There are two incontrovertible facts one that water is a key determinant for health security and economic growth. And two, water wars are not inevitable but will happen only if we do not manage our resources prudently. In this age of Covid-19, we have understood just how critical the issue of clean water is. Our defense against the pandemic is that we wash hands frequently. This is why in the Union Budget 2021, the Government has included water in the health component of the country's accounts. This is a game-changer, in my view, as it recognises the role of clean water as a critical preventive health measure.I would also argue that while water scarcity is indeed growing, it is not inevitable that cities will run out of water or that we will not have any water to drink. I say this because water is a replenishable resource it snows and rains each year. More importantly, other than in the case of agriculture, we do not consume water. We use and discharge. Therefore, it can be treated and then re-used and recycled. So, this is one future we can change.This means getting the policy and practice of water management right. The good news is water literacy has grown. Over the past few decades, the country has learned critical lessons on water management and evolved a new paradigm. Till the late 1980, water management was largely confined to the issue of irrigation projects the building of dams and canals to store and supply water long distances. But then came the big droughts of the late 1980 and it became clear that it was not enough to plan for augmenting water only through large projects. This was also when the Centre for Science and Environment published its report, Dying Wisdom, which documented traditional technologies for rainwater harvesting in ecological diverse regions of India. The slogan was Rain is decentralised, so is the demand for water. So, capture rain when and where it falls.There was a paradigm shift in policy. In the droughts of the late 1990, state governments launched massive programmes to capture rainwater by building ponds, digging tanks, and building check-dams on streams. By the mid-2000, these efforts coalesced into the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act investing labour into building rural water assets. By this time, it was also understood that groundwater considered a minor resource was the major supplier of water for both drinking water and irrigation in the country. It was also understood that over 50 per cent of agriculture was still rainfed and so water conservation and decentralised rainwater harvesting ensuring that every well and every waterbody was recharged and wellbeing. Was critical for productivity.In the decade of 2010, the crisis of urban drought hit homes. But again, policy evolved as it learned that augmenting water supply was only one part of the challenge cities were increasingly dependent on long-distance sources pumping and piping this water meant both losses in distribution, as well as costs of electricity, and this, in turn, made the available water expensive and more inequitable. As water supply dried up, people turned to groundwater and without recharge ponds and tanks had been decimated up by real estate or simply through neglect declining water levels. More importantly, water supply was linked to pollution the more the water supplied the more is wastewater generation. This, without adequate treatment, leads to pollution of rivers and water bodies, which in turn destroys available water and increases the cost of cleaning up drinking water.A few years later, research revealed that the bulk of urban residents are not even connected to the underground sewerage network which is capital and resource-intensive. Instead, they depend on onsite sewage disposal systems, where household toilets are connected to septic tanks or just holding tanks or even to open drains in the vicinity. But the sewage treatment infrastructure was not designed to fit the city sanitation system and so remained underutilised. Rivers remained polluted. In all this, new solutions emerged if the affordable water supply was critical, then cities needed to cut the length of their distribution pipelines, which meant an increased focus on local water systems like ponds, tanks, and rainwater harvesting. Then, if cities needed to ensure affordable sanitation for all and affordable treatment of wastewater, on-site systems could be re-engineered so that waste was collected from each household, transported, and treated. There was no need to build long-distance pipelines for the supply of water or even longer distance pipelines for taking back the wastewater for treatment. But most importantly, we have learned that if this urban-industrial wastewater is treated for reuse then water is not lost. More importantly, our rivers will not be lost. This is where implementation is now focused.The Indian experience has been invaluable in teaching, not just us, but the world how water management can be reinvented so that it is affordable and so sustainable; it puts water in the hands of communities and focused on decentralised recharge and reuse. Making water everybody's business is the only way ahead. Submit