The Water Sector in India: An Overview

Sailen Routray

Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

 

India has only 4 per cent of the world’s water resources even as it has around 16 per cent of the world’s population and 2.45 per cent of the world’s land. In gross national terms, the availability of water in India is not inadequate right now. This situation can, however, change with population growth, economic development and increasing urbanization. There are of course many problems with aggregates at the national level. 

India, as the cliché goes, is a land of wide variations in terms of most issues, and this extends to the water sector as well. In terms of water availability there exists a wide range of both spatial and temporal variations. Most of the precipitation in the country happens through rainfall, which is received in the four months between July and October in most parts of the country as a result of the south-west monsoon. 

Spatially, broadly speaking, the northern and eastern parts of the country have better water endowments compared to the western and southern. The less endowed parts include the desert areas of Rajasthan and the arid areas in the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in peninsular India that lie in one rain-shadow region or the other (Iyer 2003).

Sectoral Usage of Water

Although water availability in India is spatially and temporally variable, there is a consistency in terms of the patterns of demand. Irrigation is the biggest consumer in all Indian regions accounting for more than 80 per cent of all water consumed. Domestic usage (including drinking water) and industrial usage together constitute less than 20 per cent of all water demand (Iyer 2001a). Since irrigation is the single biggest consumer of water in the country, it needs to be looked into in some detail.

Irrigation

The discourse on irrigation in India is largely around surface irrigation, though groundwater is an increasingly significant contributor. Over the last three decades or so, India has seen a massive expansion of groundwater irrigation. There has been a progressive decline in the water table in most areas, and this has led to farmers deepening wells in a competitive manner. This has consequently led to higher costs of irrigation that is being increasingly borne by the poorer farmers. 

Urban water demands for both domestic and industrial purposes have spiraled upwards during the same period, with a bulk of this demand being met through the exploitation of groundwater in urban areas. Lack of treatment of this effluence has contributed to the pollution of the existing groundwater stocks. The degradation of the groundwater through over-extraction and pollution is increasingly contributing to inequity, conflicts, indebtedness and poverty (Janakarajan and Moench 2006).

Surface irrigation projects were important in providing irrigation water until about 1970. From the early 1970s, the rate of expansion of groundwater irrigation has been higher than that of surface water irrigation. The expansion of groundwater has sometimes been able to extend the benefits of irrigation to areas hitherto unreached by surface irrigation systems. It is also a much more efficient source of irrigation as there are fewer evapo-transpiration losses, and it allows farmers better control of both the timing and quantity of water. But due to unsustainable growth over the last decade or so, the groundwater irrigation economy might end up collapsing under its own weight (Shah 2004). 

In terms of the existing surface-based systems, there have been no major initiatives to improve the efficiency of water use through renovations. Till now, the attempts at promoting water-use efficiency by inducing institutional changes have neither been concerted influential in terms of their impact. In India, the proportion of the irrigated area transferred to Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) is around 7 per cent; this compares very unfavorably to 45 per cent achieved in Indonesia, 66 per cent in the Philippines and 22 per cent in Thailand. 

While institutional changes may hold greater promise in the long term, in the short term, technological changes resulting in improved crop yields per unit of water, inducing farmers to switch to water-efficient crops by pricing mechanisms, the use of rain water in conjunction with irrigation water in high-rainfall areas and greater focus on the high-rainfall areas of central and eastern India might be more promising as strategies. Increasingly, the role of the government in irrigation systems is seen as a part of the problem, leading to the prescription of market mechanisms as the solution. 

But as experience has more often than not shown, market failures in water and irrigation management are as common as the failure of state systems. There is a widespread prevalence of externalities, high transaction costs and lack of clear property rights for irrigation water in India. This makes it difficult to have properly functioning water markets and any large-scale, full-scale privatization of irrigation water difficult and potentially inequitable (Hanumantha Rao 2002). 

Drinking Water

Although irrigation is the biggest consumer of water in India, the most important usage of this resource is for drinking and other domestic purposes. Despite the gains made in the water and sanitation sector after independence, tens of millions of people in India are yet to gain access to safe drinking water. About 15 lakh children under the age of five die every year in the country due to preventable, water-borne diseases, and about 20 crore person-days are lost annually (mostly by the poor and the vulnerable) as a result of such diseases. 

