Water Growing Understanding, Emerging Perspectives Essays from Economic and Political Weekly Mihir Shah and PS Vijayshankar The Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) is a unique national institution. It is an intellectual meeting-point for diverse participants in deliberations upon Indian society – academics from a multitude of disciplines, thinkers, activists, concerned citizens, students, policy makers -- all of whom make it a point to express their thoughts, their research and their most passionately held views in the pages of the EPW. EPW has been so pivotal to the cerebral life of India that one can credibly reconstruct the intellectual biography of the nation by rummaging through its volumes over the decades. This is also specifically true when we come to the question of water. From being virtually absent from the EPW till the 1980s, water emerges as a growing concern in the decades to follow, with the number of articles on water-related issues increasing very rapidly in more recent decades. Between 1966 and 1990, there was, on an average, one paper on water every yearin the EPW. After 1990, in the last 25 years, the EPW features roughly one paper per month on water. This is a reasonably accurate reflection of the place of water among intellectuals and policy makers in India. A legacy of not regarding the economy as a subset of the larger social and ecological systems, Indian planning for decades after Independence continued to ignore the need for sustainability and equity in water resource development and management. There was just one way forward, that of harnessing the bounty in our rivers and below the ground, and this strategy had almost completely unquestioned acceptance. It is only when voices began to be heard in opposition to theSardarSarovar Project on the river Narmada, that national attention began to be paid to these issues and questions started arising on the wisdom of our understanding and approach to water. Around the same time, questions also began to be raised about the sustainability of our strategy of groundwater development under the Green Revolution. The collection of 30 papers put together in this volume is an attempt to do justice to the vast canvas of issues and richness of perspectives that writers have brought to bear on the question of water in their contributions to the EPW between 1990 and 2014. Selecting these papers was a task, as challenging, as it was exciting and enriching. Each selected paper contributed ideas, perspectives and arguments that we believe are new, substantial and of enduring value. Our selection of papers seeks to reflect the multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary character of water. And the aim was to give adequate place and representation to the huge diversity of concerns and
Transcript
Water Growing Understanding, Emerging Perspectives
Essays from Economic and Political Weekly
Mihir Shah and PS Vijayshankar
The Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) is a unique national institution. It
is an intellectual meeting-point for diverse participants in deliberations upon Indian
society – academics from a multitude of disciplines, thinkers, activists, concerned
citizens, students, policy makers -- all of whom make it a point to express their
thoughts, their research and their most passionately held views in the pages of the
EPW. EPW has been so pivotal to the cerebral life of India that one can credibly
reconstruct the intellectual biography of the nation by rummaging through its volumes
over the decades.
This is also specifically true when we come to the question of water. From
being virtually absent from the EPW till the 1980s, water emerges as a growing
concern in the decades to follow, with the number of articles on water-related issues
increasing very rapidly in more recent decades. Between 1966 and 1990, there was,
on an average, one paper on water every yearin the EPW. After 1990, in the last 25
years, the EPW features roughly one paper per month on water. This is a reasonably
accurate reflection of the place of water among intellectuals and policy makers in
India. A legacy of not regarding the economy as a subset of the larger social and
ecological systems, Indian planning for decades after Independence continued to
ignore the need for sustainability and equity in water resource development and
management. There was just one way forward, that of harnessing the bounty in our
rivers and below the ground, and this strategy had almost completely unquestioned
acceptance. It is only when voices began to be heard in opposition to
theSardarSarovar Project on the river Narmada, that national attention began to be
paid to these issues and questions started arising on the wisdom of our understanding
and approach to water. Around the same time, questions also began to be raised about
the sustainability of our strategy of groundwater development under the Green
Revolution.
The collection of 30 papers put together in this volume is an attempt to do
justice to the vast canvas of issues and richness of perspectives that writers have
brought to bear on the question of water in their contributions to the EPW between
1990 and 2014. Selecting these papers was a task, as challenging, as it was exciting
and enriching. Each selected paper contributed ideas, perspectives and arguments that
we believe are new, substantial and of enduring value. Our selection of papers seeks
to reflect the multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary character of water. And the aim
was to give adequate place and representation to the huge diversity of concerns and
2
points of departure that necessarily characterise an issue like water. This diversity is
both in the specific issues being tackled as also the nature of the contributors. Our
authors represent the disciplines of Hydrogeology, Sociology, Economics, Political
Science, Geography, History, Meteorology, Statistics, Public Policy, Energy and
Ecology. Academics, government officials, feminists, activists, development workers,
planners -- all find a place in our collection. In the process, the editors have exercised
their judgment regarding exclusions, most of which are papers that were of
importance at the time they appeared but were either subsequently superseded by
better work or failed to retain relevance in a very new context. Papers before 1990
have also been excluded on this count. The aim of this essay is to whet the appetite by
introducing these papers, briefly provide our own take on them, and leavethe readerto
enjoy the full course.
The articles are arranged theme-wise but the arrangement of themes has a
chronological element also, reflecting the newer perspectives, understanding and
concerns that have emerged around water.
Section One: Water Resource Development and
Management
Large Dams(5 papers)
In the earliest decades after independence, the dominant paradigm on water
involved construction of large dams across India‟s major river systems, as a key
element in creating irrigation potential and fostering agricultural development, as also
generation of power for the overall needs of the rapidly growing economy and
society. These were the years when there was great euphoria about these dams and the
growth momentum they were expected to unleash, especially in the Indian
countryside. Over the years, the ambitions of the planners grew more grandiose,
culminating in the conception of the Narmada Valley Project (NVP), which envisaged
building several large, medium and small dams across the river and its many
tributaries. One of the first dams to be taken up was the SardarSarovar Project (SSP),
even if it was geographically the last of this series of dams to be constructed on the
western extremity of the river in Gujarat. Unusual to the SSP was the fact that while
its benefits were to mainly flow to Gujarat, most of its displacement and submergence
was to take place in Madhya Pradesh. The late 1980s saw the emergence of the
Narmada BachaoAndolan (NBA), a major protest movement against the NVP in
general and the SSP in particular.In the first paper in this section, the legendary
Gandhian activist Baba Amte (1990), provides a trenchant critique of the NVP and
proposes concrete alternatives to it. Noteworthy about the paper was the fact that it set
a very high standard for the subsequent vigorous debate on large dams within India
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and abroad. The critique covered financial, economic, social, ecological and
procedural aspects with great rigour and then went on to present a set of possible
alternatives to achieve the objectives of the NVP. It is remarkable that the positions
articulated in the 25-year old paper continue to find resonance to this day, even as the
SSP and many other dams of the NVP have been completed. That the displaced, most
of them tribals, have not been adequately rehabilitated, irrigation waters have not
reached most of Kutch and Saurashtra, the Narmada bonds have had to be withdrawn,
the command areas are in a state of disarray and the ecological crisis has assumed
even graver proportions, are all sad testimony to the abiding relevance of Amte‟s
critique. What is truly ironic is that Gujarat has achieved remarkable success in
agriculture by adopting many of the alternatives advocated by Amte, including
watershed development and solar power. National policy has also acknowledged the
great tragedy of displacement, especially of the tribal people. A special provision was
adopted in investment clearances by the Planning Commission and the new law on
land acquisition, which stipulated that the gates of dams will not be closed, and no
submergence will be permitted, till six months after the process of relief and
rehabilitation of the displaced has been completed. The Forest Rights Act explicitly
makes mention of the “historical injustices” done to the tribal people of India and
provides a series of entitlements aimed at their redress.
