Correspondent
GUWAHATI, February 26
Perhaps for the first time among the North East region, Assam is all set to bring out a water policy in order to have judicious utilization of the available water resources.“To monitor the water resources, the state of Assam will bring out its water policy within a short time as the process is in the pipeline,” said AK Mitra, former secretary of Assam’s Water Resources Department. However, he did not elaborate on the tentative timing for the formal announcement of the water policy of the state.
The former Assam official was delivering his closing remark on the concluding day of the 2-day conference on climate change adaptation: Priorities for Research, Policy and practices in North East India NEDFi hall in Guwahati on Wednesday.
Stating that Assam is facing scarcity of potable of drinking water though the state is rich in water resources, Mitra also appealed to the researchers, policy makers and other concerned representatives attending the conference to join the next Assam Water Conference to be held in February 2015.The conference was held on February 21 this year.
The conference which was organized by Guwahati based NGO Aaranyak in collaboration with Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), National Institute of Administrative Research and German based GIZ, also agreed to float a forum to exchange and share ideas/findings among the researchers, policy makers and media to tackle issues relating to climate change impacts in the North Eastern states besides closely working with Ministry of DoNER, GIZ and concerned states.
On the day-1 of the conference, Union Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF)’s Joint Secretary Ravi S Prasad informed the gathering that they’ve taken up ‘real action’ to monitor the state action plans on climate change in the country.Prasad said, “So far 28 states have submitted their drafts on state action plan on climate change. Of which 11 of them were endorsed by the MoEF.” Informing that states have been asked to set up climate change cells and get the feedback on what’s happening in their respective areas, he said step are on to set up a national institute on climate change studies as well.
He added around 80-85 observatory centres will be set up across the country besides roping in institutions such as North Eastern Hill University for certain research activities for certain climate change studies in the region. On the other hand Manipur and Nagaland government representatives participating in the conference also shared their grievances in taking up climate change activities in their respective states due to the lack cooperation from the other concerned government departments while Meghalaya’s senior official CP Marak informed the gathering that they have listed as many as 150 climate change actions points in their state.