In 1991, urban water supply coverage was 83.63 per cent, which was an increase of only 10 percentage points over the figure in 1981. Instead of trying to achieve international standards in terms of water and following the targets of total sanitation, various governments have chosen to lower the standards, with the Five Year Plan documents periodically revising targets. The Eighth Five Year Plan (1992–97) set the target of 100 per cent coverage of safe drinking water in urban areas by 2000. 

After this plan period, the approach paper to the Ninth Plan (1997–2002) claimed that only 85 per cent of the urban population had access to safe drinking water and admitted to inadequate coverage in slums and other poorer localities. The distribution of water in urban areas is extremely inequitable and is biased against the poor. The leakage of water in the big cities of India averages between 35–40 per cent; reducing leakages can augment supplies with minimal additional investment (Ramachandraiah 2001).

One of the key players in the emerging policy consensus surrounding urban drinking water across the world has been the World Bank, which has been promoting public–private partnership models based on management contracts. In most of such contracts, much of the risks are supposed to be borne by the governments (primarily in developing countries), while the companies more often than not are not required to invest anything. The Delhi state government recently adopted a similar model for pursuing so-called reforms in the water sector. This was met with widespread protests and led to the unconditional withdrawal of the loan application by the Delhi Water Board to the World Bank (Bhaduri and Kejriwal 2005).

Despite the commitments of successive governments for providing full drinking water coverage to all rural habitations, many villages still lack access to safe drinking water. A large proportion of the so-called no-source villages that are provided with drinking water invariably revert back to the no-source status. This may be because of biophysical factors, but it has to be kept in mind that ‘no-source’ is as much a political category as it is a technical category. 

In some cases, villages with sources of drinking water try to get themselves declared as ‘no-source’ so as to access governmental schemes for rural drinking water provisioning. The seventy-third amendment to the Indian constitution gives panchayats the power of providing drinking water in villages. Panchayats need to be strengthened financially and institutionally so that they are able to fulfill this constitutional obligation. 

Most attempts at providing water for the no-source villages have generally attempted to provide water through tankers or pipe water schemes. Attempts should be first made to make villages self-sufficient in drinking water by watershed treatment and similar other measures. If all measures fail, water supply from outside the village/panchayat can be considered as the last resort. 

Two Issues of Contemporary Relevance

Till now, inter-sectoral conflicts surrounding water usage have not been significant in India. But that does not mean there have been no important conflicts over water resources. Over the last couple of decades or so, the water sector has been an important site of conflicts and contestations. At the macro level, big dams and water resource development projects have been important sites of conflict between many types of social actors. Similarly, the increasingly scarce groundwater resources have been important sites of contestation, albeit at a much less intense level, in many regions of the country. These need to be looked into in some detail.  

The Conundrum of Groundwater 

Most of the demand for both irrigation and drinking water till recently was being met with surface water resources.  In the last two decades or so, groundwater has become increasingly important, and its use has been growing at a faster rate than surface water resources. The first large-scale attempt to scientifically plan and develop groundwater in India was made in 1934. The actual expansion of groundwater irrigation started in 1965 after the introduction of high-yielding varieties of seeds. 

Increasing availability of electricity in the rural areas due to the rapidly expanding rural electrification programme and the increasingly easier availability of credit due to the growth of the rural cooperative credit structure have helped rapidly increase the number of wells and increase the reach of groundwater irrigation. Over the last few decades, there have been increasingly sophisticated investigations of groundwater resources in the country, though some problems with methodology remain. The methods employed have included hydro-geological surveys, geophysical studies and exploratory drillings  (Jain et al. 1977).

The rates of extraction of groundwater in India exceed by multiples the replenishment rate in many blocks, which is leading to a continuous lowering of the water table. In 2004, an alarming 28 per cent of the groundwater blocks in India could be classified in the category of semi-critical, critical or overexploited; the comparable figure in 1995 stood at only 7 per cent. Most recent legislations by some state governments lack any nuanced understanding of the resource—these rely mostly on controls and licenses imposed by the state and have little scope for community participation. 

