Governance of Water: Institutional Alternatives and Political Economy

Governance of Water

ii

Governance of Water

Governance of Water Institutional Alternatives and Political Economy

Edited by

Vishwa Ballabh

Copyright © Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) and Vishwa Ballabh, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2008 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110044, India www.sagepub.in SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 9.5/12 pt Stone Serif by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Governance of water: institutional alternatives and political economy/edited by Vishwa Ballabh. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Water-supply—Government policy—India. 2. Water resources development—India. 3. Water-supply—Rates—India. 1212 4. Groundwater—Economic aspects—India. I. Ballabh,Vishwa, 1957– HD1698.I4G68

333.9100954—dc22

2007

ISBN: 978-0-7619-3607-7 (HB) The SAGE Team: Sugata Ghosh, Neha Kohli and Mathew PJ Jacket design by W&P graphics

2007046905

978-81-7829-770-5 (India-HB)

Dedicated to Dr Verghese Kurien who has undiminished faith in people’s power and their institutions

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Contents List of Tables List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgements

ix xi xiii

Section I: Governance: Concepts, Issues and Challenges 1. 2. 3. 4.

Governance of Water: Issues and Challenges Vishwa Ballabh Water Governance, Politics, Policy Ramaswamy R. Iyer Misgovernance of Droughts in India Jasveen Jairath Gender Issues in Water Governance: Review of Challenges and Emerging Strategies Seema Kulkarni, K. J. Joy and Suhas Paranjape

3 18 36

61

Section II: Pricing, Subsidies and Governance of Surface Water 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

Pricing, Subsidies and Institutional Reforms in Indian Irrigation: Some Emerging Trends K.V. Raju and Ashok Gulati Recovery of Irrigation User Cess and Governance of Canal Systems Manoj T. Thomas and Vishwa Ballabh Irrigation Water Pricing: Analytic of Competing Sources R. Parthasarathy Resource, Rules and Technology: Ethnography of Building a Water Users’ Association Esha Shah Crafting Institutions for Collective Action in Canal Irrigation: Can We Break the Deadlocks? Vishal Narain

79 100 124

137

159

viii

Governance of Water 10. Inter-state Water Disputes and the Governance Challenge Hemant Kumar Padhiari and Vishwa Ballabh

174

Section III: Groundwater Governance 11. Groundwater Governance in Eastern India Vishwa Ballabh, Kameshwar Choudhary, Sushil Pandey and Sudhakar Mishra 12. Political Economy of Groundwater Governance in Gujarat: A Micro-level Analysis Anjal Prakash 13. Governing the Groundwater Economy: Comparative Analysis of National Institutions and Policies in South Asia, China and Mexico Tushaar Shah

195

215

237

Section IV: The Way Forward 14. Multi-stakeholder Participation, Collaborative Policy Making and Water Governance: The Need for a Normative Framework K.J. Joy, Suhas Paranjape and Seema Kulkarni 15. Multi-stakeholders’ Dialogue as an Approach Towards Sustainable Use of Groundwater: Some Experiences in the Palar River Basin, South India S. Janakarajan 16. The New Institutional Economics of India’s Water Policy Tushaar Shah 17. The Water Resources Policy Process in India: Centralisation, Polarisation and New Demands on Governance Peter P. Mollinga About the Editor and Contributors Index

269

287 307

339 371 377

List of Tables 6.1 6.2

Comparative Figures of Recovery and Costs in MRBC Recovery of Irrigation Fees in Mahi Right Bank Canal

108 109

7.1 7.2

Basic Characteristics of the PIM Project Villages, Gujarat Mean Values of Land Area (in ha) by Sources of Irrigation, Thalota Percentage Distribution of Households by Communities and Sources of Irrigation, Thalota Performance of Select Tube well ‘Companies’ in Thalota, North Gujarat

127 129

8.1

Number of Landholders Using Different Sources of Water

152

10.1

Inter-state Water Conflicts in India

176

11.1 11.2 11.3

197 198 200

11.7 11.8

Groundwater Development in Selected Villages (Village-wise) Installation of Bore Wells and Pump Sets in Different Periods Distribution of Bore Wells and Pump Sets by Caste and by Size of Landholding Sources of Investment for Bore Wells and Pump Sets in Selected Villages Refinance for Minor Irrigation by NABARD to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal (1987–2001) Role of Commission Agents in UP, Bihar and West Bengal—A Comparative View Pure Buyers of Groundwater by Size of Landholding Categories Pure Buyers of Groundwater by Caste

12.1 12.2

Eco-regions of Gujarat Irrigation Potential Created and Utilised as per June 2003

7.3 7.4

11.4 11.5 11.6

129 131

203 205 206 210 211 217 219

x

Governance of Water 12.3 12.4 12.5

Area Under Principle Crops (in million ha) Area Irrigated by Source (in km2) Area Irrigated by Source (in ’00 hectares)

223 223 225

13.1

Variety of Institutional Arrangements for Groundwater Irrigation in Nine Villages of Henan and Hebei Provinces Comparing Features of Village Groundwater Economies in South Asia and North China Comparing Water Institutions and Policies in South Asia and China—Summary Groundwater Governance: Comparative Analysis of Institutions and Policies in South Asia, China and Mexico Structure of National Groundwater Economies

241

13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 16.1 17.1

Characteristics of Swayambhoo Water Institutions Rational Choice and Comparative Sociological Approaches to the Analysis of Policy Processes

244 252 261 262 327 360

List of Figures 1.1

Framework for Understanding Water Governance

5.1

Subsidies on Major, Medium and Minor Irrigation (1980–81 to 1999–2000) Regional Shares in Irrigation Subsidies—TE 1982–83 Regional Shares in Irrigation Subsidies—TE 1999–2000 Estimates of Subsidies on Major, Medium and Minor Irrigation: A Comparison The Vicious Circle in Indian Irrigation

5.2(a) 5.2(b) 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2

7

82 83 83 84 88

Circuits of Market Interactions for a Public Organisation Organisational Structure of the Mahi Right Bank Canal Irrigation System

102

A Schematic Map of the Atchakat and Approximate Location An Open Channel Taking Off from the Main Canal Water from a Bavi Located Outside the Atchakat being Brought to Atchakat Land

141 144

10.1

Inter-state Water Conflict and Resolution Framework

178

13.1

Structure of Chinese Water Administration and its Funding

248

15.1

Flow Chart Water Transportation—Water Sale—from Rural to Urban Social Analysis of Implications of Water Crises Degrees of Conflicts and Sustainable Development

296 297

8.1 8.2 8.3

15.2 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4

Relation between Formalisation of Water Provision and Economic Growth Transformation of Informal Water Economies in Response to Overall Economic Growth Criticality of Social Analysis Transaction Costs and Productivity Pay-offs of Institutional Interventions

108

152

308 311 312 314

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Governance of Water

Preface and Acknowledgements The challenge of water management is not new to India. Given its highly seasonal rainfall and river flows, investment in water storage, control and distribution have been part and parcel of the strategy to meet the challenges of the water crisis since time immemorial. Investments in water storage and control, however, increased several fold since the late nineteenth century. Yet, despite these investments, India’s water situation is precarious and the rural and urban water problems have assumed unprecedented proportions, not only threatening food security but also India’s ability to meet the drinking water needs of its people. Today, most of our dams store much less than their planned capacity, they irrigate less than half their planned cultural command areas and more than 60 per cent of irrigation needs and 80 per cent of drinking water are met through groundwater sources. But groundwater tables are plummeting and aquifers are drying up. It thus appears that our past strategy has completely failed to ameliorate the looming water crisis. The consequences of such water stresses are unimaginable. This book is an outcome of these concerns and examines the whole gamut of issues related to the ‘governance of water’ from varied perspectives. It also hopes to set an agenda for future debate among policy makers, practitioners and academics. This book was planned as a part of Silver Jubilee celebrations of Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) in 2004. For celebrating its Silver Jubilee, IRMA organised a Symposium on ‘Governance in Development—Issues, Challenges and Strategies’, held from 14–19 December 2004 to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of the Institute. The Symposium comprised 16 workshops; each workshop focused on different themes, all of which were related to thematic and sectoral issues of governance of rural development processes. One of the sub-themes was on ‘Governance of Water: Issues and Challenges’, which ultimately culminated into this book. This book has emerged out of a collaborative process among more than 30–35 researchers and policy makers debating and discussing issues of water governance, institutions and political economy over a period of almost an year. The book is divided into four sections. The first section deals with water governance at paradigmatic levels. The second section covers governance issues, institutions and political economy related to surface water, including inter-state water disputes and their resolution. Section three covers the governance of groundwater and the final section sets the agenda for future discourse and the way forward for meeting the challenges of water governance. What emerges from the arguments made in the various chapters in the book is that the challenges facing water governance cannot be addressed in the current policy framework,

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and that only effective governance and management of water, which require a paradigm shift, can help face such challenges. This book represents the efforts of individual researchers who have come together with their ideas and insights as well as their collective consensus, at the same time acknowledging the contradictions of this debate. I take this opportunity to thank all the workshop participants for their valuable comments and observations made during the course of the presentation and discussion of the various papers. My special gratitude to the session chairpersons, discussants and rappoteurs without whose cooperation it would have been difficult to conduct the workshop smoothly and bring out this book. I am also grateful to the contributors of the various chapters to this volume for their cooperation in bringing out this book. The views expressed and inferences drawn are those of the respective authors of the various chapters and do not represent those of the funding agency or their employing institutions. Thanks are also due to the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), Sir Dorabji Tata Trust (SDTT) and Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT) for providing generous grants for research, conducting the symposium and publication. The IWMI-Tata Project, Anand, of the International Water Management Institute provided partial funding for conducting the interim workshop; their support is gratefully acknowledged. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the support provided by Kurt Vogele, Amitabh Behar, Teresa Khanna, Tushaar Shah, Sarosh N. Batliwala, Arun Pandhi, H.D. Malesra and Mukund Gorakshakar. The support received from Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), Ahmednagar for conducting interim workshop and logistics is duly acknowledged. The Institute of Rural Management, Anand and School of Business & Human Resources, XLRI, Jamshedpur have allowed me time and freedom to edit the book. I have received the utmost support from the then IRMA Chairperson Dr. V. Kurien for conducting the Symposium. My colleagues and students at IRMA contributed enormously to this, their contributions are gratefully acknowledged. My thanks are also due to Neha Kohli and Sugata Ghosh at SAGE for providing all necessary support during the process of publication of this book. I would like to thank Padmini Unikrishanan of IRMA who handled all the administrative chores relating to the workshop and symposium and word-processed the earlier versions of this book meticulously and ungrudgingly. Thanks are also due to Dibiya Ekka for helping me in editing the current version of the manuscript. Last, but not the least, I would like to thank my family members and friends who have always been a source of inspiration, in particular my wife Geeta ‘Kumud’, who stood beside me during the most difficult times.

