ABSTRACT
India being a country with rich history and traditions, water harvesting and water conservation are the domains with opulent inheritance. Indian history has also been associated with deeply rooted social values focusing on the principle that the water is a common resource sharable amongst the stakeholders without any monetary consideration and without any right of encroaching the riparian rights of the populations inhabited in the downstream of any watercourse. Gujarat is a state of India with extreme water scarcity and hence the Government of Gujarat tried to resurrect the traditional systems of water harvesting and got constructed over 0.15 million small dams across rivulets and rivers in last fifteen years. The experience of small dams is thus very rich and the issues with them have been studied and presented in this chapter. Some case studies are discussed in brief as reference only but general diagnosis made therefrom is very important.
