Directions: In the following passage, there are blanks, each of which have been numbered. These numbers correspond to the question numbers; against each question, five words have been suggested, one of which fills the blanks appropriately.
India’s ‘water crisis’ took over social media recently. Usually, a delayed monsoon or a drought, __A__
with compelling images of parched lands and queues for water in urban areas raise an alarm in the minds of the public. Similarly, episodes of inter-State river water disputes catch public attention.
__B__
, this time, it was somewhat different. Videos and news reports claiming that Indian cities are running out of groundwater went viral. These news items could not have gained the traction but for the fact that they
__C__
on a 2018 report of India’s own Niti Aayog, which was titled ‘Composite Water Management Index: A tool for water management.’
The Niti Aayog’s projection was only a means to an end goal: leveraging some
__D__
from the Indian States. The report’s central goal was to propose a tool, an index, to monitor the States’ water resource management strategies and provide the necessary course-shift, beyond supply augmentation approaches. The report may have had a lofty goal of promoting ‘cooperative and competitive federalism’ but was, in reality, a desperate move to engage with the States, in the absence of any
__E__
leverage to influence their approaches to water resources management. This also
__F__
that the fulcrum of any course correction lies with States.
Yet, what
__G__
us is the question: Just how did such ‘zombie statistics’ gain traction? This is disturbing as it shows there is an absence of
__H__
engagement or institutional accountability. India needs to reconsider the institutional processes for dissemination of knowledge
__I__
water resource management. There is a certain amount of danger inherent in the casual manner
__J__
which knowledge about water resources is legitimised and consumed, particularly in these days of ‘viral’ information.