The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted daily activities across multiple sectors globally. The extent of its impact on the global economy and its key sectors, especially water, wastewater, and associated sectors such as agriculture, is still unclear. In this paper, the preliminary impacts of COVID-19 on water resources of India, especially on the river water quality, water usage in domestic and commercial sectors, wastewater treatment sector, and agriculture sector, are discussed. The limitations in the functioning of the existing system and management of water resources are identified. The need for improvements to strengthen the water resources monitoring and developing process-based models are highlighted. This paper also discusses the need for further investigation to identify the extent of impact and contributing factors to improve our understanding of the natural system for preparing, monitoring, and implementing the policies to manage the water resources during any pandemic/epidemics in the future.

In most of the Indian cities, around half of the urban water requirement is fulfilled by groundwater. Recently, seasonal urban droughts have been frequently witnessed globally, which adds more stress to groundwater systems. Excessive pumping and increasing demands in several Indian cities impose a high risk of running out of groundwater storage, which could potentially affect millions of lives in the future. In this paper, groundwater level changes have been comprehensively assessed for seven densely populated and rapidly growing secondary cities across India. Several statistical analyses were performed to detect the trends and non-stationarity in the groundwater level (GWL). Also, the influence of rainfall and land use/land cover changes (LULC) on the GWL was explored. The results suggest that overall, the groundwater level was found to vary between ±10 cm/year in the majority of the wells. Further, the non-stationarity analysis revealed a high impact of rainfall and LULC due to climate variability and anthropogenic activities respectively on the GWL change dynamics. Statistical correlation analysis showed evidence supporting that climate variability could potentially be a major component affecting the rainfall and groundwater recharge relationship. Additionally, from the LULC analysis, a decrease in the green cover area (R = 0.93) was found to have a higher correlation with decreasing groundwater level than that of urban area growth across seven rapidly developing cities.