November 2007

Vishwa Ballabh

Section I Governance: Concepts, Issues and Challenges

2

Vishwa Ballabh

1 Governance of Water: Issues and Challenges Vishwa Ballabh

B ACKGROUND Water-related issues impinge on human wellbeing in a variety of ways. Water sustains people’s livelihood support system and features in food production, and is thus important for food security; it combines natural ecosystem, provides sink and dissolves waste material. In fact, preservation of water sources in their pristine and unpolluted state is essential for the development of a healthy society. No doubt then, Indian planners and policy makers consider the development of water resources as core to the overall economic development, and massive investments, both public and private, have gone in the development of water resources. These investments created a congenial environment for agricultural growth, leading to increase in production and productivity and a favourable food balance. Yet, presently, several problems are encountered in the way water resources are used and managed, some of which are discussed below. First, the sustainability of irrigated agriculture and massive investment in groundwater and surface water development have, however, been questioned on several grounds including the competition for water for domestic and industrial purposes. In fact, doubts have been raised about India’s capacity for sustained growth in agriculture to feed its population (Rosegrant et al. 1999). Second, the gap between the demand and supply of water is increasing rapidly. In 1951, the per capita availability of fresh water in India was 3,450 m3 per year. In 1999, it stood at approximately 1,250 m3 per capita per year—and will reduce to 760 m3 by the year 2050 (Government of India 1999). This, coupled with uneven distribution of water in major water basins, further accentuates the problem. The quality of both surface and groundwater is declining rapidly. Agriculture too has a dual impact on water quality: (i) excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides through leaching directly affects water quality; and (ii) over-extraction

4

Vishwa Ballabh

of groundwater causes deterioration of water quality. Of the 3,841 administrative blocks in India, 620 (16 per cent) exploit groundwater to its capacity, or even over-exploit it (World Resource Institute 1994). Third, that the development of irrigation has made major contributions to the growth and sustenance of Indian agriculture in the last five decades, is beyond question. But the irrigation sector is besieged with problems. Apart from inordinate delays in the completion of large and medium surface irrigation projects, the under-utilisation of potential created, unsatisfactory quality of irrigation, low-cost recovery and adverse ecological and social consequences of the present system of irrigation practices have become issues of public debate (Vaidyanathan 1999). With increasing competition and competing claims on water, the irrigation water is being allocated to other users and sectors. Urban domestic, power sector and industry receive priority over all other uses, followed by irrigation and drinking water in that order (Ballabh and Singh 2004)1. Allocation of water within the command area of an irrigation scheme too is determined more by an ad hoc manner than by design. In the absence of regular and timely supply of water, the farmers also respond and make efforts to gain and control water as much as they can and thus try to minimise risk arising from uncertainties of delivery inadequacies and timeliness of water supply (Ballabh et al. 1992). Thus, the crisis of governance and management of water resources in India are observed in all aspects of development and capture, allocation and conservation, leading to inefficiency, inequity and unsustainability of water resource management—which in turn leads to competition and conflicts among users and user sectors.

C OMPETITION

AND

C ONFLICTS

The rapid increase in the use of water in agriculture, industries and urban townships is causing scarcity of water downstream. In the absence of well-defined property rights in river stream flow, surface water sources are de facto open access resources and, therefore, being over-exploited; the riparian doctrine does not promote socially optimum use of water (Ballabh and Singh 2004). When a river basin cuts across state boundaries, the upstream state over-appropriates water resources leading to inter-state disputes. There are several examples of inter-state disputes over water, among which the Cauvery water dispute is the most well-known. The Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal award created dissatisfaction in both the claimant states leading to conflict and riots. The growing scarcity of water and political economy of states often lead to rejection of such tribunal awards. Often, the tribunal award (allocation) takes a narrow view of resource management and suggests enforcement of rigid deadlines and technical designs. It also does not take into account the regeneration of the ecosystem and groundwater recharge and use, which often becomes counterproductive. For these reasons, tribunal awards are generally not acceptable to the disputing states. Pollution also creates a shortage of drinking water in many areas. This often becomes so bad that people organise processions and picket government offices to protest against the erring

Governance of Water

5

industrial units (Moench 1999). Furthermore, increasing water scarcity has led to diversion of water to cities and municipalities from the reservoirs constructed for irrigation purposes. For example, between 1976–77 and 1996–97, water allocation from a multipurpose reservoir in Gujarat to the cities varied from a minimum of 7 per cent to 100 per cent of the water stored in the reservoir (Ballabh and Singh 2004). As the water scarcity problem becomes more severe, the local people start agitating, and protests and demonstrations become a common feature. The most notable example is of the Coimbatore and Erode districts in Tamil Nadu, where the district administration had to mediate between water sellers (who were selling water to industrial units and urban centres through tankers) and farmers (Janakarajan 1999). Farmers in many arid and semi-arid areas believe that groundwater transportation from rural areas to the urban areas and industrial units is the major cause for groundwater depletion. The competition for scarce water also leads to wide-scale pilferage. It is quite common that farmers capture canal water and transport it to non-canal command areas, often at the cost of command area farmers. These farmers not only irrigate their own land, but also sell it to other farmers at exorbitant prices. Similarly, the farmers also divert drinking water, transported through long distance pipelines, for irrigation purposes. The irrigation and water supply departments often do not have any control beyond the capture and release of water (Ballabh et al. 1999; Janakarajan 1997). The development of water markets has a positive impact and water is made available to even those who do not have the capacity to invest in deep tube wells. However, it also has adverse consequences. The discourses on development of water markets in the Indian context have largely ignored the impact of water markets on the sustainability of the resource base. Further, competitive deepening makes the access to groundwater increasingly skewed in favour of large resource-rich farmers, leaving the small farmers at an increasing disadvantage when it comes to sharing the benefits of well irrigation (Vaidyanathan 1999; Shah 1993; Prakash and Ballabh 2005). The competitive deepening of wells for irrigation also adversely affects both quantity and quality of drinking water available in rural areas. As a result, the number of ‘no sources’ villages is steadily increasing over time (Agrawal and Narain 1997). Another dimension of the water markets which is often ignored in the Indian context is that, in many areas, they are not fully developed and unequal trading relationships prevail between sellers and buyers. This results in the exploitation of buyers through price and non-price mechanisms (Shah and Ballabh 1995; Janakarajan 1997; Prakash and Ballabh 2005). The existing governance for water and political economy of the state supports urban rich domestic users, industrial units and rich landowners. The losers are small and marginal farmers, the urban poor and people living in remote rural areas who are unable to meet even their basic need of drinking water (Ballabh 2002, 2003b). Increasing pollution and lack of proper sewage and effluent treatment further accentuate the problem of water scarcity. According to an estimate, the total environmental cost of damage to India’s natural resources is in order of US$ 9.7 billion annually and a substantial portion of it could be attributed to the damage of natural water bodies (World Bank 1995). Thus, governance in the water sector is not able to achieve either preservation or conservation of water resources, nor is there equity and

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Vishwa Ballabh

social justice in the allocation of water to competing users and claimants. Some of the ills of governance in the water sector were sought to be addressed through people’s involvement and transfer of the management of water services to people’s institutions. These reforms are quite slow and the agencies responsible for bringing about the changes have, in fact, hardly any interest in altering the situation (Ballabh 2002). The responses of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations have been critical in identifying alternative, technologically feasible and institutionally workable solutions. But this has not made an impact at a scale to mitigate the crisis in the water sector due to lack of financial and human resources.

G OVERNANCE

OF

W ATER

The concept of governance (or good governance) varies widely. The World Bank defines governance as ‘the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development’ (World Bank 1992). This has been equated with ‘sound development management’ and emphasises more on economic policies and the management of development projects. On the other hand, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines governance as the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences (UNDP 1997). Thus, there are several alternative conceptualisations of governance which recognise the plurality of the actors involved. Governance, in this broader sense, includes the legitimate authority exercised in the application of government power and in the management of public affairs. There is greater emphasis on participation, decentralisation, accountability, responsiveness and even broader concerns, such as those of social equity and justice. Several alternative models are emerging in India to enlist greater participation of people in the management of public affairs and development processes (Jayal 2001), both at broader policy level as well as in different sectors of the economy. Some examples of water governance models are discussed herein. The first model deals with the imperative to roll back the state, mandated by the agenda of economic reforms and globalisation (i.e., the turnover of public tube wells). The second model involves the contestation of state projects, practices and discourses contained in the social movements arguing for a radical participatory democratic politics (e.g., the Narmada Bachao Andolan). The third model of water governance is expressed in the phenomenon of NGOs as it seeks to either take on developmental functions in ways that are imitative of state initiatives in this field, or else takes on the work of implementing state policies and programmes as a franchisee or public service contractor (i.e., watershed development programmes). The fourth model of water governance brings together the state and community, sometimes in partnership, though with varying degrees of emphasis on one or the other (i.e., participatory irrigation management). Finally, the fifth model of water governance

Governance of Water

7

is that of decentralising the state. The initiative for this has been state-driven, taking the form of a constitutional amendment, e.g., the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and recent changes brought through constitutional amendment of the Panchayati Raj Act (73rd Amendment, 1992), making them responsible for the local management of water-related services and water bodies. These reforms are applied in various degree and forms to the water sector (see Figure 1.1). Thus, the governance agenda recognises that pluralism of actors in the societal domain and the state is loosing its dominant position in the development spheres. It is particularly recognised that Figure 1.1: Framework for Understanding Water Governance Issues in Water Sector • • • • • • •

Governance: Issues and Strategies

Institutions • Government

•

• • •

Scarcity Food and Livelihood Security Equity Gender Empowerment Competition and Conflicts Economic and Financial Viabilities

• • • • • •

and Public Organisation Water Users Association and CBOs PRIs NGOs Market

Legal and policy Structure and design Decentralisation Participation Accountability Transparency

Environmental Factors • Socio-cultural • Political • Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation

Outcome • • • • •

Efficiency Equity Sustainability Resolution of Conflict Economic and Financial Viability

Source: Adapted from the Silver Jubilee Symposium proposal Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), 2004.