As is evident from experience, both the state and the market seem to find it difficult to ensure the equitable and sustainable use of groundwater. The only option left seems to be management through local community-based institutions that are adequately supported by research. In this context, enabling legal frameworks and well-defined rights also assume importance (EPW Editorial 2007). 

Water Resource Development and the River Interlinking Project (RIP) 

As is evident from the preceding discussion, ground water use in India has already met its limits. Creation of surface water potential in India also seems to be plateauing. With a rapidly growing economy, demand for water can only increase at a faster pace than in the past. This calls for a holistic approach of both demand-side and supply-side management. However, traditionally, the planning for water in India has focused on discrete, individual projects. 

Projects have almost always been approved on the basis of the benefit–cost ratio (BCR), which is an inherently unsatisfactory criterion and is prone to being distorted. Most of the major and medium projects are loss-making propositions for the various state governments. The costs and benefits of these projects are unevenly distributed across various social groups, and this makes rehabilitation and resettlement a huge problem, as India has one of the worst records regarding these issues. 

There are also major problems in terms of the planning, funding and construction of major and medium water resource development projects in the country: these include the thin spread of finances over a large number of projects resulting in cost and time overruns, the persistent overestimation of benefits and underestimation of costs, ignoring social costs and provision of adequate funding for rehabilitation and resettlement, the persistent underestimation of negative environmental impacts, and the substantial and consistent underutilization of the irrigation potential created (Iyer 2001a). 

In the background of such a history of the experience of large water resource development projects, the proposed RIP needs to be rigorously examined. The proposal to link all the rivers in India is an old one. The present round of discussions and activities surrounding the plan have started with a writ petition filed in the Supreme Court of India following which the Court treated this issue as an independent Public Interest Litigation (PIL) writ petition. 

A preliminary analysis indicates that even if the decision were to be based on purely ‘technical’ matters then the RIP will lose out to other emerging technological solutions such as desalinization for meeting drinking water needs of coastal cities or improvements in the realization of existing irrigation potential for meeting additional irrigation needs. This project is purportedly an attempt at hydraulic equity at the national level that envisages transferring water from the so-called surplus areas to the so-called deficit areas. 

The inherent logic is flawed on many counts. First, the deficit areas are not necessarily poor or deprived; the deficit has arisen due to a process of intensive water usage in the first place. Second, the promotion of ‘national’ equity between regions or states would involve heightening social inequities within them between various social groups. Since there have been no professional assessments of the proposals, or even proper pre-feasibility studies, the proposal seems unacceptable on socio-economic and ecological grounds (Bandyopadhyay and Perveen 2004).

One of the major initiatives in this proposal is about building huge storage capacities. Sedimentation of reservoirs is a huge problem in India; generally the inflow of actual sedimentation is more than 200 per cent of the design inflow (Tejwani 1987). A major part of the proposal of the RIP envisions damming the Himalayan rivers. There is a serious absence of long-term records of water flows, and there are practical problems in maintaining data quality, leading to high uncertainty levels in the assessment of water resource potential in these rivers (Kattelmann 1987). The so-called surpluses in the Himalayan rivers must be properly assessed before any major river diversion scheme is planned based on insufficient data.

New Approaches and Their Limitations 

Due to the limitations of the water resource development paradigm mentioned in the preceding section, the last couple of decades have seen the growth of many alternative approaches. These approaches try to respond to the problems that the earlier paradigm either created or failed to address. These include piecemeal and engineering-driven approaches to water resource planning, lack of a focus on environmental and social concerns, and the focus on supply-side rather than demand-side management. 

Watershed Development 

Watershed development is an alternative way of dealing with these concerns. The last decade has seen a critique of statist resource management practices and increasing decentralization of responsibilities for natural resource management to the community level. The Watershed Development Programmes (WDPs) that are being supported by the Government of India are an example of such a change. Assessment and evaluation approaches for judging the success or otherwise of WDPs in India have evolved over a period of time. 