In the 1990s, a very interesting attempt was made to resolve the Narmada
dispute by proposing a restructuring of the SSP. A brainchild of KR Datye, the
proposal was an attempt to overcome the fundamentalisms of both sides in the
Narmada dispute – those who were unwilling to rethink the dam and those, on the
other side, who were equally unwilling to rethink their absolute opposition to it.The
proposal claimed that it would ensureNarmada waters reach the needy areas
ofGujarat, even as it reduced submergence by 70 percentand ensured power benefits
to MP at levels very close to thatof the SSP. The proposal emphasized the importance
of small local systems of water storage and saw large dams as supporting a large
number of dispersed smaller structures, improving their reliability and sustainability.
Sadly there were no takers for this compromise but it was a truly creative attempt at
finding viable and acceptable solutions to intractable problems that beset the water
sector, racked as it is by deep dogmas on all sides. Paranjape and Joy (2006) (the
second paper in this section) is a summary of this alternative, which remains an
isolated instance of the spirit of compromise, showing a possible way forward for
river valley planning in India.
As work on Sardar Sarovar proceeded apace, some of those who had initially
supported the project had the intellectual honesty to revisit the SSP command and
described the challenges of managing them to attain the lofty objectives of the project.
When JayeshTalati and Tushaar Shah (2004) (the third paper in this section) travelled
to the SSP command in 2002, they found it in disarray. While the design principles
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were indeed well thought out, their execution on the ground left much to be desired.
The Water Users Associations, which were to be backbone of the entire command
management structure, were generally found to be unprepared and undercooked. The
paper proposes many innovative ideas for changing the way the SSP command is
managed in order that it does not go the way of almost every one of India‟s large
irrigation command areas.
A very different perspective for overcoming the bottlenecks created by the
limited perspective and capacities of the irrigation bureaucracy is offered in our fourth
selected paper by R. Maria Saleth (1999). This paper aligns with the perspectives that
have emerged over the last two decades about privatizing key sectors of the economy
and is one of the first and most clear articulations of this point of view for the
irrigation sector. The paper was written in the context of the setting up of a High
Power Committee on Private Sector Participation in Irrigation and Multi-purpose
Projects (PV Rangayya Naidu Committee) by the union Ministry of Water Resources
in July 1995.Salethevaluates various options for promoting private sector
participation in canal irrigation management, discusses the major issues involved in
actualising such options, recounts some recent initiatives on irrigation privatisation,
and outlines the thrust and focus of a strategy for promoting irrigation privatisation in
India. What is remarkable, however, is that in the two decades since the Naidu
Committee, very little progress has been achieved in moving along this direction,
even though the ideological climate in India has been very favourably disposed to
such a move. Indeed, the PPP (public-private partnership) route has not achieved
much success the world-over in the water sector, even in the urban sphere (Mihir
Shah, 2015). What is clear, however, is that business-as-usual will not work and that
there is an imperative need to de-bureaucratise water management in India.
Dinesh Marothia (2006) (the fifth paper in this section) isto-date one of the
best studies on the failure of the bureaucracy in last-mile delivery in India‟s irrigation
commands. Based on intensive field-work in Chhattisgarh, Marothia sought to
identify the key factors that would enable participatory irrigation management to
succeed in establishing self-governing irrigation systems within a framework of
distributed governance in solving problems of collective action.
Groundwater (5 papers)
It is surprising that even today there is inadequate recognition of the
role groundwater plays in India‟s economy and society.Of India‟s total water
consumption, 80 percent is in agriculture. Of this, nearly two-thirds comes from
groundwater. More than 80 percent of domestic water in India is also provided from
groundwater. Considering all uses, around 70 percent of water in India comes from
groundwater. In many ways, one could argue that groundwater is India‟s single most
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important natural resource. This is a situation that has emerged in the past few
decades and principally coincides with the Green Revolution and the rise of irrigation
by tubewells, which at 40 percent are the single most important source of water in
agriculture today. This figure was just 1 percent before the Green Revolution.
This dramatic change and its consequences, both positive and negative, have
been well chronicled in the pages of the EPW. Among the earliest contributors was
the economist BD Dhawan, whose prolific writings in the EPW did much to raise the
profile of groundwater in intellectual and policy circles. However, Dhawan‟s work
does not find a place in our collection as his understanding of the subject has been
superseded by later work and the debates of which he was part have become dated
and lost relevance in a significantly altered context.
Our first contributor on groundwater is Bela Bhatia (1992) who provides the
earliest rigorous field evidence of declining water levels from Saberkantha district in
Gujarat. She also brings out the link between unequal land ownership/access to credit
and the inequalities in access to groundwater. Bhatia was perhaps the first scholar to
bring out the significance of English common law (on which the Indian Easements
Act of 1882 is based) for depleting groundwater tables in India. As Bhatia says: “In
England percolation is abundant, irrigated agriculture is practically non-existent, and
landholdings tend to be quite large so that problems of 'interference' between different
users of groundwater are much less acute. However, the situation is completely
different in India, where the depletion of groundwater resources is a real danger,and
where small, contiguous holdings share common aquifers.” A relic of the colonial
period, the Indian Easements Act of 1882 allows owners of land to extract as much
groundwater as they wish, from below their land.
For Bhatia the solution to inequality in water is to reduce inequality in land.
Bhatia also favours state regulation as an instrument of controlling groundwater
overuse. It is clear that Bhatia lacks an adequate understanding of the science of
hydrogeology and the concept of aquifers whose boundaries need not and rarely
correspond to the boundaries of the land above.The insights of hydrogeology were
first brought into the pages of the EPW by Marcus Moench,who drew upon the path-
breaking work of the Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom on common pool resources.