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Vishwa Ballabh

development is not a concern of the states alone, and that civil society and private sectors can all play a significant role in catalysing the process of development. Some of the issues confronted in water governance are mentioned in the following paragraphs. First, the understanding of governance of water should begin with defining the crisis and dilemma of water resources development (Iyer 2003). This dilemma basically advocates focus on limited supply of water and our ability to learn to live with it. If this is recognised, the focus of governance in the water sector needs to be shifted from water resources development (WRD) to water resources management. This also means that the focus needs to shift from big WRD to primary and local water harvesting structures and watershed development programmes. Once this paradigm is recognised, it would entail several changes in the design of governance of the water sector. This has become particularly important because decentralised management of the water sector is considered to be a better approach. On the other hand, linking rivers and creating basin level organisations for integrated water resources management (IWRM) are suggested to resolve issues confronting the water sector. The decentralised management of the water sector and integrated approaches to WRD need not necessarily conflict with each other; however, they do mean systems of governance different from what are in practice. Second, water comes in many forms that are typically governed by different legal, economic and cultural frameworks. However, some argue that water needs to be treated as an economic good, which suggests intent to re-conceptualise the existing water governance framework using an economic interpretation of the common denominator and giving primacy to the market. If we consider water to be an economic good, it simply means that water now has recognised value or, more specifically, that it has been commodified (i.e., turned into something that can be bought and sold in the market). The greatest criticisms, of the ‘water as an economic good’ paradigm, have been levelled against the second interpretation which fosters a trend toward privatisation of water, for profit control over water. Critics maintain that water is different from commodities and should be exempt from such a definition. Proponents of markets, however, argue that without assigning water the true price of its use, it is being wasted and its use will be ultimately unsustainable to support human life and ecological health. Trying to differentiate between water as a public or private economic good may be theoretically helpful by clarifying that water—not unlike land and other natural resources—is composed of a ‘bundle of rights’ allowing some aspects of water to fall under private control and/or to be consumed, and withholding others in ‘the public domain’. The latter status undoubtedly pertains to the recognition of water as a necessity and to a host of direct and symbolic common values associated with water. While market pricing is a tried and true way of regulating the use of a scarce good, it is blind to anything that cannot enter the marketplace. So, while in theory one can specify all direct and symbolic values in economic terms, not all of them can be realistically reflected in the prices of economic commodities. The risk is that the economic value of water could come to mean simply its partial value as a commodity. The loss of access to all the rights in the bundle that are not reflected in the commodity market is a legitimate cause for concern. So if we seek to reconceptualise water as an economic good, how do we use pricing to regulate private consumption without endangering other private and public rights in the bundle?

Governance of Water

9

Between water as an economic and a common public good, there is a third argument. According to this view, water does not display any innate qualities either private or public. In the everyday realities within which people live and sustain their livelihood, there is a fluid continuum between what is private and public about water. For example, at times there is access to it as a common pool resource; at other times, people pay for water or use it as a means to barter (Mehta 2003). Thus, the ‘publicness’ and ‘privateness’ of water is the result of social and political interventions and realities. Access to water reflects power asymmetries, socio-economic inequalities and other distributional factors such as land ownership. Third, in the ongoing debate about water as a right, a need and/or a commodity, the distinction between the individual’s need for water and water as an economic good is helpful. There will be little disagreement that, from the perspective of individual human beings, adequate access to safe water must be treated as a right similar to other human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Water is the essence of all life and cannot be replaced with anything else to fulfill its role. While the declaration of water as a human right may not make available more water, it could institutionalise access to water, particularly for the poor. If the right is justifiable and constitutional, there is scope for it being a powerful tool for mobilisation. The declaration of water as a human right can also be used to take governments, companies and other agencies to task if people’s rights to water are denied due to disconnection and commodification processes. However, rights come with responsibilities; and there is a need for massive resources, institutional forces and political processes to operationalise such a right. Fourth, water as an economic good also relates to globalisation processes which lead to an enhanced focus on water as a ‘global’ problem or issue with a whole new host of global players coming up with ‘solutions’ to solve the problems of poor water access for the world’s poor. However, apart from being multifaceted, water is largely local or regional in scope. Thus, the notion of water as a global public good is good in theory (especially if we want to harness international cooperation around water), but in reality it does not match with the biophysical properties of water and its various externalities. But the General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS) is set to become the first enforceable international agreement covering the supply of freshwater. As implied, the provisions of the GATS cover investment (‘commercial presence’) as well as trade in water. How and in what ways the GATS provision will affect Indian water resources is neither understood nor examined. Since it aims to remove barriers to trade in the form of domestic regulation, its provisions will affect the ability of many governments to deliver their public policy objectives with regard to affordable water. How water is viewed in a particular context as an economic, social and common good has ramification on ‘governance’. For example, viewing water only as an economic good means developing and enforcing private property rights would be an essential ingredient of governance requirements. These debates have led such policy prescriptions as the development of secured property right is sine qua non for efficient and sustainable management of water resources. The proponents of the property right school have further argued that assigning this right would empower users, less privileged women and the security of long-term investment in water savings; cause users to consider opportunity

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Vishwa Ballabh

cost of water and gain additional income from the sale of assigned water right and internalise externalities. Opponents, on the other hand, argue that enforcement of meaningful property right in the context of the Indian situation is difficult and has a large transaction cost which outweighs the benefits. This is true for both surface as well as groundwater. Fifth, the water sector in India is also going through various reform processes. Apart from people’s involvement through Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) in Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM), the private and public participation is being advocated in water related services. These experimentations are at various stages of their development and wide varieties of factors are responsible for promoting people’s involvement in water management. However, a critical question which needs to be answered is: to what extent does the formation of the WUA or involving private and public partnership lead to the creation of mutual accountability between users and traditional water bureaucracy, thus making water bureaucracy more accountable? A related issue, which has brought forth current literature on irrigation and water sector reform is that the water bureaucracy does not have any incentives to decentralise management and involve users (Ostrom 1995). The determinants of the success of these reforms thus revolve around changes within the water bureaucracy and the incentive structure facing the concerned officials. Available evidences suggest that the water bureaucracy remains apathetic towards the WUAs. Sixth, the response of NGOs and social activities has been critical in identifying alternative technologically feasible and institutionally workable solutions. NGOs are few in number and their scale of operations is limited, relative to the magnitude of the problem. Generally, they advocate water harvesting through locally controlled and administered institutions for sustainable solutions to rural drinking water, and the participation and control of farmers in the management of irrigation systems. Lack of commitment and general apathy towards such an approach by the water bureaucracy, however, limits the scope of wider adoptability (Ballabh 2003a). Seventh, the National Water Policy (NWP), adopted by the Government of India in April 2002 and the Supreme Court directives to link major Indian rivers by 2016 would have farreaching implications on the governance of water. This Policy emphasises the participatory approach and argues for legal and institutional changes, necessary to implement decentralised governance of the water sector. As a result, several scholars are arguing for multi-stakeholders’ platform (MSP) and the creation of institutions which can facilitate the above process. The MSP and integrated water resource management (IWRM) at various levels are newfound approaches to resolve some of the issues confronting the water sector. Both MSP and IWRM experimentations are in their nascent stages. If the experience of participatory irrigation is any indication, the new found approaches are unlikely to succeed given the fact that the Indian water bureaucracy remains firmly in control of the decision making process as well as resources. The water service departments remain unaccountable to water users and their institutions, and these departments determine the degree and nature of people’s participation. The functioning and decision making processes within the department continue to remain undemocratic and non-transparent (Ballabh 2003b).

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C HALLENGES OF W ATER G OVERNANCE : S UMMARY OF C ONTENT The growing scarcity and ineffective institutional arrangements for capture, allocation and distribution compounds the water crisis. These crises are unlikely to be resolved by the supplyside management approach and efforts to increase the water supply. When requirement exceeds supply, the excess supply is diverted to already well-off people. As stated in the preceding section, in the struggle for capture and control over scarce water, those left out are among the poorest of our society—the poor and marginal farmers and domestic water users, both in rural and urban areas. Equitable water distribution of scarce water among multiple users poses a major challenge. Mismanagement of water in the deficient areas is also quite common. The natural scarcity of water is thus aggravated due to its usage by a few (Jairath 2003). Analysing these claims and counter-claims within the broad ambit of political contestation and defining politics as the complex and aggregate of relationships of men in society, especially those relationships involving power and authority, several discernable features are visible on the waterfront. First, contestation over water is not at one level but is being articulated and played at different levels; second, at each level of these contestations there are dominant groups with each one interested in maintaining the status quo; and, third, there seems to be a coalition of dominant groups from one level to another (Ballabh 2003b). Thus, the Indian water sector is facing a major crisis of governance in which the dominant coalition is the gainer and the state political economy reinforces the above process. As mentioned earlier, the notions of governance that have emerged in recent years include not merely institutions of national government but also those of local and global governance. These new definitions are more broad-based and consider governance as a process which encompasses state–society interactions and partnership. The definition of governance thus includes a range of organisations—public and private as well as co-operatives, and the complex relationship(s) between and among them. Institutions of local government (such as panchayats); civil society organisations (ranging from social movements to NGOs and from co-operative to civic associations); and private corporations as well as other market institutions are all relevant actors in the context of the new governance paradigm. Democracy and civil liberties form an integral part of good governance. In the current discourse of the politics of policy making in Indian water resources, the dominant paradigm is highly technocratic in nature and the emphasis is on infrastructure building and a prescriptive style of policy making and management. The emphasis on big projects and the plan to connect river systems are the manifestations of this dominant thinking, including prescription about how and in what manner peoples’ participation needs to be solicited in water management. The hype and debate around the river linking project initiated by the Government of India (GOI) misses the point that this is a rehash of the old strategy of addressing social problems through engineering solutions. The need for stakeholders’ participation in policy formulation is recognised and enlisted, but their representation is highly questionable.