During the 1970s and the early 1980s, the evaluation of WDPs was premised mainly on biophysical criteria. This started changing in the late 1980s with a growing recognition of the fact that watershed development involves more than just maintaining or improving the quality of natural resources and now has objectives related to social, ecological, environmental and equity concerns as well (Turton 2000). 

There is increasingly the diagnosis that the ‘dryland blindness’ of planners and policymakers has failed to recognize that climatic and livelihood uncertainty is an integral part of the lives of people in the drylands occupying much of the country. It is argued that policymakers and planners are based in distant capitals, and they are better accustomed to wetter areas with perennial rivers and more efficient irrigation facilities. They tend to use yardsticks suitable for wetter areas to evaluate and plan water resources, resulting in ‘dryland blindness’ and the spread of conditions of acute water scarcity in the dryland areas of the country. 

Rainwater harvesting techniques are probably the best way to tackle the water problem in drylands. The ‘dryland blindness thesis’ argues that water harvesting is unlikely to have the negative effects associated with large dams and schemes that tap finite groundwater resources. Yet it has not gained acceptability amongst key decision-makers in water resource management. The lesser visibility of watershed development schemes and the lack of appeal of watersheds to powerful business lobbies may explain why watershed development has not been taken up as a political issue (Mehta 2000).

The actual experience of watershed development projects in India has been varied. With a history of at least three decades, these programmes have been conceived basically as a strategy for protection of livelihoods of people living in fragile ecosystems that experience soil erosion and moisture stress. 

Although the performance of this programme across the various states is highly uneven, the overall performance of the programme in the country has shown a distinct improvement after the new guidelines have been in place (Hanumantha Rao 2000).

But such narratives of ‘success’ do not go uncontested. For example, a water audit conducted as part of the Karnataka Watershed Development Project (KAWD) shows that demand for water, induced by watershed ‘development’, is slowly outstripping supply, and the possibility of augmentation is limited. The audit also found no evidence that watershed development activities have reversed or even halted degradation of water resources or have helped take steps towards making villages drought-proof. 

Watershed development is not necessarily going to lead to either sustainable or equitable development of natural resources in the KAWAD watersheds (Batchelor et al. 2003). Therefore, watershed development, even in its ‘participatory’ incarnations, cannot be used as a general panacea for the ills plaguing the irrigation sector in India. 

Traditional Water Management Systems 

India has had many different kinds of traditional water management systems, which evolved in response to local needs and conditions. In much of peninsular India, tanks have been important sources of irrigation. But their importance has been decreasing slowly in the post-independence period. The proportion of the gross cropped area irrigated by tanks decreased from nearly 17 per cent in 1952–53 to around 5 per cent in 1999–2000. 

This has to be seen in conjunction with the fact that the proportion of the area under tank irrigation has decreased more rapidly in states where tank irrigation used to be more important, while the decrease is a lot less steep in those states where it used be less important. In fact, there have been marginal gains in tank irrigation in states that traditionally relied less on it. Data from the Agricultural Census of India across two decades from 1970–71 to 1990–99 shows that lands of small and marginal farmers owning less than two hectares of land continue to account for the majority of the tank-irrigated area in India. 

In 1970–71, these two categories together accounted for around 40 per cent of agricultural land irrigated by tanks, a figure which increased to more than 55 per cent by 1990–91. During the same period, the share of large farmers in tank-irrigated areas decreased from around 14 per cent to 6 per cent. Thus tank irrigation remains a crucial resource for small and marginal farmers (Palanisami 2006).

In the last decade or so, there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of what are called traditional water harvesting systems that primarily consists of tanks in much of peninsular India. The work of the New Delhi–based research organization Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has been crucial in such a refocusing. Tank-based systems in peninsular India have received increasing attention from both academics and practitioners. 

There has been an increasing recognition of the various state authorities regarding their importance, and over the last decade, there have been many state-sponsored tank rehabilitation programmes. But the actual number of tanks rehabilitated remains proportionately small compared to the total number of tanks. Augmenting tanks through peoples’ renovation is increasingly seen as a cost-effective as well as equitable tool to address concerns surrounding agricultural productivity and rural poverty. 

