Ms. Mandeep Kour, Commission Secretary, Housing and Urban Development Department was the Chief Guest on the occasion. While addressing the gathering she lauded the efforts of the department and INTACH Jammu Chapter for taking up such an important and much-needed study of inventorizing the water bodies of Jammu district. She informed the house that work has already started on the rejuvenation of some of these traditional water bodies and the findings of this study would be helpful in deciding the priority level for management of these water bodies.
She invited the department and the INTACH to collaborate with their department and engage students and scholars from the University in the management of these water bodies. While discussing various Central government schemes viz., Amrit Sarovar and Amrut schemes for conserving traditional water bodies under MG NREGA she encouraged the members to adopt these traditional water bodies for their conservation.
Prof. Piyush Malaviya, Head, Department of Environmental Sciences while formally welcoming the dignitaries discussed the importance of such collaborative and integrated studies involving multi-stakeholders for water conservation and management.
Technical session of the event started by keynote presentation by Dr. Deepika Slathia, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences. She highlighted the detailed findings of the collaborative study on the ‘Listing and mapping of the traditional water bodies of Jammu Municipal Corporation (JMC) Area’ undertaken by the Department in collaboration with INTACH, Jammu Chapter.
She informed that around 65 water bodies comprising of ancient wells, step-wells, and ponds have been listed and mapped, and detailed studies have been carried out on other important aspects of these water bodies such as their ecological, cultural, and socio-economic significance, threats being faced by each water body, and the level of priority for effective management of each water body.
“As almost all these water bodies are showing signs of deterioration, it’s high time that interventions are made for their effective restoration and management”, she said while discussing various threats being faced by these water bodies. “Since the water bodies have already been identified and prioritised based on their status, restoration and rejuvenation of these water bodies can be started in phase wise manner starting with the high priority water bodies”, she recommended while concluding the findings of the study.