Recent advances in water sector

36-45Water is essential for sustaining life on Earth. However, in view of the increasing demands for various competing sectors such as urbanization, industrialization, growing population, and increasing living standards, the finite freshwater resources are getting vulnerable to deficit in terms of quantity and quality. Further, because of the high time and space variability in rainfall in this country, optimum conservation and management of the available water resources for different purposes is the need of the hour. In the past few decades, the science of hydrology has made significant progress in various dimensions. Hydrological instrumentation, data collection, processing, storage and retrieval have been computerized to a considerable extent. Spatial database provided through remote sensing satellites and spatial analyses through Geographic Information System (GIS) are finding applications in a number of modeling studies. Nuclear techniques are finding applications in a number of hydrological applications related to identification of recharge areas, groundwater seepage and its movement and identification of flow components from different sources in a stream. Further, Decision Support Systems (DSS) are being developed at the scale of river basins which can help the decision makers in analyzing various scenarios for rational surface and groundwater development and management without going deep into the modeling intricacies. This paper discusses some of these recent developments in various facets of hydrology and water resources