Since the inception of India Water Foundation our objective was policy advocacy and assimilation and dissemination of information, best practices, right technology, sharing success stories among different stakeholders including vulnerable marginalized and grass root communities. We shared through digital communication with schools who were already engaged with us, village local bodies, district administration that we were in touch with since the initiation of our various projects at rural level related to water, environment and climate change, since water is not a mere sector but a connector it connects different sectors like agriculture, health, education, energy etc.
It is worth mentioning that this new normal in the COVID 19 era is not new for us and we are constantly engaged in spreading awareness about maintaining proper hygiene, cleanliness and social distancing through our blogs, newsletters, e-magazine, social media etc. We have intensified efforts in the urban as well as rural areas with local administration and elected representatives in villages (panchayats) through e-governance. In a crisis without precedent — both in spread and scale — everybody needs to speak to the panchayat members and laude the local governments for their proactive approach to fight the crisis and prevent it from going from Level 2 to 3. When the history of India’s first pandemic in the 21st century will be written, these grassroots governance system will emerge the winner.
Apart from this given the magnitude of potential unemployment, business failure, and financial-system risk, measures to ease people’s socio-economic distress along with effective public-health measures must be seized as a golden opportunity. IMF and WHO have supported ‘no trade-off’ policy between saving lives and livelihoods. The government’s graded response under our Hon’ble Prime Minister’s stewardship is witnessing some proactive measures with Health care paradigms and socio-economic priorities in parallel. Given that economic sectors are intertwined, Red, yellow, and green zones could also be earmarked at economic zones to carry out safe activities. Moreover, actions would need to be executed with different approaches for based on their characteristics (such as rural versus urban, industrial versus service) given their working scenarios. However, the agenda is yet incomplete, especially for the most vulnerable sections of society. As we face the Last Decade for action for SDGs realization (2020-30), COVID-19 has halted our efforts on ending poverty, reduction in inequality, health and education, tackling climate change, etc. Moreover, actions would need to be executed with different approaches for based on their characteristics (such as rural versus urban, industrial versus service) given their working scenarios and sector-by-sector analysis for all businesses to open in parallel.
As a matter of fact India Water Foundation with its network of Partners, relevant stakeholders and more than 50,000 Jal mitras (water friends) is committed to meet the unprecedented challenge of this pandemic, with an opportunity for renewed and persistent commitment towards conservation of Our Nature and Natural Resources. We are witnessing one of the most unprecedented and unimaginable challenges of all times and the positive manifestation of improved Environmental parameters during the lockdown, at the same time is signaling, alarming and suggesting about the future road map and development pathways to be adopted for sustaining of Ecosystem Health, for sustained and improved provisioning of ecosystem services, Water and Biodiversity conservation and other conservation concerns to minimize probability of recurrence of such Pandemic.
There is always a blessing in disguise. In such times of the lockdown, it is important that we join our efforts and strengthen ourselves through an interactive platform and address the conservation challenges that we face. We share the newsletters received from World Water Council and other partners with our network for better percolation of relevant information and build capacities. We need to learn from the vulnerabilities of our system to make it more robust ― investing in local economies and local health systems through global partnerships. Learning about the natural world will be critical to building a better and sustainable future for all.
Let’s keep discussing this in these tough times