Estimation of state-wide and monthly domestic water use in India from 1975 to 2015

Abstract

ABSTRACT Domestic water use is one of India's primary water uses that also includes irrigation, industrial, and environmental water uses. However, there is a lack of reliable data that hinders the estimation of domestic water use in India. Previous large-scale assessments often estimated domestic water use using population alone as a predictor. Economic and technological development and the improvement in the country's living standards may increase per-capita domestic water use. The present study's objective was to develop a large-scale domestic water use model in India, which considered the temporal variation of per-capita domestic water use. The economic indicator per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was used to model the time-variant per-capita domestic water use. The model results showed acceptable performance (NSE>0.7) at both the national and state levels. Maharashtra exhibited the highest per-capita domestic water use in the country because of the rapid economic and technological development relative to other States.