Both physical and institutional measures are necessary for revitalizing tanks. In most tank revitalization programmes, structural improvements tend to overshadow investments in institutional improvement. Before any investments are made in tank-irrigation systems, the availability of adequate water for the tank must be ensured. Enabling institutional preconditions should be created so that tank management institutions are genuinely representative and equitable (Sakthivadivel et al. 2004). 

Integrated Water Resource Management 

Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) is part of a host of new set of strategies being promoted by international bodies as innovative practices in the water sector. Indian water policy discussions are generally influenced by overarching global discourses. The discourse surrounding IWRM reflects an emerging global consensus surrounding water; the main elements of this consensus are a naturalized and absolutist notion of water scarcity and its links to poverty and deprivation, and a host of demand management practices and policies. 

There are serious flaws in such a diagnosis and prescription, the link between water scarcity and ‘water poverty’ being tenuous. The main components of IWRM packages, such as reforms in water pricing for water to reflect its ‘production costs’ and the enforcement of water withdrawal permits, have generally been difficult to implement. Attempts at ‘integrated planning’ at the regional level have failed in a similar manner. 

One of the biggest reasons for such failures has been that water economies in poor countries are more often than not informal in nature, and this makes the operation of formal demand management systems that are imposed from above almost impossible to succeed. But IWRM cannot be completely rejected. It has its applications in highly formalized segments of the water economy. With increasing urbanization, our cities with a significant part of their water economy in the formal sector will need the direct demand management practices as envisaged by IWRM (Shah and van Koppen 2006).

Even in the rural sector, with increasing water scarcity, well-regulated water markets seem to have emerged in certain regions. In these cases also, IWRM can be a fruitful framework to locate interventions for producing desirable outcomes with respect to both equity and efficiency. As a framework, IWRM cannot be rejected summarily without figuring out its applicability in specific sectors and regions. 

Till very recently, the water sector has been dominated by supply-side concerns and by the various disciplines of engineering. IWRM provides us with a framework to integrate social science concerns with engineering know-how and to address demand-side management. This is a welcome development, and IWRM should be given a fair, if limited, trial as a framework for locating water-related interventions in the country. 

Water Markets and Appropriate Pricing of Water 

Due to the apparent inefficiencies in state-managed irrigation systems, market-based mechanisms are increasingly being promoted as alternatives. There are two broad sets of reasons that are given for preferring water markets over administered pricing. Theorists advocating market mechanisms for allocating water resources generally claim that it might be a theoretical possibility to devise and implement an efficiently administered prices system, but in the real world, the information requirements are demanding and can hinder the effective functioning of such a system. 

An administrative solution presumes neutral, efficient and incorruptible administrators and administrative bodies that design and implement the ‘correct’ prices. More often than not, this is not borne out in practice. These administrative bodies are more often than not captured by interest groups or are ill-informed about future demand or are inefficient and are unable to set and send out the correct price signals or collect the water charges effectively (Mohanty and Gupta 2002). These are, in short, some of the main arguments given for water markets. 

Critiques of free-market solutions argue that in actual experience, water markets need regulation and the enforcement of private rights, and they run into the same set of problems as administrated pricing. More importantly, there are many examples of market failures, and the introduction of water markets is no guarantor of an efficient mechanism for allocating water. The informal water economy of countries like India involves complexly intertwined claims over water, and market mechanism cannot be simply grafted over these. Questions surrounding water equity also assume salience in the context of water markets. In this context, communitarians provide a third alternative to statist and market mechanisms, one that gives effective rights to communities to manage their own water resources (Iyer 2001b). 

But other responses to the slogan ‘get the price right’ in the context of water are possible. In a classic case of correct diagnosis being followed by incorrect prescription, it does not necessarily follow that the only, and the most effective, way to conserve water and increase irrigation efficiency is to increase prices to reflect the scarcity value of water. As suggested by some scholars, there are two broad reasons for reaching this conclusion. 