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The capability and credibility of the tribunals to resolve water-related disputes among states is apparent apart from delay in the resolution of disputes, often even the implementation of award is not enforced. As water scarcity increases such disputes are also likely to increase among the regions, users and different claimants of water resources. Overall, this hydro-politics is constructed around the scarcity of water and management and devolution of power to the people’s institutions is often ignored. The macro hydropolitics, the capture and the creation become part of a grand strategy to mitigate water scarcity. The state not only designs mega projects but also promotes those policies and programmes which help the dominant class of users to capture and control scarce water. The inadequacy of the current governance structure in the Indian water sector should be seen from these perspectives, and the role of public, private and civil society organisations in mitigating water crisis in India needs to be redefined keeping in mind their strengths and weaknesses. Realising that the new paradigm of governance is the locus of many emerging challenges of rural development, the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) chose ‘Governance in Development’ as the main topic for its Silver Jubilee Symposium. Specifically, the major objectives of the symposium were: • To identify issues and challenges confronting governance in development across different dimensions—such as decision making, participation, decentralisation and accountability. • To identify the role of state, market and civil society organisations in bringing out good governance in development process. • To create new knowledge and strategies for governance in development processes that expand human capabilities and opportunities. Of the 16 themes selected for the symposium, one of the themes was specifically focused on understanding the challenges in the governance of water resources. This book is an outcome of this particular effort to identify issues, challenges and strategies in the governance of water. It is also an outcome of a year-long process of discussion and debate among 30–35 water professionals ranging from practitioners and academicians to policy makers. While some of them had been observing developments in the Indian water sector for over five decades, others had just started their career as young water professionals in the last four to five years. Thus, a good mix of the young and the old was debating on issues of governance. An interim workshop was also organised in Pune, in collaboration with the Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), a leading NGO working on the conservation and management of water resources. The chapters in this book have been organised into four broad sections. Section I, which is introductory, comprises four chapters, including this chapter; ‘Water Governance, Politics, Policy’ by Ramaswamy R. Iyer; ‘Misgovernance of Droughts in India’ by Jasveen Jairath; and ‘Gender Issues in Water Governance: Review of Challenges and Emerging Strategies’ by Seema Kulkarni, K.J. Joy and Suhas Paranjape. Together, these chapters cover various threads of water governance at theoretical, empirical and paradigmatic levels. The authors use both descriptive and prescriptive approaches of governance and present very varied points of view,

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which together create a holistic learning about the concepts, issues and challenges involved in the governance of water. At the prescriptive level, they present normative content which needs to be incorporated to mitigate the water crisis. Section II, which deals with the governance of surface water, particularly the canal irrigation system including the governance of inter-state water basins, consists of six chapters. The chapter ‘Pricing, Subsidies and Institutional Reforms in Indian Irrigation: Some Emerging Trends’, by K.V. Raju and Ashok Gulati identifies the current pitfalls and maladies of surface irrigation system and broadly identifies the issues related to pricing, subsidies and institutional reforms to overcome the current problem. Manoj Thomas and Vishwa Ballabh’s chapter titled ‘Recovery of Irrigation User Cess and Governances of Canal Systems’ analyses the incentive structure for irrigation and revenue officials for delivery recording and collection of water charges using management perspective and theories. ‘Irrigation Water Pricing: Analysis of Competing Sources’ by R. Parthasarathy examines why the Water Users’ Association under the participatory irrigation management is not willing to raise irrigation charges. The next two chapters in Section II that discuss limitations and constraints of participatory irrigation management are: ‘Resources, Rules and Technology: Ethnography of Building Water Users’ Association’ by Esha Shah; and ‘Crafting Institutions for Collective Action in Canal Irrigation: Can We Break the Deadlocks?’ by Vishal Narain. These chapters also identify the environmental and institutional changes that need to be incorporated in irrigation reforms for broader participation of users in irrigation management. Finally, the chapter by Hemant Kumar Padhiari and Vishwa Ballabh, ‘Inter-state Water Dispute and the Governance Challenge’, covers the limitations and challenges of resolving inter-state water dispute and conflicts. It argues that under the current governance arrangements, even if the disputing states arrive at a final agreement, there is no guarantee that the conflict will not resurface again. Section III deals with the governance of groundwater and includes three chapters. The chapter by Vishwa Ballabh, Kameshwar Choudhary, Sushil Pandey and Sudhakar Mishra deals with groundwater development in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal and highlights the role of public policies and panchayati raj institutions, including water markets, in access and control of groundwater resources in water abundant regions. The chapter by Anjal Prakash, ‘Political Economy of Groundwater Governance in Gujarat: A Micro-level Analysis’, argues that groundwater governance from the ecological perspective would mean understanding the environmental deterioration that is located in land use, local ecology and patterns of development. The perception of scarcity is rooted in historically evolving politico-economic relations. It is more so in societies encompassed by large socio-economic inequalities in access and control over resources. Water scarcity, therefore, does not have a universal effect on all social groups. An ecological framework means devising strategies to protect the interest of historically marginalised groups in the wake of extreme scarcity situations. Finally, the chapter by Tushaar Shah, ‘Governing the Groundwater Economy: Comparative Analysis of National Institutions and Policies in South Asia, China and Mexico’, presents an overview of groundwater economy, governance and challenges in South Asia. It argues that the current approach of leapfrogging and importing ideas from different economies is unlikely to succeed in the South

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Asian context. The nature and strategy of governing groundwater depends on a variety of factors, including the extent of formal/informal nature of the groundwater economy. How countries respond to the challenge of sustainable management of their groundwater economies depends on a constellation of factors that defines the peculiar context of each country. This constellation of factors differs vastly across regions and countries and these differences have a decisive impact on whether an approach that has worked in one country will work in another with a different context. Section IV, the final part of this book, deals with the ways forward and includes four chapters. The chapter ‘Multi-stakeholder Participation, Collaborative Policy Making and Water Governance: The Need for a Normative Framework’ by K.J. Joy, Suhas Paranjape and Seema Kulkarni examines the meaning, scope and challenges of incorporating deliberative democracy in water governance through multi-stakeholder participation. The chapter by S. Janakarajan, ‘Multi-stakeholders’ Dialogue as an Approach Towards Sustainable Use of Groundwater: Some Experiences in the Palar River Basin, South India’, demonstrates how multi-stakeholder participation could be used to bring disputing groups on a common platform and help resolve some of the disputes related to water governance. The chapter by Tushaar Shah, ‘The New Institutional Economics of India’s Water Policy’, makes an attempt to analyse why reform in the water sector is not effective and suggests that the institutional analyses of this sector currently focuses on law, policy and administration, which is part of institutional environment. However, the effectiveness of the water sector reforms can only be impacted through institutional arrangements which represent ‘rule in use’. While several officially sponsored interventions in water sector reform have failed, we have not learned from large scale spontaneous institutional changes that have not only enhanced welfare and productivity but have also reduced the transaction cost of institutional transformation, argues Shah. The final chapter ‘The Water Resources Policy Process in India: Centralisation, Polarisation and New Demands on Governance’, by Peter P. Mollinga argues that, in an era of institutional transformation in the water sector, an analysis of the actual dynamics of the policy process is required. It is also argued that analysis of the policy as a process and the politics of policy perspective are required before a meaningful institutional transformation can be suggested from various perspectives—including the political economy of resilience of the Indian hydro-bureaucracy. The main characteristic of Indian hydro-bureaucracy is that it continues to be a centralised and hierarchical organisation, rooted in the post-Independence planned development approach. Its administrative structure, dominated by civil engineers and water resources bureaucracy, has reproduced itself in new forms and shapes under competitive populism policies, but is now facing severe dilemmas and problems in the age of liberalisation. Another characteristic of the Indian water resource policy process is the high degree of polarisation in the debate and the interaction between civil society and the state. Thus, the chapters in this book discuss water governance through three perspectives of governance: legal, public administration and institutional economics, with larger political economy concerns. It is stated that governance in water should be differentiated from the

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general governance of polity and economy. It is also suggested that water governance cannot be discussed in isolation from the state of affairs in the country marked by institutional inefficiency, corruption and non-performance. Different models and approaches of governance are discussed in various chapters for both groundwater and surface water. In particular, participatory irrigation management is discussed at length. Despite its usefulness, it has not been scaled up to make a significant impact on water resource management. This is further complicated by the resilience and inertia within the water bureaucracy. The possible link between the larger structure of economy and the transaction cost in water as well as relations with the democratic polity as it actually functions needs to be understood more clearly. Both action research and socio-political research related to transformation of water governance need to be analysed more in depth to make water governance more transparent, participatory and accountable to the larger society. The dichotomous distinction between the private and the public in water governance is argued to be both wrong and misleading. Democratic governance is yet to be established in water development and management. More active civil society involvement and decentralisation are identified as ways to improve governance. It is pointed out that these cannot substitute the role of the state, particularly in protecting the rights of the disadvantaged sections of society. It is also identified that civil society needs to play a more active role when it comes to improving information available in the public domain. A major challenge is to meet the growing demand for water in various sectors such as agriculture, industry and drinking water and to maintain sustainability of the resource base. There exists virtual competition between these sectors, which results in conflict. The interstate conflicts over water are also increasing, and there have been concerted efforts to express public solidarity. Judicial activism through public interest litigations has highlighted these issues. The need for social science research to focus more on the transformation process of the Indian state and to draw ideas from streams like environmental sociology and the politics of policy making should be explored further. It is in this context that the role of multi-stakeholder participation and democratisation of governance has been further advocated. The contributors to this book have emphatically argued that the water sector is facing challenges which cannot be addressed in the current policy and political framework. Reform is not only to include the re-orientation of policy priorities and approaches, but also the restructuring of institutional frameworks away from the state–village dichotomy (argued to be a central feature of the present predicament). There is a requirement for new ‘intermediate’ institutions that allow a negotiated approach to water resources governance. Multi-stakeholder participation and integrated water resources management have the potential to create new vistas and opportunities. In order to conserve precious water resources, there is a need to move away from the supply-driven to a demand-driven service design along with effective ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ systems which integrate water resource management at all levels—from community to state, to the national level.

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Note 1. According to the National Water Policy of 1987 and 2002, meeting the needs of drinking and domestic water requirements is the first priority in water allocation, followed by irrigation and industry—in that order. However, these are only normative statements of state policies. The actual allocation differs radically from these stated policies. For details, see Ballabh and Singh (2004).

References Agrawal, A. and S. Narain (eds) (1997). Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting System. New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment. Ballabh, V. (2002). ‘Emerging Water Crisis and Political Economy of Irrigation Reforms in India’, paper presented at a Workshop on ‘Asian Irrigation in Transition Responding to the Challenges Ahead’, 22–23 April, held at The Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand. ——— (2003a). ‘India’s Water Crisis and Institutional Challenges: An Overview’, in S. Pal, Mruthyunjaya, P.K. Joshi and R. Saxena (eds), Institutional Challenge in Indian Agriculture. New Delhi: National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research. ——— (2003b). ‘Politics of Water Management and Sustainable Water Use’, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 58(3): 467–76. Ballabh, V., V. Muralidharan, O.T. Gulati and T. Shah (1992). ‘Operating System of the Mahi Right Bank Canal—An Analytical Study’, Working Paper No. 35, Anand: Institute of Rural Management. Ballabh, V., R. Prabhakar, M.D. Kumar, V. Vani, A. Mudgerikar and V. Joshi (1999). Western Regional Consultation on Fresh Water Issues, Workshop, Report submitted to UNICEF. Anand: Institute of Rural Management. Ballabh, V. and K. Singh (2004). ‘Competing Demands for Water in the Sabarmati Basin: Present and Potential Conflicts’, in A. Vaidyanathan and H.M. Oudshoom (eds), Managing Water Scarcity: Experiences and Prospects. New Delhi: Manohar Publications. Government of India (1999). Water Resources Development Plan of India Policy & Issue. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. Institute of Rural Management (2004). Governance in Development: Issues, Challenges and Strategies. Gandhinagar, Anand: Institute of Rural Management. Iyer, R.R. (2003). ‘The Dilemmas of Water Resource Development’, in Kanchan Chopra, C.H. Hanumantha Rao and R.P. Gupta (eds), Water, Resources, Sustainable Livelihood and Eco System Services. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Jairath, J. (2003). ‘Drought of Sanity and Flood of the Absurd–Politics of Water Discourse’, Unpublished Discussion Note, Saci WATERs, Hyderabad. Janakarajan, S. (1997). ‘The Survival of the Fittest Conflict Over the Use of Groundwater: Some Evidence from Tamil Nadu. South India’, paper presented at the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternative Development (IDPAD) Seminar, 111–17, October, Amersfoort, The Netherlands. ——— (1999). ‘Conflicts Over the Invisible Resource in Tamil Nadu: Is there a Way Out?’, in M. Moench, E. Caspari and A. Dixit (eds), Rethinking the Mosaic Investigations into Local Water Management. Colorado: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition. Jayal, N.G. (2001). ‘Reinventing the State: The Emergence of Alternative Models of Governance in India in the 1990s’, in N.G. Jayal and S. Pai (eds), Democratic Governance in India: Challenges of Poverty, Development, and Identity. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

