Joppe Cramwinckel, who spent most of his corporate years with oil major Shell, now heads the water programme at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. He was here recently to launch the India Water Tool to help companies manage water resources by mapping its availability and risks.

Excerpts from an interview :

What exactly is the Indian Water Tool?

In the last three years, business communities across the globe have started realising the importance of water resource management. Our Global Water Tool helps them identify the risks, location and what water reforms can be undertaken. In India, companies wanted to have a country-specific tool to map their water risks, as data availability here is relatively poor. So, we decided to make an Indian Water Tool with the help of companies in India, such as PepsiCo, Vedanta, Jain Irrigation etc. The online tool is free and can be downloaded from our Web site. It is an excel sheet, with a data entry form for each location. Once you load the data, you can see all the sites at one go, along with the quality of ground water and its availability.

How did you go about this?

In India, information on water is available but has never been put together on a national basis…We had difficulty in finding an Indian data set at the sub-State level that we could use. So, we hired Columbia University to map the available data and ultimately landed at the Central Ground Water Board , which agreed to release their groundwater data for the purpose of this tool. Then, with the help of Infosys, we developed this tool.

But don’t most companies already have an assessment of their water use?

Water has become a boardroom issue only recently. Even governments have, for the first time, started recognising the importance of water management in the national plan…. There is a separate chapter on water in India’s 12{+t}{+h} Plan document. Industrial water use in India is 8-9 per cent of overall water use. Now, there is increased pressure on water resources. Companies are having to lower their production because water has to be used for people…So, it has become a strategic issue now for managements….Our tool helps them take the right decision…

Isn’t implementation (water resource management) a problem in India?

I wish to think that leading companies in India can take a step towards that direction, but ultimately, regulation has to follow. But, waiting for a legislation to come before you act, is not responsible business…At the same time, the Indian Government has decided to demand zero discharge from the business community which, on paper, sounds great. But what it does is that it forces companies to recycle water, which means a lot of money. I don’t think it is conducive to ask the business community to be part of water management issues in the country, because it forces the companies to look inside, while the solution lies outside.

Don’t you think companies are looking at water management just as a CSR (corporate social responsibility) issue?

Certainly. I heard that the 100 biggest companies may have to (mandatorily) spend two per cent on CSR…ridiculous. Companies should be forced to spend a hell of a lot more on sustainable development…If you make it (CSR) per two cent, then they will say “we have done enough”. It doesn’t work like that.

>aditi.n@thehindu.co.in

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