In our second paper on groundwater, Moench(1992) suggests that it is the
invisible, open access nature of groundwater that lies at the root of its
overdevelopment, arguing that “ground water aquifers are frequently complex and
poorly understood”. A robust, scientifically validated database on groundwater is
required for its sustainable and equitable management. Moench also questions the
prevailing methodology of estimation of groundwater resources. The adoption of a
district or a block as the unit of estimation is likely to give a wrong picture since the
boundaries of these administrative units may not overlap with the natural aquifer
boundaries. Moreover, the changes in the saturated zone alone may not indicate
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resource availability since this ignores changes in the unsaturated, „vadose‟ zone and
issues related to groundwater flow. The paper also makes a strong case to move away
from the estimation methodology based on arbitrarily chosen normative values for
recharge, extraction etc. and to move towards empirical verification of these
normative values. These observations are significant because they questioned the
scientific basis of the official estimates of the resource and brought in the idea of
aquifers and aquifer recharge as an important dimension in understanding India‟s
groundwater problems.
Moench also argues that direct regulation is only one of the three options
available. Local community management through institutions like the Western US
„districts‟ could be another option, but this would need a lot of enabling support from
law as well as the regulatory authority. Though the Californian districts may not be a
good institutional form for groundwater management in India, the idea that law has to
shift stance to enable community action rather than going for the command-and-
control option is an important early insight emerging from Moench‟s paper.
In the 1990s, an influential line of thinking was the one advanced by Tushaar
Shah, who argued that groundwater markets (or more precisely, pump rental markets)
promoted equity by enabling access for small and marginal farmers, who otherwise
could not afford to own a borewell. Thiswas questioned in the pages of the EPW by
Navroz Dubash(2000)(the third paper in this section) who showed that in the water-
scarce environment of North Gujarat, competitive extraction and falling water levels
lead to a shutting out of the lower castes, typically marginal farmers and the landless,
from well ownership and water markets altogether. Dubash‟s pioneering work
demonstrates that the impact of regulatory interventions is contingent on the social
context of their operation. Variations in topography, hydrology, land use patterns and
depth to water table exert a powerful shaping influence on groundwater markets, with
the outcome being contingent upon socio-economic factors such as the distribution of
land, access to credit and caste.
Ranade (2005) is an unusual paper in this section. Ranade highlights the
exclusion of groundwaterin the historic 1979 Award of the Narmada Water Dispute
Tribunal (NWDT), which has since been the reference point for all water
development plans in the basin. Any student of hydrology knows that post-monsoon
river flows draw upon base-flows contributed by groundwater. Conditions of heavy
groundwater extraction often lead to decline in stream flows. Ranade argues that the
omission by the NWDTof groundwater withdrawals is a serious oversight, which may
result in forced deviations from the decreed allocations across States. Especially
because the period since the Award has been one of heavy groundwater extraction in
the Narmada basin. Since this has been one of the outstanding errors and defects of
water legislation and administration throughout the world, Ranade concludes by
suggesting that surface water allocation in any basin should have intrinsicprovisions
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for groundwater allocation.
While the paper is written in the context of the Narmada, the scope of its
critique goes much further and could cover all river-sharing arrangements where there
is a potential for upstream/downstream conflict. For example, this argument could
apply to inter-state disputes between Punjab and Haryana on sharing of Ravi and Beas
waters, as well as the Cauvery dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The
observations of the paper are important since they emphasize the need to incorporate
the interconnection between surface water flows and groundwater while forging river
basin agreements in India.
The final paper in this section by Vijayshankar and Kulkarni (2011) argues
that the crisis of groundwater in India is much more serious than usually supposed. It
shows that as many as 347 districts (59% of all districts in India) have problems
related to either the availability or quality of groundwater. These districts cover
roughly one third of the land area of the country and account for over one third of
India‟s population.The paper proposes a broad typology of 6 hydrogeological settings
for the entire country and questions the usefulness of the CGWB‟s categorisation of
districts/blocks as safe, semi critical, critical or overexploited. Since the process of
groundwater accumulation and movement are vastly different across hydrogeological
settings, the implications of any stage of groundwater development will vary
significantly with each type. Hence, we need to develop a disaggregated picture of
groundwater storage and flow through a careful mapping of the aquifers in the entire
country, on the basis of which management strategies and protocols for each
hydrogeological setting could be derived. The paper proposes the adoption of a
National Aquifer Management Programme, which maps aquifers, monitors quality
parameters and puts in place a legal and institutional framework for groundwater
governance. Since groundwater is an open-access, common pool resource, its
protection is not possible without an agreement among the community of users to
cooperate and manage the resource themselves in a sustainable manner. Although the
examples of such community action still remain few and far between, in a country
with many millions of users, each with individualized private access to groundwater,
this approach needs to be given serious consideration. While doing so it may be useful
to broaden the typology proposed in this paper to include social and historical factors
that would shape the possibilities of collective action.
Section Two: Historical Perspectives(5 papers)
Many of the problems of the present-day have traceable roots in what we have
inherited from the colonial and pre-colonial periods (Whitcombe, 1972; Stone, 1985;
Imran Ali, 1987). The pages of the EPW contain many rich contributions that allow
us to make these connections. One of the recurrent themes of this collection, as also in
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water policy discourse in India in recent times, has been understanding the challenges
of irrigation reform. As Member, Planning Commission for five years, one of my
most difficult tasks was to make the Central Water Commission bureaucracy
understand the imperative of moving from a narrow engineering perspective to one
that recognised the intricacies of sustainable and equitable water management.
Perhaps a clue to understanding this challenge better can be gleaned from two
historical papers from the pages of the EPW included in our collection -- David
Gilmartin (2003) and Margreet Zwarteveen (2011). Gilmartin‟s piece on British
irrigation administration in the Indus basin in the late 19th
and early 20th
century
contains two key insights. The first derives from the colonial drive to contain waste,
which is the origin of the Indian engineering notion of “not allowing river waters to
flow wastefully into the sea”. The entire ideology of command-and-control over river
systems emerges from this early notion. Thus, we must build large dams on rivers and
harness that water in a way that minimizes waste. There is a visible absence of an eco-
system perspective and a complete lack of understanding of river systems and the
vital functions they perform. There is only a uni-dimensional view of a river as a
source of irrigation and power. All other vital eco-system services provided by a river
are obliterated.
The second key insight has to do with the fact that British irrigation engineers
strictly limited their involvement in the command only till the departmentally
controlled canal outlets. Beyond the outlets are the “local communities of water
users” whose incorporation into the massive, centralized irrigation systems has
remained a challenge to this day. This appears to be at the root of the key malaise of
India‟s post-independence irrigation history – the deep neglect of last mile
connectivity in our large irrigation commands. Of the fact that despite spending
thousands of crores on building dams and canal systems, our water use efficiency
remains among the lowest in the world and dam water so often fails to reach the
farmers for whom it is meant, especially those at the tail-end of the command.