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Mehta, L. (2003). ‘Contexts and Constructions of Water Scarcity’, Economic and Political Weekly, 38(48): 5066–72. Moench, M. (1999). ‘Addressing Constraints in Complex Systems: Meeting the Water Management Needs of South Asia in the 21st Century’, in M. Moench, E. Caspari and A. Dixit (eds), Rethinking the Mosaic: Investigations into Local Water Management. Colorado: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition. Ostrom, E. (1995). ‘Incentives, Rules of the Game, and Development’, Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics. Washington D.C: The World Bank. Prakash, A. and V. Ballabh (2005). ‘A Win-Some Lose-All Game: Social Differentiation and Politics of Groundwater Markets in North Gujarat’, D. Roth, R. Boelens and M. Zwarteveen (eds), Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Rosegrant. M., W.C. Ringler, R.V. Gerpacio (1999). ‘Water and Land Resources and Global Food Supply’, in G.H. Peters and J.V. Braun (eds), Food Security Diversification and Resource Management: Refocusing the Role of Agriculture? Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Shah, T. (1993). Water Markets and Irrigation Development: Political Economy and Practical Policy. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Shah, T. and V. Ballabh (1995). ‘The Social Science of Water Stress: An Exploratory Study of Water Management Institutions in Banaskantha District, Gujarat’, in M. Moench (ed), Groundwater Management: The Supply Dominated Focus of Traditional NGO and Government Efforts. Ahmedabad: VIKSAT and Natural Heritage Institute. Shah, T. and V. Ballabh (1997). ‘Water Markets in North Bihar: Six Village Studies in Muzaffarpur District’, Economic and Political Weekly, 32(52): A-183–90. United Nations Development Programme (1997). Governance for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations Development Programme. Vaidyanathan, A. (1999). Water Resource Management: Institutions and Irrigation Development in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. World Bank (1992). Governance and Development. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. ——— (1995). The Cost of Inaction: Valuing the Economy-wide Cost of Environmental Degradation in India. Environmental Division, Washington D.C: The World Bank. World Resource Institute (1994). World Resources 1994–95: Guide to the Global Environment. New York: Oxford University Press.

2 Water Governance, Politics, Policy∗ Ramaswamy R. Iyer

I NTRODUCTION At the outset, a few words about the term ‘governance’ may be in order. It is often loosely used in a very wide-ranging sense, covering meanings for which other terms exist. Such usage involves the loss of valuable differentiations. The best use we can make of a multiplicity of terms such as ‘government’ (meaning the act of governing), ‘administration’, ‘governance’, ‘politics’, ‘policy’, ‘management’, and so on, is to employ them in distinct senses to the extent possible. From that point of view, the term ‘governance’ needs to be used with a delimitation of its boundaries and an avoidance of an overlap with other terms. It is perhaps best used in the governmental or public-administration context. The expression ‘corporate governance’ has come to stay and has to be tolerated, though it seems to this writer that it involves an undue exaltation of what corporate bodies do. As for civil society institutions, they may in some instances be engaged in what might be called ‘governance’, but by and large, governance is what governments do; the term refers to the manner and quality of the act of governing. An undue extension of the meaning of the term robs it of its clarity and precision.1 Keeping those considerations in mind, it seems useful to employ the current vogue-word ‘governance’ to stress the fact that the experiences and perceptions that people have from day to day of the functioning of a whole range of governmental and related institutions and services are as important as the nature of the prevailing political system or economic policies. Among such institutions and services are water supply, electricity, garbage collection, the police, the courts, public transport, tax payments and refunds, and so on. Promptness, efficiency, responsiveness and the absence of corruption in these agencies and services will make a great deal of difference to people’s lives. To some extent this can be separated from the forms of government or issues of policy, though a despotic form of government or bad policies will sooner or later affect even these day-to-day matters. Within limits, and with qualifications, one can say that country X (say, China, Singapore) has an authoritarian political system but ∗ The issues discussed in this chapter have been elaborated further in my book Towards Water Wisdom: Limits, Justice, Harmony (Sage 2007).

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provides good governance, or that country Y (say, India) is a ‘free’ country in political terms, a democracy, but is not a shining example of good governance. When we proceed from those generalities to the specific case of water, two questions arise. First, is ‘water governance’ something special? Is it not part of overall governance? Second, can we separate water governance issues from water policy or water management issues? The two questions are inter-related. To the extent that corruption, inefficiency and non-performance in water-related institutions are merely reflections of the general state of affairs in the country, this does not tell us much about water per se. However, to the extent that ‘governance’ problems relating to water stem from wrong approaches, bad policies or misdirected planning, water governance cannot be discussed in isolation from water policy or resource management. It may be added here that water is perhaps more liable to politicisation than most other matters.

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What then are the ‘governance’ problems in relation to water? The following is a series of brief, synoptic accounts, without tables and diagrams3, of ‘water governance’ as it appears to different groups. The pictures that are presented will be found familiar enough; care has been taken to state the position in terms that will find general acceptance.4 Taking urban water supply first, the general experience in most of our cities is one of a limited, intermittent, unreliable supply; poor water quality; an unresponsive administration; an inequitable distribution of the available water over different areas varying from as low as 30 or 40 litres per capita per day (lpcd) in the areas of the poor to more than 400 lpcd in the affluent areas; an implicit subsidisation of the rich through low water rates; and an inadequate coverage of the poor by the public system, forcing them to buy water at much higher rates from private sources. The use of large quantities of precious and scarce fresh water for the disposal of human waste through flushing toilets; the absence of sanitation facilities for large numbers5 of people; the enormous generation of waste of all kinds—domestic, municipal, industrial—in urban areas; the very partial treatment of such waste; the discharge of untreated and partially treated sewage and effluents into the rivers, turning them into sewers; the contamination of aquifers; and so on, are also matters that may be mentioned here. However, they go beyond ‘governance’ in the narrow sense. Turning to rural water supply, despite five decades of planning and more than a decade of ‘Drinking Water Missions’, the curious (and by now familiar) fact is that targets for covering ‘uncovered villages’ are repeatedly achieved, but the numbers grow larger rather than smaller. This must mean that some ‘covered’ villages are lapsing back into the uncovered category, and that newer villages are being added to this class. A significant aspect of the scarcity of water in rural areas is of course that the burden of bringing water from distant sources falls on women, including girl children.

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Canal water for irrigation (from major and medium projects) is cheap6, but unreliable. The supply is generally not provided in the time or the quantities needed. The systems are in many cases in disarray because of poor maintenance and operation.7 The farmer is dependent on the irrigation bureaucracy which is not service-oriented, and is (with honourable exceptions) unresponsive to the needs and problems of the water user. The problem of tail-end farmers in the command getting very little water is well-known. The system is also amenable to manipulation and distortion by the influence of the rich and the politically powerful, and corruption plays an important role here as elsewhere. The problem of water logging and salinity that has been a concomitant of canal irrigation in many cases is a serious one, but it is primarily a watermanagement rather than a ‘governance’ issue, though there may be governance aspects to it. Similarly, in the context of canal waters and irrigation, inter-state river-water disputes have been very prominent, but these again are political and water-use rather than governance issues. We shall revert to this later in the chapter. In relation to groundwater, ‘governance’ seems non-existent. Both law and politics are to blame here. By law, the water under a piece of land belongs to the owner of that land, and he or she (including businesses and corporate entities) can exploit it at will. This could lead to inequitable relations between the seller and the buyer of water, the depletion or contamination of the aquifer and the drying up of wells and other water-sources in nearby areas. The existing legal position makes regulation very difficult and this is compounded by political factors. Despite the existence of the Central Groundwater Authority for about a decade, and some attempts at legislation at the state level, there is no real regulation of groundwater use (on what Tushaar Shah [2004] describes as ‘colossal anarchy’ in relation to groundwater. See also note 27). In the context of large projects, ‘governance’ generally presents a high-handed, violent and cruel aspect to those who face displacement/loss of livelihood and delayed and badly flawed rehabilitation. To them, governance often means the police.8 The social activists and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) that seek to mediate between such project-affected people and the government are likely to perceive ‘governance’ in terms of callousness to suffering, denial of human rights, repression, the use of force in response to resistance, and so on. Those concerned with environmental issues will tend to fault ‘governance’ on violations of environmental laws, rules and procedures, and will find serious limitations and inadequacies in Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). From the financial, economic and management points of view, low water rates and the consequent ills of poor revenues, losses in financial terms, inadequacy of funds even for operation and maintenance (O&M) and non-availability of funds for capital-renewal and new investment, will constitute bad governance. From the point of view of the governmental agencies concerned with water—the municipal authorities and the Irrigation Departments—proper governance will undoubtedly seem hamstrung by a chronic inadequacy of budgetary allocations; a shortage of water (in many cases) for the service that they are expected to provide; the pressures of the rich and the politically well-connected; a powerlessness to deal effectively with those who violate the law or bend or circumvent the procedure; improper directions from the political levels; and

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the pervasive presence of corruption. (The reference is to the perceptions of the upright and conscientious officials; others may prefer to conform to the prevailing ethos and make their ‘adjustments’.) The various water governance problems and deficiencies enumerated above are usually seen piecemeal, and many partial remedies and fragmented reforms are proposed: Participatory Irrigation Management or PIM; privatisation; water markets; proper pricing of water; and so on. Some of these ‘reforms’ originate in the government, some are recommendations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and some are ideas advocated by our own economists. Some of these propositions are sound, some are questionable, and some are fraught with danger. From the world of the environmental and social activists and mobilisers, there are pleas for a National Rehabilitation Policy (now in place, and as mentioned above, a disappointment); the drastic modification of the Official Secrets Act and the enactment (or the full implementation) of a Freedom of Information Act; a thoroughgoing reform of the Land Acquisition Act; full adherence to The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996; due conformity to the provisions of the Environment Protection Act; proper implementation of the requirement, now mandatory, of a public hearing in the case of large projects; and so on. Reforms in the area of governance are indeed very necessary. However, if we consider any ‘water governance’ issue carefully, we will find ourselves led beyond governance in a narrow sense into larger issues, and beyond the sphere of governments into the domains of water users, private sector agencies, and civil society. We must therefore look at a wider canvas. But before we proceed from water governance to water policy and management, a brief reference to ‘water politics’ may be in order.

