Water Footprint in the Context of Urban Water Management: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Water, a crucial resource in preserving the ecology in good shape, has becomescarce. Water footprint (WF) measure has been proposed in the literature to understandthis prevailing water crisis. The WF, which consists of green, blue, andgrey, can be defined as the green water footprint (WFgreen) that shows how muchwater is used by forests and non-irrigated agriculture; the blue water footprint(WFblue), shows the amount of water used by irrigated agriculture, industry, andresidences, and grey water footprint (WFgrey) shows how much water would berequired to neutralize the pollution in the water and bring it back to the acceptabledischarge water quality. This study conducted a comprehensive WF calculationin Purulia, Dhanbad, and Ranchi municipalities of West Bengal and Jharkhand,India. The primary reasons for choosing these municipalities were that they arewater-scarce and have an inadequate municipal water supply system.The researcher used published data to estimate WF. The results show WFgreenvalues depict that Purulia reports the highest mean values (182.6 to 296.3 (M3*103)per square kilometer (sq km)), followed by Dhanbad (170.3 to 241.2 (M3*103) persq km), and then Ranchi (131 to 219.2 (M3*103) per sq km) for four consecutiveyears (2016-19). These figures imply that Purulia overuses its water resourcesin agriculture, and hence its high WF green needs to be corrected by increasingwater productivity. Dhanbad�s high WF is because of the water consumption byits forests. The high WF is not of concern given that the forests help hold up thesoil and water. Ranchi�s WF is low because it has less land under forests andagriculture.Moreover, WFblue values of 2019 illustrate that Ranchi reports the highest (108M3 per capita), followed by Purulia (81.5M3 per capita), and Dhanbad reports theleast (68.8M3 per capita). The primary factor for getting such results is high runofffollowed by evaporation, and then the municipality supplies water. Therefore,Steps should be taken to retain the rainwater in some form in the soil and manmadechannels.In addition, this study examines the per capita per-day water availability among272 sample households of different income classes to understand the ground-levelsituation. The result reports that slum dwellers are the worst sufferers since theydo not get even the bare minimum amount of water � 70 lpcd, while affluent peopleliving in apartments or bunglows suffer no shortage. The study finds that thisinequality prevails because the primary water source is groundwater, accessibilityto which depends on wealth ownership. As the residences change from poorto non-poor, people depend less on centralized water supply and more on tubewells/bore wells. This is because the water supplied through the municipality isnot enough. Also, the correlation between sources of water and seasonal dearthshows significantly less value, which signifies that seasonal dearth does not relateto which water sources households are fetching the water from. Water quality isterrible for all income classes, but the rich can purify it through R-O.Furthermore, the study also found that in the case of municipality water balance,all three municipalities are going through a deficit water balance. For Purulia,it is 14 (M3*103) per day; for Dhanbad, it is 490.4 (M3*103) per day; andfor Ranchi, it is 439.6 (M3*103) per day, respectively. This means that water withdrawalis far more than the recharge rate. Water availability is expected to be evenmore compromised as we move forward.In such a situation, check dams, ponds, wells, reservoirs, etc., seem to be helpingin water conservation. In addition, water recycling, as tried out by Surat MunicipalCorporation, can also reduce WF. Based on these practical solutions, in theend, some policy recommendations are proposed for water conservation.