Supplementing the insights of Gilmartin is the paper by Zwarteveen, who
observes: “Beginning with colonial times and continuing to the present, irrigation has
been an important site for the construction of gendered power and hegemonic
masculinities. The strong connection between masculinities and irrigation cultures
may provide an important explanation of why hydraulic bureaucracies are so resistant
to change.” Zwarteveen draws on the work of Ruth Oldenziel (1999), who showed
how male and white mechanical and civil engineers during the late 19th century in the
US, succeeded in narrowing the definition of technology to include only those
activities that they engaged in. In doing so, they reduced the significance of the
traditional artefacts and forms of knowledge associated with women and black
people.This resulted in the rise of engineers as a male professional elite with
exclusive rights to technical expertise and a redefinition of femininities as intrinsically
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incompatible with engineering and technology.
According to Zwarteveen, “studies on the history of engineering in
South Asia suggest how, here also, the very definition of engineering was, at least
from the colonial period onwards, based on racial and gender exclusions and
hierarchies”. In India, the setting up of the first engineering college in Roorkee in
1848 reflected the hierarchical values of that time, what Ashis Nandy(1988) has
famously called the “hypermasculinity” of British imperial ideology in India. As
Gilmartin has argued, irrigation was crucial in the larger schemes of empire and state
building. And the continued domination of irrigation departments, both at the centre
and the States, over the last seven decades, by engineers, who are invariably male,
reflects the enduring legacy of values that pervades irrigation systems in India – those
of command and control. Suggestions of more open, participatory, devolving systems
with a multi-disciplinary appreciation of water, are stubbornly resisted.
Another historical paper in our collection helps us understand how we
have gone so terribly wrong in one more key area of water management – floods. In
addressing the problem of floods, the central focus over the years has been on
engineering/structural solutions. Apart from the massive investments in large dams,
India has already constructed over 35,000 km of embankments. But the problem has
only got aggravated. Evidence from floods in the Ghaggar river basin, both in 1993
and 2010, clearly shows the damage caused in Punjab and Haryana by breaches in
embankments and unused, poorly designed and maintained canals, as also because
settlements have been encouraged on flood plains and drainage lines. In 2008, a
breach in an upstream embankment of the Kosi led to nearly thousand deaths and the
displacement of around 3.35 million people. In north Bihar, despite the continued
construction of embankments, the flood-prone area has increased 200% since
independence, at times because embankments end up obstructing natural drainages
and impede the natural building up of river deltas and flood plains (Ackerman, 2011).
In a paper in this collection, Rohan D‟Souza (2002) traces the origins of this
approach to the colonial period. He has studied the experiments with flood control in
the delta regions of eastern India over the period 1803 to 1956. He suggests that this
region was transformed over this period from a flood dependent agrarian regime to a
flood vulnerable landscape.The colonial administration developed the idea of flood
control to secure its property regime and its revenue collection strategies.
Embankments designed to insulate lands from inundation were the first flood control
works deployed by the British in the Orissa delta, based on the learnings from
adjoining Bengal. D‟Souza provides a fascinating account of the struggle between the
revenue administration and the military engineers over the wisdom of the
embankment construction programme, an account that actually does a great deal of
credit to the engineers who at least at that point in time were very clear that the
embankments were aggravating the flood line byclogging drainage and causing the
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river beds to rapidly deteriorate.Butpowerful sectional and proprietary interests who
were dependent on flood protection structures, drowned out these voices of sanity and
ecological wisdom.
When Arthur Cotton was called upon to survey the delta in 1858 he came up
one of those classic pronouncements, which (even though deeply flawed) have guided
water policy in India till today: “all deltas requireessentially the same treatment”,
which meant that their rivers needed to be controlled and regulated into an invariable
and constant supply. D‟Souza‟s is a rich and detailed study of the political economy
of the colonial historical context. It is fascinating to note the deep similarities between
the debates of that period with those during the 12th
Plan attempt to break with this
tradition of embankments and dams and move to an alternative „room for the river‟
approach, based on best international practice.
The two other papers in this section deal with water harvesting systems of
which there is a long and rich tradition in India (Sengupta, 1985; Narain and
Aggarwal, 1997; Mosse, 2003). The renowned historian David Hardiman‟s (1998)
paper in the EPW describes the rise of well irrigation and the decay in water-
harvesting systems in early 19th century Gujarat, while the bureaucrat-scholar
Niranjan Pant‟s (1998) paper is on the traditional ahar-pyne system of south Bihar.
Deromanticising notions of egalitarian pre-colonial water harvesting systems,
Hardiman argues that merchant capital was already deeply embedded within rural
society, and it was this capital, which was often crucial in funding small-scale
irrigation works. But at the same time, the water harvesting systems weremaintained
and operated by the peasants themselves. As Hardiman cautions, “This may
bedescribed as control by the 'village community‟ but it is important to emphasise that
such communities were internally differentiated to a greater or lesser degree ..It was a
system which provided a subsistence for the poor, but did not alleviate their poverty.”
Under the British, there was a profound decay in water harvesting systems during the
early 19th century, reinforced by colonial disinterest and ruinous rates of land-tax.
Knowledge of earlier techniques was lost and never recovered. Whereas in the past
there were multiple forms of water conservation, using check- dams, channels,
controlled flooding, reservoirs and wells, in the colonial period the major emphasis
was on wells. Moving to the situation in contemporary Gujarat, Hardiman rather
idealistically suggests “the forging of a variety of local systems of water harvesting
which are determined by the varying topography of each particular area and which are
controlledby communities of those who need, rather than by communities of those
who already have.”
Ahar-pyne, described by Pant, is a traditional system of south Biharby which
the natural drainage is blocked and the water impounded for use. Long narrow
artificial canals called pynes branch off from the rivers and carry water to the fields.
The same slope is impounded in extensive reservoirs called ahars, which are formed
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by constructing a series of retaining embankments across the lines of drainage.The
ahar-pyne system of irrigation irrigated about 35 per cent of 2.5 mha of cropped land
during the first two decades of the 20th century in south Bihar. The area irrigated by
this system haswitnessed a constant decline, reaching about 0.53 mha (12 percent)by
the end of the century, with the emergence of alternative forms of irrigation and the
non-integration of ahar-pynes into new canal systems. Pant believes these
ecologically sound and low-cost systems of water harvesting have a huge potential
even today in solving the water problems of south Bihar in a truly integrated manner,
simultaneously providing for both water harvesting and drainage that other systems
do not provide. What is required is sustained social mobilization and collective action
for the operation and maintenance of these systems, something that has been hard to
come by in recent times.
Section Three: Social and Political Dimensions of Water (5
papers)
Over the past 25 years, the pages of the EPW have provided space for the
articulation of the social and political dimensions of water, which generally tend to be
ignored in policy discourse, as also in the fundamentalism of narrow water
disciplines.
