Published Paper Details:

Water is an important source for sustaining life and livestock, which requires being properly used, developed and managed. India is not a water-deficient country, but its growing demand for water makes it vulnerable, and by 2050 it will become the highest water-demanding country with a daily demand of 2413 billion litres per capita at the global level. In 1951, India's water per capita availability was 5177 cm per year, decreasing to 1820 cm in 2001. India's water per capita availability will be 1341 cm per year in 2025 and 1140 cm per year in 2050. In India, 43.5 percent of drinking water requirement is being fulfilled by tap water, 42 percent by handpump/tubewell sources, 11 percent by well and 3.5 percent by other sources. Inadequate use of water resources is an important feature of Uttar Pradesh which pushed many regions in the state into dry and rain-fed zones. The state is also the largest extractor of groundwater, accounting for 18.4 percent of the country's groundwater and 5.4 percent of the world's groundwater. The per capita groundwater extraction is 225.0 cm per capita which are more than the national average of 182.9 cm per capita and the world average of 125.9 cm per capita. In Uttar Pradesh, 67.9 percent of water drinking requirements are fulfilled by handpumps or tubewells, 27.3 percent by tap water, 4 percent by well and 0.9 percent by other sources. It has also been observed that the majority of the development blocks have overexploited the groundwater resources in which some development blocks become more critical while some other blocks come under the semi-critical zones. This may be due to rapid population growth, urbanization, higher dependency on groundwater for agriculture, fast-growing manufacturing units, and a change in temporal and spatial variation due to climate change and ineffective management of water resources.