Impact Assessment of Water Conservation Measures Using Swat Model for Upper Yamuna River Basin in India

Water scarcity has become a major issue due to changing hydrological phenomena and rising water demand in all sectors. The only significant source that can help to resolve this issue is precipitation as per requirement. In many places, the average annual precipitation is insufficient to cope with the dry spell throughout the year. Further, it is very important to sustain the water level for natural resource management by suggesting potential water harvesting structures (WHS). The choice of the water harvesting structure is made under the recommendations made by the IMSD (Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development) guidelines. The spatial analysis has been performed and water harvesting (WH) sites are identified by overlaying the thematic maps of climatic conditions, geology, Land use land cover, discharge, slope, etc. using the multi-influencing factor (MIF). Based upon the specified criteria (IMSD guidelines), four types of water harvesting structures have been proposed. Additionally, after the adoption of suggested Water Conservation Practices (WCP) it is found that Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) has been increased by 1.08%, Evapotranspiration (ET) by 2.70%, Soil water (SW) by 18.23%, Percolation (PERC) by 3.05% and Groundwater flow (GW_Q) by 8.57% however Surface runoff (SURQ) decreased by 23% and water yield (WYLD) reduced by 7.75%. The suggested water conservation practices can be suitably adopted for sustainable water resource management in and around the Upper Yamuna River Basin with achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-13