Executive Summary

India faces an unprecedented water crisis, driven by climate variability, inefficient agricultural practices, and rapid urbanisation, with per capita water availability steadily declining. Rather than looking at water merely from an environmental or engineering perspective, Water, Nature, Progress: Solutions for a New India frames it as a critical macroeconomic variable that will determine India’s trajectory toward becoming a developed nation by 2047. While access to water has improved through initiatives such as the Jal Jeevan Mission and AMRUT, systemic inefficiencies and fragmented governance across the agricultural, industrial, and urban sectors remain severe constraints on economic growth.

The book advocates for a paradigm shift from traditional "blue water" extraction to the sustainable co-management of land and water ecosystems. It emphasises unlocking the hidden reservoir of "green water", projects used water in India from a pollution liability to a multi-billion-dollar wealth-generation opportunity through the reuse of treated used water, and advocates for addressing the critical water and sanitation gaps in peri-urban areas, often ignored as the administrative "missing middle". To achieve these, it suggests governance reforms, behaviour change promotion, and pricing reforms.

Key findings

• Growing water stress and climate risks: Declining per capita water availability, increasing frequency of floods and droughts, and shifting precipitation patterns are intensifying water insecurity across regions.
• Inefficiencies in water use: Agriculture accounts for the majority of water consumption, yet water productivity remains low due to unsustainable cropping patterns and inefficient irrigation practices.
• Untapped potential of used water: Urban India generates significant volumes of used water, but limited treatment and reuse result in lost economic and environmental opportunities.
• Fragmented governance: Multiple institutions with overlapping responsibilities lead to weak coordination, inadequate monitoring, and inefficient resource allocation. 
• Underutilisation of demand-side solutions: Policies have historically focused on supply-side infrastructure, while behavioural change and efficiency improvements remain underemphasised. 

Key recommendations

• Adopt a green water mission: Shift focus from blue water extraction to managing "green water". Scale regenerative farming, protect upstream natural forests, renew Soil Health Card scheme and reform MSP policies to incentivize climate-resilient crops like millets over water-intensive rice.
• Enable a circular water economy and ‘sponge cities’: Target 100 per cent used water treatment by 2035 to generate wealth from waste. Redesign urban landscapes into "sponge cities" using blue-green infrastructure for flood management and water recharge, and leverage new public-private partnerships to scale the reuse of Treated Used Water (TUW).
• Prioritise peri-urban WASH system: Launch a dedicated Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) 3.0 to address service gaps in expanding transitional areas. The mission would focus on tailored governance reforms, community experiments, financial guarantees to ensure proper treatment, and disposal of faecal sludge and technological innovations for decentralized water treatment.
• Strengthen water governance to dismantle administrative silos governing land and water resources, promote behavioural change for scaling up reuse and precision agriculture for freshwater savings, and  reform water financing and pricing, shifting the mindset from a "willingness to pay" to a "willingness to charge" through rational, volumetric tariffs that ensure full cost recovery.