With competition for water increasing, it is important to understand patterns of water
use. How and when are water resources being consumed? Where are the opportunities for
water saving and how can the productivity be improved? How can water be best
redistributed in a given system to increase the overall productivity of the system? Water
accounting studies are used to identify the various users of water in the context of
basinwide water use, and the productivity of each use. Although these questions can be
solved through the framework of water accounting (Molden, 1997; Molden and
Sakthivadivel, 1999), the results rely substantially on proper input data.