ITC’s River Basin Revival Programme covers a total area of 21 lakh acres across Maharashtra, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka. ITC’s initiatives have already enabled four basins including the Ghod river basin in Maharashtra become water positive as against the water balance deficit estimated by the water balance studies done at the inception of work in each of these basins.
As part of its integrated water stewardship initiative, ITC has been working on enabling water-positive status at the basins of 5 rivers across 5 states by enhancing water availability and improving water use efficiency in agriculture. A river basin is the area of land that is drained by a river and all its tributaries.
ITC's Public-Private Partnership (PPP) with the Maharashtra Water Resources Department marks a significant milestone in its journey of river basin regeneration. Launched in February 2025, the partnership aims to enhance water use efficiency across 60 major irrigation projects in the Godavari, Krishna, and Tapi river basins. Covering over 4.25 lakh acres and engaging 521 water user groups, the initiative aims to facilitate water-positive status in the basins by improving water literacy among Water User Groups and improving water use efficiency in significant crops.
This collaboration builds on an earlier successful partnership with the state in 2020 that improved water use efficiency across five irrigation projects, positively impacting crop yields and farm incomes.
ITC's partnership with the Department of Rural Development & Panchayat Raj (RD&PR), Government of Karnataka and Vyakti Vikas Kendra India (VVKI) done in March 2025 is an important step for securing South Pennar Basin. The partnership will focus on improving water harvesting and groundwater recharge in the South Pennar basin covering Bengaluru Urban and Rural, Kolar and Chikkaballapur districts, 12 Taluks, 238 Gram Panchayats and about 13945 water harvesting and recharge structures.
ITC's Approach towards Water Stewardship and River Basin Revival leverages the expertise of reputed knowledge partners like WWF India, ACWADAM, Biome, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), among others. ITC ensures the implementation of scientific and effective River Basin rejuvenation to make river basin water positive by balancing supply and demand. It also partners with government departments such as agriculture, irrigation, and forests to amplify the scale and coverage of its initiatives. The company has signed 50-plus PPPs with different state Governments for water stewardship and related aspects.
S Sivakumar, Head of Sustainability, Agri and IT at ITC Ltd., said, "As a part of our large-scale sustainability efforts, ITC has pioneered a large-scale integrated water stewardship programme, earning the distinction of being water positive for the last 22 years. Given the scale and complexity of climate change and increasing pressure on water resources, ITC has reimagined its water stewardship strategy to strengthen the scale and impact of its initiatives by embarking upon an ambitious plan to achieve water-positive status at the river basin level. Our recent PPPs with the Government of Maharashtra and Karnataka embody our commitment to strengthen our river basin rejuvenation programme further in days to come, positively impacting even more lives, livelihoods and landscapes."
ITC's Water Stewardship Programme focuses on efficient water management and conservation through watershed development initiatives, which have, to date, covered over 17 lakh acres and benefited more than 5 lakh people in 17 states. The Company's water stewardship initiatives have created a potential water storage capacity of 58.81 million KL. To contextualise this with an analogy, this is equivalent to filling up 23,524 Olympic-sized swimming pools with water that could be saved. Demand-side water use efficiency initiatives across 17.24 lakh acres have achieved potential crop water savings of over 1,380 million KL in a year.
ITC's water conservation interventions around its units and within the units have resulted in 9 of its unit sites earning platinum certification under the global Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) standard.