In a classic paper in this collection, Lyla Mehta (2003) argues that access to
and control over water is usually linked to prevailing social and power relations,
based on which she posits the distinction between “real” and “constructed” scarcity of
water. She highlights the complex nature of scarcity and its linkages with ecological,
socio-political, temporal and anthropogenic dimensions. As she says, “there is
tremendous inequality in access to and control over water resources. In water scarce
western India, irrigation pumps work twenty-four hours a day, while poor women find
their drinking wells run dry.” In her field area in Kutch, she finds that upper castes
own most of the wells and their unsustainable use of groundwater has even led to
saline ingress from the sea. This exacerbates perceptions of water scarcity, which, in
turn, becomes a war cry for getting Narmada waters to Kutch over massive distances.
And this only reinforces growing neglect of traditional agrarian practices based on
wisdom of centuries, where the people of Kutch had understood their own eco-system
and devised sustainable ways of living within it. These include dryland agriculture
and intricately worked out systems of migratory pastoralism, both finely tuned to the
deep, inherent uncertainties of life in a region, intermittently wet and dry.
At the very other end of the “development spectrum” but with a very similar
perspective,we have included the work of a young geographer, Anindita Sarkar. In a
study of the groundwater economy of Punjab in the 21st century, Sarkar(2011) argues
that as profitability in agriculture declines with falling water tables, the cost of
12
depletion is disproportionately borne by the resource-poor farmers because they are
unable to make the requisite investments in changing technology and well deepening.
Especially in exclusively groundwater dependent irrigation systems, poorer farmers
are forced to buy water to sustain agriculture, lease out land or even sell their land.
Thus, groundwater depletion exacerbates the skewedness in distribution of land and
facilitates further appropriation of irrigation water, transforming the landlords into
powerful “water-lords” in the rural economy.
Reflecting the multi-dimensionality of water and its significance in almost
every aspect of life, discussions on water in the EPW have spanned many sectors,
beyond irrigation to domestic and drinking water as well. In longitudinal primary
research located in a group of mountain villages in Kumaon in the Central Himalayas,
between 1998 and 2004, Deepa Joshi (2011)focuses on the complex interrelationships
with water of gender and caste, given the historic role theyhave played in defining a
persisting inequality in India. Joshi‟srich ethnographic accounts paint a vivid picture
of “a sharp gendering of water responsibilities”, starting around adolescence and
“continuing well after their bodies are bent with age and physical exertion”. What is
really interesting in her work is the emphasis on the intersection of this gender
discrimination with the age-old caste hierarchy that has “historically positioned dalits
as eternally polluted, feared to pollute sacred water sources”. Debunking romantic
notions of harmonious traditional communities, Joshi cautions against a presumed
“community” while moving away from bureaucratic systems of water supply, even
when policy correctly aims at decentralisation and devolution. Caste and gender
discrimination continue to be fractures in communities and need pro-active steps to
overcome, in the absence of which “participation” can end up remaining a mere
slogan.
We must hasten to add here that given our long experience of implementing
water projects on the ground, we are ourselves far less skeptical than Joshi of the
possibilities in this direction, even in the absence of what she calls a “drastic political
overhaul” (whatever that may mean). This arises through a recognition that fates of
everyone, women, men, Dalits, upper caste, rich and poor are tied together through
the common pool resource that is water. Without doubt forging this common
realization is not easy. It entails a period of sustained struggle, negotiation and the
emergence of a shared understanding. Alsowhile we understand Joshi‟s opposition to
unilaterally imposed systems of water pricing, we do believe that a key element in this
shared understanding is that sustained availability is impossible without ascribing a
clear value to water. With the crucial proviso that this is not the marginal cost pricing
of water and that the valuation process be both transparent and deeply participatory.In
this way, water does not become a “commodity”. Rather, it is only when water is
valued in this manner can we hope for it to become an actualized human right and not
something that remains merely on paper.
13
A theme cutting across all social and political dimensions of water is that of
conflict. These conflicts, their scale and nature, range over contending uses for water,
issues of ensuring equity and allocation, water quality, problems of sand mining,
displacement by dams, trans-border conflicts, problems associated with privatisation,
as well as the various micro-level conflicts currently raging across the country. Gujja
et al (2006) put together a compilation of articles for the EPW on this wide range of
issues. We have only included their introductory piece in this volume but many of the
18pieces covering 14 States in this February 18, 2006 issue of the EPWare worth
reading to understand the seriousness, depth and multiple dimensions of water
conflicts in India that have only got aggravated over the last decade. Gujja et al see
this pervasiveness of conflicts deriving from the very common pool resource nature of
water: one unit of water used by a person is a unit denied to others. Also because
water has multiple uses and users and involves resultant trade-offs. Finally, the way
water is planned, used and managed causes externalities, both positive and negative,
many of which are unidirectional and asymmetric. They propose giving up of highly
polarised positions on water and the need to adopt a consensual, multi-stakeholder
approach from the grassroots upwards to resolve these conflicts.Interestingly, while
these studies include several instances of conflicts around surface water, there is very
little study of conflicts around groundwater, which remains a key area for further
research (see Chekutty, 2015 for an update on the infamous Coca Cola Plachimada
case).
One of the most prolific contributors to the EPW on the question of water over
the years has been the former Secretary, Water Resources, Government of India,
Ramaswamy Iyer. Iyer has written extensively on water conflicts covering disputes
over Cauvery, Mullaperiyar, Brahmaputra, Ganga, Narmada, Indus, as also on the
Inter-State Water Disputes Act. For this collection, we have chosen Iyer (2013) on the
Cauvery Dispute. His paper is, as he calls it, “a lament and a proposal” on the
notification by the Government of India, at the instance of the Supreme Court, of the
Cauvery Tribunal‟s 2007 Final Order in February 2013. The Cauvery Tribunal‟s Final
Order was the culmination of a 17-year long process of adjudication. However, as
Iyer says: “The Cauvery dispute has been adjudicated but remains unresolved.” For
adjudication is an inherently divisive process: “Each party makes maximal claims,
engages eminent counsel, and fights a bitter legal battle.” The tribunals include only
judges but conflicts over water would be better served if they included experts in the
multiple disciplines involved in water. Even more than the judicial process, it is the
very unsustainable pattern of water use in the dominant development paradigms of the
day, across the board, which lie at the root of these conflicts. Iyer‟s proposal for
resolution of the Cauvery dispute is an example of lofty Gandhian voluntarism. If this
had been the spirit emanating from the two main warring States, the conflict would
not have arisen in the first place.
