district, Maharashtra State: Past, present and future

Author: 
Patil, N. A. and Suryawanshi, D. S

Water demand projections (WDPs) are widely used for future water resource planning. Accurate WDPs can reduce waste or scarcity associated with over development or under development of water resources. Considering that the projection period of some WDPs have now passed, this paper examines how closely such past projected withdrawals match current water withdrawals to identify lessons that can be learned and strengthen future studies on WDPs. Six WDPs conducted before 1990 and seven conducted after 1990 are analyzed in detail. The review shows that the pre-1990 WDPs, which considered population as the main driver of change, over predicted current water use by 20 to 130%. In this paper analysis of water availability adopting Ministry of water resource, India methodology, Hargreaves Samani (1985) method for crop water and Hussain S. K. (1977) method for livestock water requirement based on climatic and population data for 9 drought- prone tahsils. Climate data for 31 years collected from IMD, Pune. Using this database and methodology find out tahsil and sector wise present status of water demand. The average per capita domestic water withdrawals at present already exceed projections. The accuracy of global WDPs could be increased, within areas, and influence of rapidly changing key exogenous and endogenous drivers of water demand in different sectors are taken into account. Present study shows that the per capita availability of utilizable water in the study region in 1981 was 1638 m3; in 2011 it came down to 1,096 m3. Also it is expected to decrease by 990 m3 & 894 m3 per person in 2021 & 2041 respectively.

Paper No: 
1704