W ATER P OLITICS The most visible manifestation of water politics is in inter-state river-water disputes. In recent times we have seen the enormous importance that the dispute over the sharing of Cauvery waters has in the politics of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Similarly, the disputes over Ravi-Beas waters (Punjab–Haryana), the Almatti project (Andhra Pradesh–Karnataka), the old Mullapperiyar and Parambikulam Aliyar agreements (Kerala–Tamil Nadu), are politically very important. The politics of the Ravi-Beas issue has become very evident with the passing of an Act by the Punjab Legislature terminating past water agreements and the Presidential reference on this matter to the Supreme Court.9 In the international arena, water relations are important components in (and determinants of) India’s political relations with Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. It is politics that has rendered the River Boards Act 1956 inoperative and made the establishment of any kind of organisation at the river-basin level extremely difficult. In the Krishna Tribunal’s Award, Scheme B that envisaged a Krishna River Authority was not made mandatory and never came into operation. In the Cauvery case, attempts to establish a

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standing, professional-cum-bureaucratic Cauvery River Authority had to be abandoned and a political Authority set up (essentially as a mediating body, without any planning or managerial functions). Turning to ‘major/medium’ projects, promises to undertake such projects play an important role in electoral politics, and their locations and important features are often influenced by political considerations. The differential incidence of the social costs and benefits of such projects on different groups, and the generally inequitable distribution of their benefits among the beneficiary groups, are part of the ‘political economy’ of the projects. References are sometimes made to the alleged politician–bureaucrat/technocrat–consultant–contractor nexus, but the existence of such a nexus and its extent are allegations that need to be verified in each case. Besides, such a nexus, where it is a reality, would fall under the head of ‘corruption’ rather than ‘politics’. A special case, namely the head-reach/tail-end conflict in an irrigation command, tends to become political as the two groups organise themselves and exert pressure on the irrigation department: one of the two groups (generally the head-reach group) might become politically more powerful and influential with the department. Again, the idea (often advocated) of resettling and rehabilitating project-affected persons in the command area of the project and giving them a share in the benefits of the project, and the Acts that have been passed in this regard in some states, run into difficulties in actual practice because of the resistance of those who are already in the command area: this is a political difficulty. Similarly, rural/urban or agriculture/industry water conflicts tend to get politicised. For instance, the conflict between the polluting industries and the farmers and other rural inhabitants in the Palar Basin in Tamil Nadu has political dimensions. Also, we are often told that in Maharashtra sugarcane plantations get assured water throughout the year, but there are acute drinking water problems in the adjoining villages: this too is a political fact, as it attests to the greater power and influence of the sugarcane lobby. Again, it is politics that is responsible for the reluctance of most State Governments to raise (canal) irrigation water charges appropriately (as recommended by many Committees and Commissions), and their readiness to give electricity to farmers at very low rates or free, leading to the reckless mining of groundwater. Issues of equity, power and caste relations, ‘gender’10, and so on, arise in the context of the establishment of Water Users’ Associations under the PIM scheme, watershed committees for managing water-harvesting or watershed development initiatives, and tank farmers’ associations (in the southern states). These involve both social and political questions. Finally, the difficulties in regulating the exploitation of groundwater are (as mentioned earlier) partly legal and partly (and more importantly) political.

W ATER S ITUATION : M AJOR C ONCERNS Let us now look at the wider canvas of resource policy and management, which will subsume governance and political issues as well. As we survey the present water situation in the

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country and try to envision the future, the worries and concerns that seem prominent are the following: • grim forecasts of water scarcity or a water crisis in the country as a whole and the related problem of food security; • more specifically, the persistent problems of drought-prone areas, arid zones and other water-short areas; • recurring flood-related damages and losses in other areas; • bitter and divisive inter-state river-water disputes, and the growing ineffectiveness of the constitutional conflict-resolution mechanism; • some unresolved issues relating to rivers with Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh; • the emergence of acute water conflicts between users (agriculture/industry, agriculture/ drinking water) and between areas (rural/urban); • the difficulties of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals for the provision of safe drinking water and sanitation facilities; • the ominous depletion of groundwater aquifers in many parts of the country; • the shrinking of wetlands; • the pollution and contamination of water sources, cutting into the already scarce available supplies; • the enormous waste of water in every kind of use (agricultural, industrial, municipal, domestic); and • the uncertainties arising from predictions of climate change. An adequate discussion of all the points enumerated above (many of which are inter-related) cannot be attempted in this chapter. In particular, issues of water quality11 and pollution, flood management12, groundwater management13, sanitation14, climate change15 and water relations with neighbouring countries16, will need separate chapters of considerable length. We shall focus here only on a few key themes or ideas: the perception of an imminent water crisis; the stress on large supply-side projects or long-distance water transfers; the belief that droughts and floods can be linked and that the answer to the first lies in the second; the tendency to think of water as a commodity (‘economic good’); the advocacy of ‘full cost recovery’ as the basis for pricing; and the faith in the efficacy of market forces and in the virtues of privatisation.

Crisis? Is a water crisis inevitable? The brief answer to that question is: ‘Yes, if we go on as before. No, if we take certain steps.’ Fears of a crisis arise from projections of future water demand linked to projections of the rate of growth of population, pace of urbanisation and processes of economic ‘development’. The relevant numbers will be found in the Report (September 1999) of the high-level National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development Plan (hereafter NCIWRDP) set up by the Government of India, Ministry of Water Resources, as well as in certain studies such as

24

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those by the Working Group of the NCIWRDP; by the India Water Partnership (India Water Vision [1999]); and by Kanchan Chopra and Biswanath Goldar of the Institute of Economic Growth (Chopra and Goldar 2000). Without going into the numbers, it may be stated that the demand-supply balance seems precarious enough in all these studies to warrant concern; and that concern has led to the formulation by the Government of large supply-side projects such as big dams and long-distance water transfers. However, the crucial element here is the demand projection, and that needs to be looked at carefully. In every kind of water-use, major economies are desirable and possible, though difficult. We have to go beyond the somewhat modest assumptions of improvement that the NCIWRDP has made.17 Substantial improvements in efficiency in water-use in agriculture (in conveyance systems, crop-water requirements, irrigation techniques, yields18) are needed, and if achieved, will sharply cut down the agricultural demand for water. In rural and urban water supply, the tendency is to project future needs on the basis of per capita norms which are fairly high and which are sought to be raised further. However, instead of improving the norms for supply from the current figures to higher levels, it might be more appropriate to maintain (or perhaps even reduce)19 current norms, enforce economies on those (whether in rural or urban areas) that use too much water, and improve availability to groups or areas that receive too little. The substantial incidence of waste in urban water-supply systems is also a matter that calls for concerted action. In industrial use of water, multiple recycling and re-use needs to be insisted upon, allowing minimal make-up water. Strenuous efforts need to be made to promote improvements in efficiency and technological innovations in every kind of wateruse to maximise what we get out of each drop of water. If we do all this, the demand picture will not remain the same. The pressure on the resource will not disappear but may well be less severe than now feared; a crisis may still emerge, but it may not be unmanageable. A critical examination of projections of future water demand, or rather of the assumptions and methods involved, ought therefore be an important area of study. (The writer is well aware that the approaches that he is advocating will involve radical changes in thinking and in ways of living. If we feel that it is not ‘realistic’ to expect such changes, we must also ‘realistically’ accept the inescapability of a crisis.) Turning to the supply side, large-dam projects are not the only answer; there are other possibilities. Local rainwater harvesting (i.e., ‘catching the raindrop as it falls’) and watershed development are also part of the supply-side answers20 to the demand. Fortunately, many successful examples of such initiatives are available. If these examples could be replicated in thousands across the country (wherever feasible), they could be far more significant components in national water planning than we can now imagine. A veritable transformation of the water scene may result. If we combine those two approaches, namely, • on the demand side, the practice of the utmost economy and efficiency in water-use and of resource-conservation; and • on the supply side, efforts to augment the availability of ‘usable’ water through extensive recourse to local water-harvesting and watershed development,

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25

we may be able to avert a crisis, though the situation will undoubtedly be difficult and will call for careful management.

Big Projects: Last Option Such an approach may not eliminate the need for big projects, but may minimize that need. Big dams and long-distance water transfers have to be treated as projects of the last resort and chosen only if they are the best options in a given situation. But why should they be treated as the last option rather than the first choice? The reasons can be succinctly stated: they have serious impacts and consequences, environmental, social and human, not all of which can be remedied or mitigated or compensated for, or even foreseen fully; Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and Cost-Benefit Analyses are highly flawed as the basis for project decisions; the balance between total costs and total benefits (financial, economic, ecological, social and human; direct and indirect; immediate and distant; primary and secondary/tertiary; quantifiable and non-quantifiable) is difficult to ascertain; the costs will be definitely incurred and may turn out to be higher than foreseen, whereas the benefits are uncertain and may fall short of expectations; the financing of such projects presents formidable budgetary and debt-service problems; and so on. (We ignore here the phenomenon of ‘time and cost over-runs’ on such projects; the extent of corruption often associated with large public investments; and the vicious circle of poor revenues arising from low water rates, leading to poor operation and maintenance and to poor service, and therefore to poor revenue collections and resistance to increases in tariffs. These are managerial or ‘political economy’ problems not necessarily attributable to the projects.) The reasons for being wary of large projects and choosing them only if they are the unique possibility or the best option in a given case are clear enough. However, their avoidability would depend on the availability of other options.

Alternatives? Are there alternatives? How significant are they? It has already been argued that extensive local rainwater harvesting and community-led watershed development may minimize the need for big projects, and that this can form a significant part of national planning if undertaken in large numbers all over the country (wherever feasible). However, two questions arise: (1) On a national scale how much will this add to the available (‘usable’) water? No clear answer is available to this question, but there is a number of 140 BCM21 shown as ‘additional run-off capture’ in Chopra and Goldar (2000), referred to earlier. All that one can say is that given the large gap between precipitation (4,000 BCM) and ‘available’ water resources (1,953 BCM), and that between the latter and ‘usable’ surface water resources (690 BCM)22, there seems to be scope for adding significantly to the last number through local action.

