Sustainable Watershed Management: A Novel Approach for Green Technology

Introduction

The aim of green technology is to make people life better without compromising the quality of life. The power to heal our future is the necessity of green technology. It is therefore friendly way to protect the earth’s natural resources and the environment. According to Mahatma Gandhi, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed”. India is endowed with many natural resources but 50% of the resources are degraded due to deforestation, soil erosion and indiscriminate use of water. This leads to constraints in productivity like water scarcity, inherent low soil fertility and poor water management practices. Water is a basic natural resource which nurtures life and 70% of the population relies on agriculture and 2/3 part of the cropped area is dependent on rainfall without any protective irrigation. There is an urgent need to develop natural resource management techniques to sustain livelihood. The main component of integrated water resource management is the sustainable water supply (Raju et al 2008). The water as natural resource has many uses in domestic purpose (drinking, cleaning, sanitization, cooking), industrial operations (energy production, agriculture, manufacture of goods). Therefore, the three goals of accessing sustainability in water supply include environmental integrity, economic stability and social responsibility. The basic elements of Sustainable watershed management are interconnected as:

Figure 1.

Basic elements of sustainable watershed management

Watershed management is a geo-hydrological unit draining to a common point by system of drains. It is thus the land and water area bounded by a drainage area on the earth’s surface from which runoff resulting from precipitation flows past a single point into a large stream, river or ocean (Shukla 2015). The water which comes from rainfall and storm water is collected in watershed which is separated from other watershed by naturally elevated areas. Thus, “a watershed is an area of land and water bounded by a drainage divide within which the surface runoff collects and flows out of a watershed through a single outlet onto a river lake or pond”. The main aim of watershed management is to conserve the soil, plant and water resources of a catchment while benefiting humanity. It combines environmental, social, and economic concerns with approaches to treat forest, range, agricultural and urban parcels in an integrated manner (Naiman, 1994). The problem of degraded land, water and its management is complex and multi-dimensional and its development aims to develop human resource in watershed development and management and generate awareness about the importance of sustainable development and maintenance of existing work force working in the watershed development and develop skill in the rural youth to work in the watershed development based on watershed management approach and developing natural resources on sustainable basis (Suryawanshi et al 2012).

The factors affecting watershed management are Watershed characters, climatic factors, land use pattern and water resources. Depending upon the size, drainage, shape and pattern, the watersheds may be classified as follows:

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  Macrowatershed (>50,000Hectare)

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  Subwater shed (10,000-50,000 Hectare)

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  Milliwater shed (1000-10,000 Hectare)

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  Microwater shed (100-1000 Hectare)

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  Mini water shed (1-100 Hectare)

Watershed Management- A Multidisciplinary Approach

The approach for watershed invites integrated inputs from various disciplines for the development of watersheds in accordance with their characteristics. The objectives of watershed management include: