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.
***
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.
References
Bandyopadhyay,
J. and Shama Perveen. 2004. ‘Interlinking of Rivers in India:
Assessing the Justifications’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 39(50): 5307–5316.
Batchelor, C., M.R.
Rama and M. Rao. 2003. ‘Watershed
Development: A Solution to Water Shortages in Semi-arid India or Part of the
Problem?’, Land Use and
Water Resources Research, 3: 1–10.
Bhaduri,
A. and Arvind Kejriwal. 2005. ‘Urban Water Supply: Reforming the
Reformers’, Economic and Political Weekly,
40(53): 5543–5545.
EPW Editorial. 2007. ‘Groundwater:
Half-Solutions to Groundwater Depletion’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 42 (40): 4019–4020.
Gujja,
Biksham and Hajara Shaik. 2005. ‘A Decade for Action: Water for
Life.When Will India Cover the “Uncovered”?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 40(12): 1086–1089.
Hanumantha
Rao, C.H. 2002. ‘Sustainable Use of Water for Irrigation in
Indian Agriculture’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 37 (18): 1742–1745.
Hanumantha Rao, C.H. 2000.
‘Watershed Development in India: Recent Experience and Emerging Issues’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(45):
3942–3947.
Iyer, R.R. 2003. Water: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns.
New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications.
Iyer, R.R. 2001a. ‘Water: Charting a
Course for the Future, Part I’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 36(13):
1115–1122.
Iyer, R.R.
2001b. ‘Water: Charting a Course for the Future, Part II’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(14
& 15): 1235–1245.
Jain, B.K., B.H. Farmer, H. Rush,
H.W. West, J.A. Allan, B. Dasgupta and W.H. Boon. 1977. ‘India: Undergroundwater Resources [and
Discussion]’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 278(962): 507–524.
Janakarajan,
S. and Marcus Moench. 2006. ‘Are Wells a Potential Threat
to Farmers’ Well-Being? Case of Deteriorating Groundwater Irrigation in Tamil
Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly,
41 (37): 3977–3987.
Kattelmann, Richard. 1987. ‘Uncertainty in Assessing Himalayan Water
Resources’, Mountain Research and Development, 7 (3): 279–286.
Kulkarni, Seema, Sara Ahmed,
Swarnalata Arya, K.J. Joy and Suhas Paranjape. 2007. Women, Water and Livelihoods. Pune: Women and Water Network and
Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPECOM).
Mehta, Lyla. 2000. ‘Drought
Diagnosis: Dryland Blindness of Planners’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 35(27): 2439–2445.
Mohanty, N. and Shreekant Gupta. 2002. Breaking the Gridlock in Water Reforms through Water Markets: International
Experience and Implementation Issues for India, Working
Paper Series, Julian L. Simon Centre for Policy Research. Liberty Institute.
http://www.libertyindia.org/policy_reports/water_markets_2002.pdf, accessed on 23 November 2007.
Palanisami, K. 2006. ‘Sustainable
Management of Tank Irrigation Systems in India’, Journal of Developments in Sustainable Agriculture, 1(1): 34–40.
Phansalkar,
S.J. and Shilpa Verma. 2004. ‘Water and Livelihoods: Improved Water Control
as Strategy for Enhancing Tribal Livelihoods‘, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(31): 3469–3476.
Ramachandraiah,
C. 2001. ‘Drinking Water as a Fundamental Right’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36 (8): 619–621.
Ray, Isha. 2005. ‘Get the Price
Right: Water Prices and Irrigation Efficiency’, Economic and Political Weekly, 40 (33): 3659–3668.
Sakthivadivel,
R., P.S. Gomathinayagam and Tushaar Shah. 2004. ‘Rejuvenating
Irrigation Tanks through Local Institutions’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(31): 3521–3526.
Shah, Tushaar. 2004. ‘Water and
Welfare: Critical Issues in India’s Water Future’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(12): 1211–1213.
Shah,
Tushaar and Barbara van Koppen. 2006. ‘Is India
Ripe for Integrated Water Resources Management? Fitting Water Policy to
National Development Context’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 41(31): 3413–3421.
Tejwani, K.G. 1987. ‘The
Himalaya-Ganges Problem’, Mountain Research and Development, 7(3): 323–327.
Timmons, John F. 1954. ‘Economic
Framework for Watershed Development’, Journal
of Farm Economics, 36: 1170–1183.
Turton, Cathryn. 2000. Enhancing Livelihoods through Participatory
Watershed Development in India, Working Paper 131, Overseas Development Institute.
Upadhyay, Bhawana. 2005. ‘Gendered Livelihoods and Multiple Water Use in North Gujarat’, Agriculture and Human Values, 22:
411–420.
Wallace, Tina and Anne Coles. 2005.
‘Gender, Water and Development: An Introduction’, in Anne Coles and Tina Wallace
(eds), Gender, Water and Development.
Oxford and New York: Berg.
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.
