Reviving diminishing and deteriorating water resources: a case study of Delhi

Abstract

Water is an important aspect for sustainable development in any city as it lays a foundation for achieving Sustainable Development Goals. Despite this water stress is becoming a key issue around the world. The thesis addresses the issue of water stress and declining rates of water resources in the most stressed and high populated city Delhi. Hence, this establishes a need of adopting a water resilient approach in the cities to adapt to such water stresses. For tackling the concern of water stress in urban areas the approach of integrating blue infrastructure with green infrastructure has been studied. The concept of Blue-Green Infrastructure is a powerful and innovative approach to address urban water challenges, aiming to recreate a more nature-oriented water cycle in the urban environment. The thesis attempts to resolve the issues faced by water resources in Delhi by adopting this water sensitive approach of Integrating Blue-green Infrastructure. The outputs of the research will be in three stages. Firstly, Chapter two accesses the best practice of integrating blue-green infrastructure at different spatial scales a detailed literature review has been performed this will provide a roadmap of what all can be adopted in case of Delhi. After the theoretical background of the research Chapter three discusses the Research Design that has been undertaken this gives the contextual background behind the study area selection and micro study area selection for a detailed proposal. Secondly, to understand the existing situation pertaining to water resources of Delhi temporal analysis of water consumption patterns will be performed and has been depicted in Chapter four. Chapter five discusses the analysis performed for the research. The third stage will be to identify the potential zones or favorable areas for water recharge through geospatial technique. With this integrated approach of remote sensing and geographical information system the potential zones will be delineated. The outcome of the thesis has been detailed out in the micro study area in Chapter six which will be strategies in form of different spatial scales (From source to sink) and policy interventions that can be further recommended in the Neighborhood level plans of Delhi. The overall outcome of the thesis will be a water sensitive spatial strategies and policy interventions for Delhi to build it resilient towards water stresses in future.