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Equitable access and rational use of water resources is important to cope with water scarcity. The optimal allocation of limited water resources for various purposes is required for sustainable development. Awash river basin is one of the most utilized river basins in Ethiopia. There is increasing demand for water due to recent population growth in the basin because of Urbanization. Excessive water abstraction without properly assessing the available water resources in the basin contributes to water scarcity. The basin exhibits two extreme hydrological events, flooding and drought at different seasons of the year. This paper mainly focuses on surface water resources assessment of the Awash basin, and the temporal gap between water supply and demand. The paper also discusses the impacts of these gaps on sustainable development and suggested few recommendations to minimize it. Using SWAT model, the annual average surface water available is estimated around 4.64 Billion Cubic Meters (BCM) as compared to the estimated demand of about 4.67 BCM in the basin for 1980-2012. This shows that on an average, the demand exceeds the availability by 0.03 BCM during the study period. Seasonal water deficit is even serious. A detailed seasonal analysis for the last 2 years (2011)(2012) shows that the demand exceeds supply by 1.27 and 2.82 BCM during December-April of 2011 and 2012, respectively. However, there is a surplus supply of 1.67 and 3.16 BCM during June-September months of the same year.

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Hydrological investigation and behavior of watershed depend upon geo-morphometric characteristics of catchment. Morphometric analysis is commonly used for development of regional hydrological model of ungauged watershed. A critical valuation and assessment of geomorphometric constraints has been carried out. Prioritization of watersheds based on water plot capacity of Piperiya watershed has been evaluated by linear, aerial and relief aspects. Morphometric analysis has been attempted for prioritization for nine sub-watersheds of Piperiya watershed in Hasdeo river basin, which is a tributary of the Mahanadi. Sub-watersheds are delineated by ArcMap 9.3 software as per digital elevation model (DEM). Assessment of drainages and their relative parameters such as stream order, stream length, stream frequency, drainage density, texture ratio, form factor, circulatory ratio, elongation ratio, bifurcation ratio and compactness ratio has been calculated separately for each sub-watershed using the Remote Sensing (RS) and Geospatial techniques. Finally, the prioritized score on the basis of morphometric behavior of each sub-watershed is assigned and thereafter consolidated scores have been estimated to identify the most sensitive parameters. The analysis reveals that stream order varies from 1 to 5; however, the first-order stream covers maximum area of about 87.7 %. Total number of stream segment of all order is 1,264 in the watershed. The study emphasizes the prioritization of the sub-watersheds on the basis of morphometric analysis. The final score of entire nine sub-watersheds is assigned as per erosion threat. The sub-watershed with the least compound parameter value was assigned as highest priority. However, the sub-watersheds has been categorized into three classes as high (4.1-4.7), medium (4.8-5.3) and low ([5.4) priority on the basis of their maximum (6.0) and minimum (4.1) prioritized score.

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