1st year Annual Review Meeting for CSE-NMCG three-year action research and capacity building initiative on ‘Making Ganga basin cities water-sensitive’

Date: March 10, 2022 

Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) partnered with the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), Ministry of Jal Shakti, Government of India for a unique three-year action research and capacity building initiative, ‘Making Ganga basin cities water-sensitive’. The initiative is under the national flagship programme for improving river health and water flows in rivers of the Ganga basin – Namami Gange. 

CSE and NMCG jointly launched the initiative on July 28, 2021. On successfully completing the first year of the project, an annual review meeting was organised on March 10, 2021, chaired by the newly joined Shri G Ashok Kumar, Director General, NMCG to discuss work done and way forward. The meeting was also aimed at briefing the newly joined director general about the partnership and programme. The meeting was attended by Shri Jagmohan Gupta, Advisor-NMCG, Dr Suresh Kumar Rohilla, former CSE and other senior officials. The main highlights of the discussion were capacity building initiative on making Ganga basin cities water sensitive and how urban water management approach delivers sustainability and resilience. 

Following are some key outputs and outcomes that were presented by Dr Suresh Kumar Rohilla, Former CSE and were discussed in the meeting:

• The program in its first year achieved significant outreach and build capacities of government officials and other water sector experts:

Webinar: 10458 | Online Trainings: 469 | Residential Trainings: 93 | Total: 

• 11020
• Participation of 1640+ Government Officials
• Active participation from across 305 cities across India and 51 cities outside India across the globe.

This represents the enormous outreach of the Webinars and Training programs of CSE and the strength of its network all over the world.

• 469 participants from government organisations and individual experts undertook the online trainings under the three themes mentioned above.
• 93 participants were trained at the advanced level in the residential trainings, from among the participants who were trained in the online trainings earlier (60 %). The participants in these advanced residential trainings were Planners, Architects, Engineers, and Officials from Development Authorities, Planning Departments and Urban Local Bodies.
• A great extent of information dissemination was also done for the general public and relevant stakeholders, under this initiative through media collaterals like brochures and web page.
• A Research Report was also published- “Roadmap for Implementation of Water-Sensitive Urban Design and Planning (WSUDP) in Uttar Pradesh: Storm water harvesting in Parks and Open Spaces”. 

Apart from the outputs, some key issues and challenges were also discussed in the meeting such as, delay in activities due to COVID travel restrictions, difficulty occurred in securing nomination, last minute drop outs from partner organisation and challenge of monitoring and ensuring of the learnings into practice by implementation on ground. 

Following decisions were taken by the end of the meeting.

• NMCG invited CSE to submit the annual calendar of all the activities for the year 2022 by end of April.
• Focus on urban water stormwater/ rainwater Harvesting in parks, groundwater management for Ganga basin cities state /cities, decentralised planning to be accelerated with the programme capacity building initiative.
• A comprehensive database to be prepared and shared with NMCG including all the participants who were part of the training programmes. More targeted participation considering the subject of interest and emphasis on implementation should be prioritised.
• A decentralised way to be adapted for fast-tracking the capacity building initiative of training officials and professionals for planning water sensitive cities.

NMCG was also awarded ‘Water Champion Award 2021’ for showcasing remarkable impact story as an outcome of CSE trainings presented at ‘2nd Online Impact Workshop cum Masterclass on Capacity Building Initiative for Citywide Water and Sanitation Management’ organised by School of Water and Waste (SWW)- Dr Suresh Kumar Rohilla, former Senior Director, CSE presented the award to Shri G Ashok Kumar, DG-NMCG. The meeting was concluded by sharing vote of thanks from both the parties.