14
Section Four: Economic Concerns(4 papers)
Vaidyanathan and Sivasubramanian (2004) provide estimates of the total
quantum of “consumptive use” of water in India. These estimates are useful in
understanding how water use in agriculture has changed over time and what the
inefficiencies in the system are. The paper estimates that total annual consumptive use
of water by crops is 660 billion cubic metres, of which 55 per cent is accounted for by
irrigated crops. Irrigated crops use considerably more water than rain-fed ones (5.5
tcm per hectare compared to 2.7 tcm per hectare). Technical efficiency of irrigated
agriculture (the ratio of consumptive use to gross utilization from surface and
groundwater sources) is estimated to be 33 per cent and is lower in water surplus
Eastern India compared to the rest of the country. The paper comes up with a
significant finding that though the output per hectare is higher in irrigated agriculture
than in unirrigated agriculture, the production efficiency (output per unit of
consumptive use of water) is the reverse –10 to 30 per cent lower compared to
unirrigated agriculture. This shows that there are significant inefficiencies in irrigated
agriculture and huge scope for water saving through innovations in technology and
management. This closely ties in with the running concern of this volume with
improving the management of water in our large irrigation commands.
In the next paper in our collection, Somanathan and Ravindranath(2006) argue
that without knowing marginal water values and demand elasticities, no such policy
conclusions can be drawn. For we cannot say how muchproductivity can be raised
through reallocation in inefficient irrigation commands; we also cannot know ifinter-
basin transfers will yield sufficient benefits relative to their huge costs; or how much
over-extraction of groundwater can be mitigated by moving to a system of pricing
electricity at the margin, rather than by pump-capacity,as this depends on how
responsive water demand will be to the resulting increase in the cost of water.
This adventurous paper is based on a pilot small sample survey in the upper
Papgani watershed in the Kolar, Anantapur and Chittoor districts of Karnataka and
Andhra Pradesh. Given the severe limitations of data, the findings are necessarily
tentative and few conclusions can be drawn. The deeper problem is created bythe
multi-dimensional nature and role of water as a merit good, with social and
environmental significance, which makesthe selection of an appropriate set of prices
unusually tough. And the applicationof price-based instrumentsis complicated by the
existence of externalities, market failure and high transactioncosts (Perry et al, 1997).
The question is of the relative importance of price and non-price factors in these
situations.
This is the line of argument adopted byIsha Ray (2005) in our collection
(Mollinga and Boulding, 2004; Gulati, Meinzen-Dick and Raju, 2005). Shealso
focuses on the growing inefficiency of India‟s canal irrigation system. Taking the
example of Mula command in Maharashtra, she questions the hypothesis that raising
15
water prices to a point close to full cost can reduce irrigation inefficiencies. She
argues that cost of irrigation water comes to only a very small proportion of gross
margins from crops (even in the case of sugarcane, it comes to barely 1.2 per cent)
and hence any change in its price is unlikely to affect the demand curve for water in
agriculture significantly. Secondly, farm level inefficiencies are a small part of overall
system inefficiencies in canal commands. So, considering that 65-70 per cent of the
water released at the canal head is “lost” due to evaporation and seepage, the farmer
actually controls only 30-35 per cent of the irrigation water. Third, the major reason
for wastage of water in gravity-flow systems is not pricing but well-known
uncertainties and delays associated with canal irrigation combined with the unequal
access that head reach farmers enjoy vis-à-vis tail-enders. Given all these, the paper
strongly argues that „getting prices right‟ can at best have only a marginal impact in
reducing irrigation inefficiencies in canal systems. Instead, Ray argues for altering the
structure of macro-incentives through a carefully worked out support price and
procurement policy to reduce inefficiency and influence cropping decisions of
farmers. This could be combined with controlled water allocations per unit of crop
area, rules of which are already in place but need tighter implementation.
Sulochana and Siddhartha Gadgil (2006) present a fascinating statistical
analysis that attempts to assess the impact of the inter-annual variation of the all-India
summer monsoon rainfall on GDP and foodgrain production during 1951-2003. The
Gadgils find an interesting asymmetry, with the negative impact of deficit rainfall on
GDP and foodgrain production being larger than the positive impact of surplus rain.
Despite the substantial decrease in the contribution of agriculture GDP over the past
five decades, the impact of severe droughts has remained between 2-5% of GDP
throughout. It is clear that with the growth in irrigated area, rainfall does not remain
the binding constraint it was in these regions of the country and more rain does not,
therefore, necessarily result in proportionately higher output. The Gadgils also cite the
high rainfall year 2006 as an instance of poor reservoir management leading to losses
due to floods caused by sudden release of water in dams.
For us, the most important conclusion to be drawn from the paper is that it
underscores the huge work remaining to be done in improving the productivity and
resilience of rainfed agriculture in India, which would help mitigate the negative
impact of rainfall deficit years on both GDP and food production. This is also an
opportune moment for us to explain the absence from this collection of any paper on
what we regard as the most important issue related to water, which is the improved
conservation and management of water in the drylands of India. As practitioners of
the last 25 years in this field and as also those who have conducted both research and
policy advocacy on this issue for more than two decades now, it is indeed a strange
omission on our part. But the reason is relatively simple. While India has a rich
history of decentralised water harvesting and many illustrious examples of work on
16
the ground in watershed management and rainfed agriculture in more recent years, we
found that published research in the EPW in this area (including our own papers) has
not matched the high standards of work on the ground or of the other work in the
EPW related to water. Hence the exclusion.
Section Five: Water Policy
Regional Perspectives (4 papers)
The EPW is much more than an academic journal. It is also one of
India‟s key fora for discussions on policy issues. We have divided our selection of
papers on policy into two parts. The first part includes four outstanding papers on
water policy issues focused on States and the second part includes two important
national overview papers on key policy initiatives.
The state specific studies we have selected highlight how key policies
initiatives or the lack of them “outside” the narrowly defined water sector can have a
crucial bearing on developments within the water sector and their sustainability.
Based on field-work in six districts of Bihar in the early 21st century, Kishore (2004)
argues that the growth potential unleashed by expansion of shallow tubewell irrigation
in the 1980s was constrainedby the complete neglect of public sector investments in
physical and institutional infrastructure and unfavourable output to factor price ratios.
Bihar did record high growth rates of cereal yields during the 1980s, higher than the
national figures. However, this could not be sustained in the 1990s, and cereal yields
have stagnated since then. Kishore suggests that it is the lack of adequate
infrastructure (especially rural electrification) and economic incentives that
contributed to agrarian stagnation in Bihar.
