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The country's inland water resources are listed as rivers and canals; reservoirs; dams and ponds; bells, oxbow lakes; water that is unsafe; and brackish water. Aside from rivers and canals, total water bodies occupy an area of approximately 7 million hectares (Chaudhary and Walker 2019; Gagan 2015). There are few flowing rivers in the desert and they are lost in the desert. There are whole arid regions where evaporation is equal to rainfall, and thus, no airflow. Coastal rivers have medium and small river basins (Chaudhary and Walker 2019).

Together, the rivers Brahmaputra, Ganga, Indus, and Godavari occupy more than half of the country's territory. The entire west coast, extending 1500 km between Surat in Gujarat and Cape Comorin in Tamilnadu, is fed by 14 medium and 18 minor river basins, leaving major river basins including Mumbai, Panji, Cochin, and Trivandrum. On the east coast of Peninsular India, three places have large river basins (Gagan 2015). These three pockets are the area south of the River Cauvery from Madurai to Cape Comorin; the area between the basin of Penner and Cauvery where Chennai and Pondicherry are located; and the area between the basins of Mahanadi and Godavari in Orissa. There is a tremendous variation both in the quantity of discharge from a major basin to a minor one and in the quality of discharge from region to region.