First, raising the prices of canal water to the point where it significantly affects water demand will negatively impact farm revenues in the short and medium terms, and, moreover, such a policy will be politically indefensible. Low price increases, on the other hand, will have very little impact on water demand. More importantly, the choice of water-inefficient crops cannot be squarely laid at the door of low water prices of canal water. Farm-level inefficiencies are not the most significant inefficiencies on existing systems of canals; the inefficiencies lie at the higher levels of the system. 

A better mechanism can be to enforce simple allocation rules (such as a per-hectare ration) that can immediately signal the scarcity value of water without raising prices. This is politically a far more feasible step than raising prices of canal water significantly, as quantitative restrictions over water use are already a part of the management of most Indian canal systems. 

A transparent and equitable quota system can also free up water to be transferred to urban usage or to other farmers or to meet environmental needs. This is not to argue that one should not ‘get the price right’. Till mechanisms for effective price signals are in place, ‘getting the price right’ is not automatically the best possible way under most circumstances in India to deal with the inefficiencies in irrigation water allocation (Ray 2005). 

Conflicts, Constitutional Provisions and Institutions 

Apart from ‘getting the price right’, ‘water wars’ is another strand around which contemporary narratives surrounding water are being framed. Despite the increasingly audible international rhetoric surrounding ‘water wars’, the incidence of violence surrounding water is mostly at the sub-national level. These conflicts can be between sectors, as is the case with the farmers’ protests surrounding the transfer of water to non-agriculture use from the Hirakud reservoir in the east Indian state of Odisha; between different states, as is the case of the dispute surrounding the waters of the Cauvery River between the states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu; or involve governments and non-governmental actors, as is the case with the struggle of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) that has been fighting against the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) on the Narmada River focusing on the problems of resettlement and rehabilitation. Most of the conflicts seem to be clustered around large projects and on interstate rivers.

Conflict Resolution 

With regard to interstate river disputes, Article 262 of the Constitution and the Inter-State Water Disputes Act (ISWD Act) 1956 provides the adjudication system as a mechanism for conflict resolution. This Act needs to be properly implemented by reducing delays at every stage. In addition to making the adjudication process better, it is equally important to provide an enabling environment for conflict resolution through negotiation. 

Institutional means should be provided for achieving this, and River Basin Organizations can perhaps fulfill this role. Conflicts between states are only one of the many types of conflicts that arise surrounding water, and there needs to be an enabling legal, institutional and policy environment to be able to deal with all these various types of conflicts effectively. Such mechanisms are sadly lacking now. 

In a policy environment increasingly suffused by neo-liberal prescriptions, a system of clearly defined water rights is proposed to help reduce and resolve water conflicts. This is a simplistic view as this prescription does not take into account the already existing set of claims and rights over water; in fact, the very attempts at enforcing such rights might lead to further conflicts. The set of conflicts between the people and the state needs to be looked at a lot more carefully (Iyer 2001b).  

Constitutional Mechanisms 

The most important entry in the Constitution of India about water is Entry 17 in the State List that deals with water supplies, irrigation, canals, embankments, water storage and hydropower. This entry is subject to the provisions of Entry 56 of the Union List of the Constitution that primarily deals with interstate rivers and gives sweeping powers to the central government to regulate and develop interstate rivers in ‘public interest’. 

But the centre has not been able to make any substantial use of the enabling provisions of this entry. The Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules to the Constitution list drinking water, water management, watershed development and sanitation to be devolved to panchayats and urban municipal bodies. These bodies will have an important role to play in the future, and future legislation will need to take their existence into account (Iyer 2003).

Institutional Reforms 

The National Water Resources Council (NWRC) set up by the Government of India, an important body in the Indian water sector, has no statutory backing and therefore lacks teeth. Whether giving the NWRC statutory backing will improve matters of federal water governance is a difficult question to answer. One long-standing institutional innovation that is yet to be implemented is that of the River Basin Organizations. 

Despite the hostility of the states to River Basin Organizations, these need to be set up on an urgent basis as water management at the level of the basin as a whole can go a long way in diffusing tensions between various stakeholders and in reducing the intensity of the conflicts. The Inter-State Council, a recommendatory body established by Presidential Order on 28 May 1990, is another institution which can be utilized to settle disputes surrounding the waters of interstate rivers (Iyer 2003). 