Shah and Verma (2008) assess the impact of the Jyotigram Scheme
(JGS) in Gujarat. This paper highlights the significance of the groundwater-energy
nexus in determining the sustainability of agriculture in a groundwater dependent
economy. It is the relatively free access to state-provided power that drove India‟s
Green Revolution. But it is the same free power that has also contributed to the
destruction of India‟s water table by its adverse impact on both levels and quality of
groundwater. How then are we to resolve this dilemma? How do we ensure that we do
not kill the goose that lays the golden egg? It is clear that in a country with an
estimated 30 million groundwater structures (wells and tubewells), centralised,
command-and-control regulation through a licence-quota-permit raj is not going to
work. International experience shows these have worked only in countries like
Australia and the US, where there are a small number of large users of groundwater
(Tushaar Shah, 2015). We have described earlier how we need a new decentralised,
participatory approach to groundwater management. However, such initiatives will
not work unless the overall architecture of policy incentives is appropriately aligned
17
with them. Fortunately, we have some examples from the States on how this could
possibly be done.
Gujarat‟s Jyotigram scheme based on the separation of power feeders suggests
a way forward that in subsequent years has been adopted in several States in India.
Under the scheme, villages get 24x7 three-phase power supply for domestic use, in
schools, hospitals, village industries, all subject to metered tariff; and tubewell owners
get rationed, full voltage, predictable power eight hours per day. In their survey
conducted in 2007, Shah and Verma found that power cuts, which were endemic in
Gujarat for many years, had mostly gone; and so had voltage fluctuations. The JGS
showed that effective rationing of power supply can act as a powerfultool for
groundwater demand management. It can reduce groundwater draft in resource-
stressed areas and stimulate it in water-abundant or waterlogged areas.
Shah and Verma suggested that combining JGS with a massive program of
watershed development and water harvesting could make a massive positive
difference to groundwater levels, creating a major win-win for all. In the years since
their study, this has been the experience in Gujarat, where agrarian growth has been
spurred more by decentralised water harvesting than the much-touted SardarSarovar
dam (Shah et al, 2009).
While much of north, west, central and south India suffers from an
overdraft of groundwater, eastern and north-eastern India shows huge unutilized
potential. In recent years, policy has moved to focus on these regions, which are home
to the largest number of poor people in India. After posting agricultural growth rates
of 6% per annum in the late 1980s and early 1990s, West Bengal‟s agriculture
stagnated at 1-2% per annum in the next decade.In 2011, West Bengal had the lowest
rates of pump electrification for irrigation in the country (15% against a national
average of 67%).
There is, therefore, a renewed emphasis on increasing use of groundwater but
in a manner that seeks to learn from the mistakes made in the other parts of
India.Mukherjiet al (2012) report on a package of policy initiatives from West
Bengal, which have the potential to kick-start a second Green Revolution in the
region.West Bengal has had one of the most strictly regulated groundwater regimes in
India through the West Bengal Groundwater Resources (Management, Control and
Regulation) Act 2005. Under this Act, farmers needed to get permits from the State
Water Investigation Directorate (SWID)to apply for electricity connections from the
West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (WBSEDCL). In 2011,
the Water Resources Investigation and Development Department (WRIDD) passed an
order that placed all farmers except those located in 37 semi-critical blocks of the
State outside the purview of the Act. Now farmers located in 301 “safe” groundwater
blocks and owning pumps of less than 5 horsepower (HP) and tube wells with
discharge less than 30m3/hour no longer need permits from SWID. At the same time,
18
the WBSEDCL began to pro-actively provide new electricity connections to farmers
against a payment of a fixed connection fee depending on the connected load.
Farmers no longer have to pay the full cost of wires, poles and transformers based on
the distance from the network, as they were required to before. The hope is that these
reforms will spur an increase in utilisation of groundwater in a State that is home to
more than 20 crore poor people, most of them living in rural areas. Of course, as we
move forward in this direction, the very same questions that came to haunt the rest of
the country will arise here too. More specifically, in West Bengal, the issue of arsenic
contamination of drinking water needs to be taken very seriously (Smith, et.al., 2000;
BGS, 1999). This is why there is a need to very carefully learn from the experiences
on aquifer management in the rest of the country and to ensure that the process of
groundwater development remains sustainable. What is more the legacy of a SWID
with highly competent hydrogeologists (perhaps more than in any other State in the
country) needs tobe converted into an asset to help in moving this goal of
sustainability forward.
We have spoken of some States in India suffering from declining water levels
and quality and others in the East where groundwater is abundant and there are
instances of waterlogging. In Punjab we have the curious case where falling water
tables and quality co-exist with waterlogging, in different parts of the State.
Himanshu Kulkarni and Mihir Shah (2013) call this unique phenomenon “Punjab
Water Syndrome”. In many ways the story of Punjab, India‟s most irrigated State, is
the story of what has gone wrong with India‟s Green Revolution and affords us
invaluable lessons on what to avoid in not only other parts of India but regions such
as Africa, where groundwater is an increasingly important resource. As Kulkarni and
Shah say, “the emergence of the Punjab Water Syndrome can be seen as a classic case
study of the consequences of the engineering-construction-extraction centred
approach, based on control over nature, which has dominated India‟s water resource
development since Independence. Punjab‟s experience underscores the need for a
paradigm shift towards an ecosystem understanding located in participatory
governance of the common pool resources of the region, especially groundwater”.
With uranium, arsenic and heavy metals entering Punjab‟s groundwater and a
“Cancer Express” plying from Punjab to the medical capitals of this country, the crisis
has assumed grave proportions. But Kulkarni and Shah remind us that the crisis “is
not just about scarcity and contamination but about a broader challenge of ecosystem
restoration, protection and governance.”What is remarkable is that Hoshiarpur and
Patiala report groundwater depletion despite increasing rainfall trends and Firozpur
shows clear evidence of water-logging, despite the deficit rainfall anomalies in the
latter part of the 20th century. This broad analysis clearly indicates that we need to
look beyond rainfall patterns for an explanation of the Punjab Water Syndrome, much
of which can be correlated to anthropocentric factors.
19
These factors include both excessive groundwater irrigation in most pats of the
State, without any reference to ecological balance but also poor quality of surface
water irrigation through leaking canal systems and improper drainage, which have
given rise to rising water tables, waterlogging and salinity in south-western
Punjab.The extensive and prolonged use of surface water for irrigation without
adequate drainage causes underlying saline groundwater tables to rise in the naturally
arid Lower Indus Valley, shared between Pakistan and India, which is the largest
contiguous irrigation system in the world.A truly alarming scenario looming on the
horizon (of course in need of much more careful validation) is the potential threat of
saline groundwater of Southwest Punjab beginning to flow into the depleted fresh-
water aquifers of central Punjab, the heartland of the Green Revolution, on account of
the hydraulic gradients induced by shallow water levels in Southwestern Punjab and
deeper water levels in the Northern parts. The paper ends with a suggested package of
measures to tackle the twin problems of falling water tables (and quality) and
waterlogging. This includes groundwater recharge and improved surface and sub-
surface drainage systems, bio-drainage, micro-irrigation and lining of canals but also
measures “outside” water such as diversified cropping patterns and a range of non-
agriculture livelihood options suitable for the saline regions.