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(2) What will be the hydrological consequences of extensive rainwater harvesting in all catchments?23 Will this reduce run-off and therefore river-flows? Again, no answers are available. This needs new research. However, one’s guess here again is that given the gaps mentioned above, river-flows may not be significantly affected by interceptions in the upper catchments, though some reductions of downstream run-off in the immediate vicinity may occur. In any case, all measures of augmentation of the ‘usable’ quantum of water—large dams, power-driven bore wells and tube wells for the extraction of groundwater, and local rainwater harvesting and watershed development—will have their hydrological and environmental consequences, and we need to be aware of these. Prima facie, it does not seem likely that the impacts of rainwater harvesting will be worse than those of large dams or groundwater extraction. Doubtless a wise combination of all three methods of augmenting supplies will need to be adopted. The widespread practice of rainwater harvesting will reduce the need for recourse to dams and ever-deeper bore wells and tube wells. Besides, water harvesting is often used as a means of recharging groundwater.

Droughts, Floods and River Linking The ‘paradox’ or ‘irony’ of flood and drought is a formulation often heard in India. The topography of the land and the pattern of rainfall result in the incidence of floods in some places and droughts in other areas and sometimes they can occur (in different areas of course) at the same time. There is neither ‘paradox’ nor ‘irony’ here: these are merely facts of geography that govern our lives. Area-specific ways of coping with these features of nature that impinge on our lives have to be, and can be, worked out. This is where the challenge lies. What we should do about the occurrence of floods in one area and what we should do about the water needs of arid or drought-prone or water-short areas are two separate questions. (Briefly speaking, the answers to the problems of arid or drought-prone areas have to be primarily local, with the bringing in of external water being an exceptional recourse in those places where local solutions are unavailable or grossly inadequate.) Unfortunately, the wrong perception of a paradox or irony here leads to the wrong answer: the ‘inter-linking of rivers’ to divert floodwaters to arid areas. A detailed critique of the Government of India’s ambitious river linking project cannot be attempted here.24 Each such ‘link’ proposal must of course be examined carefully to establish need, feasibility, techno-economic viability, acceptability from environmental and human points of view, and so on, and some may be found worthy of approval. The objection is to a general theoretical conceptualisation of river linking. The fallacy involved in it is particularly evident in the expression ‘national water-grid’ on the misleading analogy of a power-grid or a highways-grid. In a power-grid or a highway-link, the movement can be in both directions, but that is not the case with a river link; water will flow only in one direction. Apart from that, highways and power lines are human creations and can be manipulated by humans. Rivers are

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not human artefacts; they are natural phenomena, integral components of ecological systems, and inextricable parts of the cultural, social, economic, spiritual lives of the communities concerned. They are not pipelines to be cut, turned around, welded and rejoined. ‘Flood Control’ is a large subject that cannot be discussed here in detail, but a few words may be in order. The initial response to flood damage was to try to ‘control’ floods through structural means such as dams or embankments. It was found through experience that these efforts were ineffective or even harmful. Without going into the matter in detail it can be said that while dams may moderate flood flows to a limited extent under normal conditions (provided they are planned and operated for that purpose among others), they may aggravate the position if (in the absence of a flood cushion) water has to be suddenly released in the interest of the safety of structures. As for embankments, there is serious doubt about their efficacy as flood-control measures. They have often proved a remedy worse than the disease. It is increasingly recognised that what we must learn to do is not so much to ‘control’ floods as to cope with them when they occur and minimise damage, partly through ‘flood-plain zoning’ (i.e., regulation of settlement and activity in the natural flood plains of rivers) and partly through ‘disaster-preparedness’. However, the notion of ‘flood control’ continues to hold some sway over people’s minds.25

Water Markets, Privatisation

26

In this country water markets have tended to emerge particularly in the context of groundwater extraction through tube wells and bore wells, and they serve some useful purposes, though there are dangers of unsustainable extraction as also of inequitable relationships between sellers and buyers. Water markets exist and cannot be ruled out, but there are some difficult issues. The first question that needs to be asked is: is water a commodity? Given the multiple dimensions of water, the answer to this question has to be ‘yes and no’. In economic uses (commercial irrigation, industry) it is a commodity, but as a means of life support (water for drinking, bathing, washing and cooking) it is not. It must be added that if water is a commodity in some uses and a basic life-support need and therefore a fundamental right in other uses, the latter aspect must always take precedence over the former. The advocates of water markets (who definitely view water as a commodity) recommend: ‘Define property rights and allow trading’, but the citizen’s right to water (for drinking, cooking and washing) is a part of the right to life and the water rights of a farmer for irrigation or those of an industry for industrial uses are use rights; neither can be regarded as ‘tradable property rights’. That line of argument seems to lead to the conclusion that the prescription ‘define water rights and allow trading’ is untenable and cannot be followed. And yet, this has been done in certain countries. Farmers have been allowed to sell their water to industries or for urban water supply. States (having a ‘surplus’ of water) in a federal structure have been allowed to sell water to other states (which are short of water). Both those examples are taken from the United States of America. It is sometimes argued that water markets are the answer to conflicts over water, whether between uses (e.g., agriculture and industry) or between administrative

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or political units (e.g., states or provinces). In India too this proposition is occasionally urged. We are told: ‘If water markets were to prevail, Orissa might be prepared to sell a quantum of Mahanadi waters; the conflict between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over Cauvery waters can be resolved; farmers and industrial units (in say Tiruppur) may find a way out of their bitter fight’27; and so on. This is a dangerous and pernicious principle, and the mere fact that it seems to have worked in some instances in certain countries should not blind us to the dangers. As already mentioned, use rights are not property rights and cannot be allowed to be traded in. Farmers or industries may have temporary surpluses to spare, in which case they can sell them, but a permanent surplus (e.g., if a farmer decides to reduce or give up the practice of agriculture, or an industrialist decides to close down his or her industry) should entail a loss of the water right and a reallocation of it by the state or the community. As for water-sharing by states in a federal structure or by countries, the general principle has been that the lower riparian has certain rights and the upper riparian a certain obligation towards the lower riparian. That was enshrined in the Helsinki Rules (1966) and continued in the UN Convention of 1997. That principle also lay behind the Indus Treaty 1960 between India and Pakistan and the Ganges Treaty of 1996 between India and Bangladesh. To say that the upper riparian can sell water to the lower riparian would be to negate that well-established principle or stand it on its head. It is amazing that such a negation can be seriously put forward. Apart from the denial of the rights of the lower riparian, it would introduce a commercial motivation into the thinking of the upper riparian and might lead to an unsustainable exploitation of the resource.28 Further, the upper riparian province or state or country can sell water to the lower riparian only by acquiring control over the waters through structures: in other words, the upper riparian will first stop the water from flowing to the lower riparian and then sell the water so blocked to the lower riparian. The preposterousness of the proposition is obvious and does not need to be laboured. Upper and lower riparians (or riparians and non-riparians) must share waters (where necessary) through the routes of agreement, treaty, conciliation, mediation, arbitration or adjudication, and not by a sale-and-purchase contract. Turning to the advocacy of privatisation, the argument for privatisation cannot forthwith be transferred from consumer or industrial goods to water, because the analogy is inapt: we cannot do without water and there are no substitutes for it. Moreover, water is a basic right and (as mentioned above) the state does have a responsibility to ensure that no one is denied this right, regardless of which agency provides the service. Besides, the prime motive of the private corporate sector is profit, and if considerations of profitability come into conflict with other considerations, profitability will prevail; such an approach cannot be brought into the sphere of a basic life-support resource. A simplistic proposition might be to say that the privatisation of a service is acceptable subject to regulation, but that we must be wary of privatising the resource itself. However, such a distinction is difficult to maintain. The privatisation of the water supply service may sooner or later lead to the transfer of control over the resource to private hands. Even if a private entity is not formally given the ownership of the water source, the transfer of control structures (a dam or a barrage or a bore well or a pumping station) to it (or the building of such structures) gives it a position of power which cannot easily be undone, and which can have

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serious implications. Lastly, allowing the domestic private sector to exploit national natural resources, particularly water, may make it difficult to deny a similar right to foreign investors in terms of the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime and principles, and this carries with it the danger of countries losing control over their own natural resources. The supply of water by private tankers in urban areas and the burgeoning bottled-water trade are also instances of water markets. These ought not to be necessary at all. They become necessary and possible only because of the failure of public systems in terms of the duration, regularity and dependability of supply and the quality of the water provided. If the public system provided an adequate, reliable and safe supply, the demand for tankers or for bottled water may go down sharply. Apart from that, these supplies (and the soft drinks business) have necessarily to draw raw water from somewhere, and that draft may be an unsustainable or inequitable one. The instances of the bore wells of the Coca-Cola company depriving an entire area in Kerala of its water, and of Chhattisgarh handing over a 20-km stretch of a river to a private concessionaire for water supply, are well-known. In both these cases, there has been a public outcry and the stories are as yet unfinished.

Pricing The twin propositions that water rates should be regarded as ‘user charges’ and not as a form of taxation, and that the principle behind ‘user charges’ should be ‘full cost recovery’, are important elements in current economic thinking. This writer has no difficulty in accepting those propositions in the context of water as an input into economic activity (irrigation, industrial use, water for hotels). However, these principles cannot apply to ‘water for life’ (drinking water, or what Peter Gleick calls ‘basic water requirement’) without modification. This too must be priced reasonably. Full economic pricing to the affluent seems warranted: there is no reason why they should be subsidised, and there may even be a strong case for penal pricing beyond a certain level of use as a means of discouraging wasteful use. However, some degree of subsidisation to the less affluent may be called for. Besides, no one should be denied this basic life-support need merely because of his or her inability to pay, and that consideration may necessitate free supplies to the very poor. Finally, some kind of reasonable pricing or costing will have to be adopted for ‘water as a social good’ (water for municipal services such as firefighting, water for public institutions such as schools and offices). The translation of the approach outlined above into a structure of charges may not be easy, but that difficult task will necessarily have to be undertaken.

W HAT N EEDS

TO BE

D ONE

Pulling the threads of the discussion in the foregoing sections together, let us proceed from analyses to an agenda for action. The following is an attempt at a compendious statement of what needs to be done in relation to water.

