(492a) A Life Cycle Model of Water Use in India with Implications to Manufacturing

With India's fast economic growth, increasing prosperity, changing consumer preferences, and erratic monsoons, fresh water is becoming a critical resource that could greatly limit the country's development.  While agriculture continues to be the largest direct user of water, other large direct consumers include the mining industry and thermoelectric power generation.  The rest of the economy, including the chemical and manufacturing industries, depend indirectly on these primary water users, making it essential to understand the direct and indirect dependence.   Such understanding is essential for determining the risk and vulnerability of economic activities to water scarcities and opportunities for enhancing water efficiency by managing the supply chain, and is becoming an important part of business decision making.

This presentation will describe a new model for determining the life cycle water withdrawal of all sectors of the Indian economy.  This model combines data about direct water use in India with an economic input-output model of the Indian economy.  The data about water use was collected from diverse sources including government statistics, industry sustainability reports, and the academic literature and combined with a model of the 2005 Indian economy.  In addition to providing the life cycle water withdrawal for all sectors, this model can also be used to determine the supply and demand chains for each sector and to identify “water hotspots” or sectors in the selected network that are most dependent on water.  Such information can help by guiding industrial decisions and government policies that reduce or manage the risk of scarcities, and for improving enhancing efficiency.  In addition to providing novel insight about the life cycle withdrawal of water in India, this work will focus on the chemical and manufacturing sectors, and identify vulnerabilities due to water withdrawal.  These results will be compared with those for the United States economy.  On-going research on modeling and understanding the water-energy nexus in India will also be described.