National Overview (2 papers)
The last sub-section of this book includes two articles that provide a national
overview on key water policy issues. Vaidyanathan (2003) is a critique of the
humongous project for interlinking of India‟s peninsular rivers, which has had many
champions, including the Supreme Court and a former President of India. One of the
earliest comprehensive overviews of the proposal, we believe Vaidyanathan‟s remains
the single best piece on the issue.He begins by pointing to the fact that the National
Water Development Agency (NWDA), which is responsible for the project, is
manned entirely by personnel from the irrigation bureaucracy, with very low
standards of transparency. The NWDA has not shown much interest in
addressingbroader questions of water management that entail multiple disciplines and
stakeholders. Vaidyanathan argues that both surface and groundwater resource
estimates are based on inadequate data, unverified assumptions and measurement
errors. Since the entire proposal is based on presumed surpluses and deficits in
different river basins, Vaidyanathan‟s detailed discussion goes to the heart of the
assumptions underlying these estimates. He shows that the estimates are extremely
sensitive to the assumptions regarding the extent of irrigation in the basin, gross and
net irrigation requirements, non-agricultural requirements and the parameters of
return flow. Thus, the estimates of transferable surplus need critical scrutiny and
evaluation by independent experts. The proposal, which was put in the backburner by
20
the UPA is sought to be revived by the present government. However, the scrutiny
and evaluation Vaidyanathan advocates has never been undertaken.
Vaidyanathan also finds that it is not clear“when, for what duration and how
much water can be drawn from each basin for transfer to the next, and how well it
matches the irrigation requirements in the recipient basin”.He, therefore, concludes
that the project is unlikely to deliver adequate water to the deficit regions, in the
quantities and at the times needed to make a significant impact on their agriculture.
After raising huge question marks over both the financial and economic feasibility of
the project, Vaidyanathan points to the curious fact that the project will leave the
major part of the land in the surplus basins without irrigation.
A more recent critique of the interlinking of rivers project that complements
Vaidyanathan‟s seminal piece with an updated ecological understanding, is to be
found in the chapter on Water in the 12th Plan document, which is not in favour of
this kind of gigantism. This is summarised in Mihir Shah (2013), which presents the
proposed paradigm shift in water in the 12th
Planthat entailed a fundamental change in
the principles, approach and strategies of water management in India. This paradigm
shift wasthe outcome of a new and inclusive process of plan formulation, wherein for
the first time in the history of the Planning Commission, all Working Groups (WGs)
on water were headed by people from outside government. The WGs included
practitioners and professionals on water from all relevant disciplines in academia,
industry and civil society, other than representatives of central and state governments.
Acknowledging the emerging limits to further large dam construction in India,
the 12th
Plan proposes a shift in emphasis to Participatory Irrigation Management
(PIM), which is to be incentivised through the creation of a National Irrigation
Management Fund (NIMF). The idea is simple. India has huge created irrigation
potential lying unutilized. By improving management of water in our commands,
charging of irrigation service fees by water users associations, who retain most of
them for operation and maintenance of irrigation systems and to provide last mile
connectivity of water to the farm, we could add hugely to irrigated area in India.
Without building new dams. The NIMF would support and facilitate States in their
movement in devolving control of irrigation commands to farmers and
debureaucratising them. What is truly ironic is that neither the UPA nor the NDA
government have notified the NIMF, which drew inspiration from best practices by
States like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat.
The Plan also proposed to initiate India‟s first-ever National Aquifer
Management Programme (NAMP) to enable the sustainable and equitable
management of our groundwater. Happily this programme has taken off but questions
remain on the allocations being currently provided for it and the severe lack of
capacities in the Central and State Groundwater Boards. The NAMP calls for a large
network of partnerships with key players outside government like universities,
21
research institutions and civil society to galvanise the creation of a veritable army of
barefoot hydrogeologists, without which such a massive task of mapping and
managing India‟s aquifers cannot be undertaken.
The paradigm shift visualizes a key role for the MGNREGA being recast as a
programme of watershed restoration and groundwater recharge. Again the jury is out
on whether this will happen given the terrible neglect of the programme in 2014-15.
The paradigm shift also involves ambitious plans for India‟s urban and industrial
sectors, with a focus on recycling and reuse of water through low-cost cutting-edge
eco-friendly technologies. The idea is to reduce the water footprint of Indian industry
by cutting down on the volume of fresh water used as also the quantum of untreated
waste water released into our rivers and groundwater. It is to be hoped that the
Swachh Bharat Mission, the Smart Cities initiative and the NamamiGange
programme will provide the requisite momentum to these crucial 12th
Plan proposals.
Looking Ahead
We thought we would conclude this introductory essay by briefly listing the
areas of research on water that remain as yet under-represented in the pages of the
EPW. There is hardly any quality work on urban water issues, where a deeper
understanding of the link between water and wastewater management would be
critical. Work on the industrial water footprint is critical in a rapidly industrialising
economy like India. There is again little work within a larger eco-systems perspective,
which would explore issues concerning eco-system services1. Such work is urgently
required if we are to decisively overthrow the fundamentalisms of narrow water
disciplines that continue to dominate government programmes and policies in India.
A useful starting point for such research could be studies on river systems for which
there is great resonance both in the popular imagination, as also in recent policy
discourse. A careful estimation of the range and diversity of ecological services of the
river system could be an exciting line of inquiry. A special focus on the dynamic, yet
eco-fragile, Himalayan region is an urgent imperative in the context of climate
change. Since we are aware that work on all the issues listed above is currently
underway in the Indian context, we would hope it will find its due place in the pages
of the EPW. Much deeper research is also called for on the growing water conflicts,
especially with respect to groundwater. This is also linked to the groundwater-society
interactions in the rural context, where access to groundwater plays a key role in
capital accumulation on the one hand and growing debt and immiserisation on the
other. Finally, as we said before, we look forward to much better work on the many
1 This work has grown in significance ever since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005. See also the pioneering work of Gretchen Daily (Daily, 1997; Daily et al, 2000)
22
diverse dimensions of rainfed agriculture, which could hold the key to national water
and food security in the years to come.
References
1. Ackerman, R. 2011. “New Directions for Water Management in Indian
Agriculture”, International Water Management Institute, Colombo, mimeo
2. Ali, Imran. 1988. The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885-1947, Princeton
University Press, Princeton
3. British Geological Survey. 1999. Groundwater Studies for Arsenic Contamination
in Bangladesh Phase 1 British Geological Survey
[http://www.bgs.ac.uk/arsenic/home. html].
4. Chekutty, N.P. (2015): „Plachimadavs Coca-Cola: 1,000 days on‟,