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• ‘Water for life’, i.e., safe drinking water (including a minimal allowance for cooking and washing), is a basic right and must be assured to all, in cities and in villages, in accordance with modest norms. Sanitation facilities must be assured in accordance with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. • Water as a ‘social good’ (water for municipal uses, firefighting, hospitals, public institutions) must be adequately provided for. • Reasonable availability of water must be ensured for economic uses (agriculture, industry), giving primacy to food security and maximising output per unit of water. • A series of area-specific answers must be formulated for the needs of arid, drought-prone or water-scarce areas, the stress being on local solutions and recourse to external water being exceptional. ‘Development’ in such areas must not be of the water-intensive kind. • In all categories of water-uses, economy and efficiency must be brought about, waste avoided and multiple use of the same water ensured to the extent possible. The approach must be to meet the essential water needs, curtail the less essential or non-essential uses sharply and restrain and manage the totality of demand within the availability to the extent possible, so that it does not get out of hand. • Principles for the proper pricing of water in all uses must be laid down and strictly followed. This will include full economic pricing for some uses (including penal pricing for use above a specified limit), reasonable pricing for other uses, subsidised pricing for the poor and a modicum of free supplies to the very poor. • Such supply-side augmentation as is found necessary must be undertaken with due regard to sustainability, equity and social justice. Primacy must be given to extensive community-led local water-harvesting and watershed development activities (wherever feasible) with due regard to hydrological and environmental aspects. • Large projects for the storage or diversion of river waters or for long-distance water transfers must be treated as ‘projects of the last resort’, i.e., undertaken only in those cases where they are the unique or the best option, after a stringent independent evaluation with reference to total costs and benefits (financial, economic, social, human, environmental) and with the fullest participation of the people likely to be affected. (Certain reforms in this context, such as an effective Freedom of Information Act, an overhaul of the Land Acquisition Act, and so on, have been mentioned in the second section of this chapter. In particular, the National Rehabilitation Policy needs to be drastically revised.) • Projects that have been ‘on-going’ for a long time should be put through a stringent review. Some should be accelerated, some re-phased and some terminated. • The Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) approach, i.e., the transfer of the management of an appropriate part of the system to farmers’ associations, is a limited but useful reform. It must be introduced in all existing (major and medium) projects and built into new projects ab initio. • The reckless exploitation of groundwater currently proceeding, leading to the rapid depletion of aquifers in many places, must be quickly brought under a regime of regulation. This may entail changes in the law relating to ownership rights over groundwater, enactment of new state-level laws for regulating the extraction and use

Water Governance, Politics, Policy

•

• •

•

•

31

of groundwater, establishment of regulatory bodies, rationalisation of power tariffs, and so on.29 Water augmentation, use and management at all levels and scales—all categories of uses on the demand side, and large projects, micro-watershed development, rainwater— harvesting and groundwater extraction and use on the supply side—must be within an overall framework of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) for a basin or sub-basin. The concept of IWRM, much advocated in international circles, needs to be widened and deepened to make it truly holistic and in harmony with nature. Water sources and systems must be protected from pollution and contamination, and those already affected must be retrieved. This will call for a massive effort. Conflicts relating to waters (rivers, aquifers) will need to be minimised, and principles and mechanisms for obviating them, or for resolving them when they arise, strengthened where they exist and introduced where they do not. Non-compliance with statutory or constitutional conflict-resolution provisions must not be accepted. The political difficulties of establishing appropriate organisations at the basin or sub-basin level for harmonious and holistic resource management need to be tackled. Ways of coping with floods and minimising damage and loss must be worked out for all flood-prone areas and real-time information systems and warning mechanisms established. The need for enacting a governing, over-arching national water law integrating all laws at the Central or state levels (including the new ones that are needed) relating to or having a bearing on water must be seriously considered.30

All this will call for action at multiple levels: the Central and state governments, village panchayats and nagarpalikas, the community or civil society, and the water users, individual or group or corporate. The specific actions at each level are not being spelt out here. What is important is to ensure the fullest coordination and cooperation among all agencies. In particular, as water management at the local level gets devolved to the panchayati raj institutions (PRIs), a constructive working relationship will need to be established between civil society institutions such as watershed committees and PRIs. The agenda outlined above will include administrative actions, the establishment of institutions (by the state and civil society), the framing of rules and regulations, the enactment of laws, social mobilisation and the institution of social sanctions, and so on. In this context, customary laws must be given due consideration. Formal and customary laws must be harmonised where necessary. However, something more is involved: a major transformation of thinking is needed in relation to water.

T OWARDS

A

T RANSFORMATION

OF

T HINKING

As this writer sees it, that transformation would include an awareness and understanding of water as a scarce and precious resource to be conserved, protected and used with extreme

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economy; an integral part of nature; a sacred resource; a common pool resource to be managed by the community or held as a public trust by the state; primarily a life-support substance and only secondarily anything else (economic good, social good, etc.); a fundamental human and animal right; and a bounty of nature to be gratefully and reverentially received and shared with fellow humans (within the state or province or country, or beyond the borders of the country), future generations of humans, and other forms of life. Such a view of water, in combination with the general principles of equity and social justice, would ensure among other things a voice for women in water-management and a proper place for them in watergovernance institutions; respect for the rights of access of tribal and other communities to the natural resource base with which they have had a close association for centuries; minimal displacement and environmental impacts as criteria in the choice of projects; and due regard for the rights of project-affected persons.31 If that kind of thinking could be brought about, it would change the nature of water politics, eliminate water-related conflicts (between uses, between areas, between countries) or make their resolution easier, make water governance more enlightened, and transform the relationship between the state and civil society. It may even make proper groundwater management possible. Efficiency problems may still remain, but they would be relatively easier to deal with. On the other hand, if we merely try to improve efficiency in administration and to find institutional or legal answers to political and attitudinal problems, we may indeed have some (limited) successes, and they will be very welcome, but the major concerns will remain unresolved. Water governance and water politics cannot be transformed without transforming water policy (which reflects our understanding of and relation to the resource), and the transformation of water policy can only be brought about by water-wisdom. That might seem to some readers a rather pious and unrealistic conclusion to a long analytical chapter. It is of course much easier to build a dam or drill deep for water than to undertake the kind of education and social mobilisation that the transformation outlined above calls for; but that way lies disaster. That is where ‘realism’ (as many see it) will take us. Wisdom is needed for avoiding that disaster; the pursuit of wisdom will not be easy; but it will be realism in the true sense of the word.

Notes 1. A fuller discussion of the meaning of ‘governance’ will be found in the author’s article on the subject in the issue of the Indian Journal of Public Administration, January–March 2004. 2. Some of the problems and issues referred to in this and ensuing sections are discussed in greater detail in the author’s other writings mentioned in the References at the end. On some issues, the reader’s attention is also drawn wherever necessary to relevant writings by others. 3. This is intended as an analytical and not as an empirical chapter. 4. In this section, the focus on ‘governance’ may entail the omission of certain other aspects or issues. 5. See the website of the WHO’s Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, Geneva: www. wsscc.org 6. Whether it should be cheap is another question.

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7. This is what leads to the Participatory Irrigation Management Programme. 8. The long-awaited National Rehabilitation Policy has at last been announced, but it is a deeply disappointing document. In many ways it represents a significant de-liberalisation of policies and practices already established in existing projects; it can only be described as a thoroughly retrogressive measure. (PS: That was a reference to the National Rehabilitation Policy 2003, notified in February 2004. Subsequently, after much debate a revised draft NRP 2006 was put in the public domain, leading to further debate. Currently, taking note of the comments received, and after consultations with the Ministry of Tribal affairs, the Ministry of Rural Development is trying to draft a National Rehabilitation Bill for enactment.) 9. This is the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act 2004, passed by the Pubjab Legislative Assembly on 12 July 2004. 10. This writer has some reservations on the use of the term ‘gender issues’ to refer to issues relating to women, but the usage has gained currency and seems unlikely to change. 11. See Adhikary et al (2000), Chapter 3. 12. See Rangachari (1999) and Mishra (2001). 13. See Shah (2004). 14. See WSSCC website www.wsscc.org 15. No reference is mentioned here, as there is a large body of literature on the subject. 16. On India’s water relations with neighbouring countries, see Iyer (2003), Chapters 18–20. 17. The NCIWRDP projects, by the year 2050, an improvement in irrigation efficiency from the present level of 35–40 per cent to 60 per cent; improvements in yields in irrigated and rainfed agriculture from 3 tonnes and 1 tonne to 4 tonnes and 1.5 tonnes respectively; and an improvement in the efficiency of industrial water use by no more than 20 per cent. 18. All these (crop water requirements, timing of watering, maximising of yields per unit of water) call for much more research than has been done so far. Again, government policies that have an influence on cropping patterns and result in encouraging excessive water-use need to be reviewed. 19. The reference is essentially to (Indian) urban norms. Rural norms are lower and perhaps cannot be reduced; however, raising them to bring them close to or on par with existing or proposed urban norms may need reconsideration. Peter Gleick (1996) puts the basic water requirement for human needs (drinking, sanitation services, bathing, cooking and kitchen) at 50 litres per person per day. Even if that is doubled, we get only 100 lpcd. The NCIWRDP’s projection is to raise the present urban norm of 140 lpcd to 200 lpcd and the rural norm from 70 to 140 lpcd. It may be added that some European cities are reducing their norms to around 100 lpcd. 20. Apart from minimising waste in all uses and insisting on multiple re-use in industry, it needs to be recognised that domestic and municipal waste is also a source from which water for some uses needs to be extracted. This will be a small addition on the supply side. 21. 1 BCM = 1 billion cubic metres = 1 cubic kilometre or km3. 22. The numbers are drawn from the report of the NCIWRDP. 23. On this question, attention is invited to the series of articles in The Hindu (T. N. Narasimhan, the present author, Chetan Pandit, and T.N.N. again—6 January, 27 January, 10 February, 9 March 2004). 24. Those who are interested may see the author’s articles on the subject in Economic and Political Weekly, 16 November 2002; Frontline, 20 December 2002; The Hindu Environment Survey 2003; and HIMAL South Asian, August 2003. See also his book WATER: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns (Sage 2003), Chapter 26.

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25. For a fuller discussion of floods and what to do about them, see Rangachari (1999) and Mishra (2001). 26. On the whole range of issues involved in this matter (water as commodity, water markets, privatisation, corporate control, etc.) see Petrella (2001), Vandana Shiva (2002), International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (2003) and Barlow and Clarke (2002). 27. These are arguments that the author has heard in the course of discussions. 28. That applies also to the sale of water by farmers to industry or by rural communities to urban areas. This too may lead to an over-exploitation of the resource for commercial reasons. 29. Having regard to the enormous number of private tube wells in the country and the fact that most of these are cases of ‘self-supply’, i.e., outside the purview of supply systems, public or private, Tushaar Shah (2004) is sceptical of the efficacy of ‘regulation’ and of changes in policy or law as remedies for the depletion and contamination of groundwater aquifers. This writer is in agreement with his diagnosis of ‘colossal anarchy’ in relation to groundwater, but not wholly with his conclusions and recommendations. Limitations of space prevent an elaboration of that statement here. 30. The case for such an umbrella legislation at the national level has been argued in the author’s article ