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Australia-India Partnering to Address India’s Water Challenges

The Australia India Water Centre has brought together eight universities and one State Government Department from Australia and 16 IITs and key universities of India for this program.

WD News: The National Hydrology Project, Department of Water Resources, RD & GR, Ministry of Jal Shakti has initiated an innovative Young Water Professionals Program in collaboration with Western Sydney University and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, lead of the Australia India Water Centre. The objective is to build the capacity of Young Water Professionals (YWPs) and to provide them with required knowledge, skills, attitude, and aptitude to offer their best in the country’s water sector by accepting leadership roles and responsibilities.

The program focuses on gender equality and diversity. The the first phase of this programme, 20 young officers (10 men and 10 women) have been selected from the National Hydrology Project’s central and state implementing agencies. The Australia India Water Centre has brought together eight universities and one State Government Department from Australia and 16 IITs and key universities of India for this program. In the concluding event of this 11-month YWP program organised recently, Ms. Debashree Mukherjee, Special Secretary, DOWR, RD & GR, Ministry of Jal Shakti presided as Chief Guest.

‘India and Australia are natural partners and this collaboration to train young water professionals is an important step in the right direction’, said Ms. Debashree Mukherjee. “I am particularly inspired by the equal participation of women. She stressed the need to orienting capacity building initiatives to meet the challenges likely to be posed by climate change and emphasised that the departments, institutions and academia need to break the silos in which they are working and holistic approach be adopted while dealing with water. She expressed satisfaction that the Yong water Professional Programme has been designed accordingly.

On this occasion, Western Sydney University, with the Ministry of Jal Shakti and the Australian Water Partnership also launched an app for farmers and ordinary citizens, ‘My Well’. It is a citizen science tool for participatory monitoring and visualisation of groundwater, surface water, rainfall, water quality, check dam water levels, and other parameters. This app will be used by villagers trained to manage their groundwater resources.

Ms. Mukherjee highlighted the importance of validated crowd sourced data to ensure community involvement in water resources management and emphasized the need to integrate the validated crowd-sourced data in the central database being managed by NWIC.

Shri Anand Mohan, Joint Secretary, DOWR, RD & GR hoped that the trainee officers who have undergone this course would have grasped trans-disciplinary aspects of water management, as opposed to focusing solely on engineering components, and would be in a position to work on real-world problems.

Prof. T.G. Sitharam, Director, the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati stressed the need for additional storages in the country to tap the monsoon flows.

Source and image courtesy: PIB

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