Water and Equity 

As the preceding discussion shows, the Indian Constitution primarily frames the debates surrounding water through spatial metaphors and statist provisions. The provisions of the Constitution look at potential conflicts primarily as between the various actors of the state. Its neglect of the of the social aspects of water usage is, however, not unique. Even academic work on social issues surrounding water have, more often than not, focused on issues of efficiency, that is, primarily around issues of cost recovery of irrigation water and the social reasons for non-sustainability of water usage. 

Issues surrounding equity have started receiving some attention of late. The discussion that follows focuses on only two axes surrounding which issues of equity can be raised, the first one being that of gender and the second ethnicity, that is, of tribals. There are many other axes on which such analyses can take place. This discussion is merely indicative of the potential of such an exercise. 

Women and Water 

In international public policy concerns surrounding water, women rarely figured in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s and 1980s, it came to be recognized that women had an important role to play in domestic water provisioning. They were identified as important users of water as a resource, and their role in the broader context of managing water as an environmental resource also started being recognized. During the 1980s (the UN Development Decade that focused on water), the focus on women in the context of water management was mostly to make the systems more efficient economically and did not overtly factor in gender-related concerns. 

In the 1990s, with the Washington Consensus firmly in place, water came to be increasingly seen as an economic good and women’s roles as water managers came to be foregrounded. More recently, it is the discourse of poverty alleviation and empowerment that frames discussions surrounding gender and water (Wallace and Coles 2005).

In the context of these changing policy orientations, it must be affirmed that in most poor rural and urban communities, it is the women and girls who have the responsibility of collecting water for domestic needs. Water   collection chores do not affect all women equally because women are not one homogeneous group—the socio-economic status of the household, age and marital status, seclusion and household composition affect women’s water-related activities. 

Till very recently, government departments and NGOs focused on the provision of drinking water and for all practical purposes ignored the issues of sanitation and wastewater disposal. Lack of accessible sanitation has significant gender impacts: women bear the cost of lack of proper sanitation facilities more than men do, and they have relatively less command over financial resources to make their needs for sanitation felt in households and communities. 

The importance of women to the water sector and of the water sector to women is not limited to domestic water and sanitation alone. In India, women work as agricultural laborers and farmers (either as legal owners of farmland but mostly as de facto household heads). Women are the invisible backbone of Indian agriculture, and a significant proportion of the workforce engaged in agricultural labour comprises women. 

Even when women are actively engaged in managing farms, they are generally not recognized as ‘farmers’. More often than not, their water rights are dependent on male landowners as water rights in India are tied to land rights, and land rights in the country are primarily vested with men. There is an urgent need to articulate women’s right to land and water through legal and policy changes (Kulkarni et al. 2007).

It must be evident from the foregoing discussion that water use amongst women happens along multiple axes, and they play an important role in using this resource for sustaining the household economy. If this role of women is recognized, it can go a long way in promoting more efficient and productive use of water in strengthening rural livelihoods.

There is work to show that access of women to water for the purposes of production can help strengthen the livelihood condition of families by increasing their incomes; it can also aid gender empowerment in a significant manner by strengthening the bargaining positions of women in a significant manner (Upadhyay 2005).

Scheduled Tribes and Water

Various surveys conducted in tribal areas of peninsular India reveal that tribal farmers in the tribal-dominated districts earn much less income from their land compared to the non-tribals in the same area. Both investments and returns on investments made by tribals are lower compared to non-tribals in the same area. Water resource development in India has traditionally been an engineering-led, statist project and has not been suitable for the tribal people as they usually live and work in the uplands. The explosive growth of groundwater irrigation in recent times has also bypassed them. 

In planning water-related interventions in tribal areas, there is a need to be sensitive to factors such as agro-climatic conditions, local topography, level of local infrastructure development and the socio-cultural characteristics of the communities. Water-related interventions should also have a labour component involving ‘Food for Work’ programmes. Carefully implemented and sustainable water-related initiatives in these areas can help reduce the deprivation amongst tribals and enhance national food security. This can also contribute towards sustainable and more efficient utilization of our land and water resources (Phansalkar and Verma 2004).

