Disappearing traditional water bodies a threat to river system

Kapurthala, March 14

Pushpa Gujral Science City observed International Day of Action for Rivers by organising a webinar to highlight the importance of actions required to conserve and sustain rivers. This year the theme of International Day of Action for Rivers was ‘Rights of Rivers’. Around 100 students and teachers from all over Punjab attended the webinar.

Dr Rajesh Grover, Director, Science City, said rivers were the life line of civilisation as they provide water for domestic use, irrigation, power generation and industry as well as a range of other ecosystem services and biodiversity values. Throughout centuries all major civilisations across the world have developed, prospered and sustained along rivers and cities like Varanasi, Delhi, London, Moscow, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Washington DC, and many more, are a testimony to that.

Managing rivers to provide multiple benefits is, therefore, fundamental to water security. The 25th anniversary of the celebration of this very important day on which several communities across the world are coming together with one voice to say that rivers matter. Further, the day also highlights the importance of rivers to biodiversity as these were key to restoring and maintaining biodiversity across the world. The river system was the Earth’s highest biological diversity zone, she added.

Dr RP Pandey, Scientist G, and Head, Environmental Hydrology Division from National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee, was the key speaker at this occasion. He delivered a lecture on ‘River health assessment and rejuvenation”.

During his address, he said that river is an aquatic ecosystem where a number of abiotic and biotic factors keep interacting and maintain equilibrium over a period of time. “India faces greater annual/intra-annual variability of rainfall both in space and time with highly skewed seasonality in rainfall. The increasing water demand for irrigation and other uses and excessive rate of groundwater exploitation were causing serious threats to availability of regional water resources flow in rivers. Consequently, water is becoming scarce not only in arid, semi-arid and drought prone areas but also in regions where rainfall was abundant. Further, disappearing traditional water bodies, like natural pond, tanks, and wetland are causing major threats to sustenance of river system,” he said.

He stressed on the need to focus on implementation of effective measures to control water quality degradation, increased pollution load in water bodies and revival of rivers including traditional water bodies which has deteriorated.