ABSTRACT
India, an ancient rural and agricultural society that is rapidly modernizing, receives a fair share of its yearly precipitation in only a few days of the monsoon, with high inter-annual variability. In most of its regions, therefore, India needs to store a large proportion of its annual runoff in reservoirs for use in non-monsoon months. In spite of this strategy being in operation for the last 60 years, India’s per capita reservoir storage is relatively small, and water-use efficiency also remains low. Though the overall performance of the water sector in terms of matching of supply and demand has improved, the country remains challenged by deficiencies in laws, regulation policies and institutions, and weakened by a suboptimal work culture in politics, legislature, technocracy and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