It must also be kept in mind that not only have the benefits of traditional water resource development projects bypassed tribals but also hey have borne most of the social costs of these projects. Therefore, any new water resource development project should pass scrutiny in terms of benchmarks of ensuring the rights of tribals over land and water.   

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India lacks suitable legal frameworks and institutional mechanisms to manage the water sector efficiently and equitably. Irrigation is the biggest consumer of water and is the reason for most conflicts surrounding it. One of the major issues in irrigation is the low efficiency of water usage that stands at around 30–40 per cent in the case of canal irrigation systems. This needs to be urgently addressed. 

The conventional approach has been to lay the blame at the door of farmers and the low cost of irrigation water that apparently leads to wastages. A big part of the wastage in irrigation water happens at the supra-farm level; increasing prices will not help us to deal with this. This is not to say that pricing is not an issue; it is. But pricing reforms can only be part of a larger set of reforms that address broader structural and institutional concerns.

Benefits from major canal irrigation systems and most of the subsidies on irrigation water tend to go to the landed sections of rural areas. Major policy changes are needed to put social equity in the irrigation sector at the centre of our concerns. One of the initiatives in such a context can be to ensure that all the farmers growing the same crop should share equal opportunity and have equal costs. In practical terms, this means that if a farmer grows rice he must pay the same amount for the water he receives regardless of whether he is a part of a canal system or is withdrawing water from underground aquifers. 

Another mechanism can be to share benefits in the sense of exchangeable rights over water rather than actual water per se. Groundwater irrigation can be made more sustainable by moving from a system of free or cheap electricity for farmers to a system of minimum and exchangeable electricity quotas for every inhabitant of rural areas beyond which market rates will be charged.

Full cost recovery at the unit level in all urban centers drawing water from beyond a certain specified radius (say 5–10 km) should be made compulsory. Water charges can be made directly proportional to the property taxes paid, and the poor can be cross-subsidized at the cost of the bigger and richer users of water in urban areas (Gujja and Shaik, 2005).

The thinking on water is currently dominated by the water resource development paradigm that essentially tries to meet demand projections made into the future by big projects for storing or transferring water. As already detailed, there are many problems with such an approach. As our discussion of the newly emerging approaches to water management shows, one cannot wholeheartedly embrace the ‘alternatives’ also. 

The thinking in the water sector is now dominated by a dichotomous approach—differences between state vs market, market vs communities, prices vs quota and small vs large systems dominate the approach. Such a dichotomous approach needs to change; the need of the hour is context-specific thinking that takes into account all the factors in a given situation.

Large-scale storage projects are, more often than not, a bad idea, especially if they are not fully integrated into extant small systems starting from the planning stage itself. Ecological sustainability should be a guiding factor in all our considerations of water planning; water is not a resource such as coal or oil; it is vital for the existence of life itself. 

Both supply-side and demand-side solutions are needed, and the right mix has to depend upon the context. More often than, demand-side management seems to be a better option than supply-side interventions.  Recognition of community rights of usage is necessary to aid efficient and equitable water management practices.

Although efficiency, both technical and economic, has to be addressed as a major issue of public policy surrounding water, equity has to be at the center of all water-related interventions. There is a strong case to be made for dissociating water rights and land rights. The landless must receive proportionately larger shares of rights over water to offset existing inequities in terms of land distribution. 

The powers of the gram sabha over land and water resources in the Fifth Schedule areas should be enhanced, and their already existing powers should be respected. This can go some way in ensuring that the state does not violate the rights of Scheduled Tribes in these areas. Water is essential to life, and this makes water equity central to all discourses surrounding equity in this country. Perhaps one should mention here that equity and justice are not matters of policy prescriptions; they are also matters of struggle. In this context, popular struggles matter as much as policy and legal changes; thus conflicts need not always be problematized.

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Note: This article has had multiple avatars, the latest of which is as a book chapter in the volume, 'Thinking about Water in Uncertain Times: State People and Conflicts' - a collection of essays on the water sector by Sailen Routray and N Shantha Mohan - published by Aakar Books, New Delhi, in 2020.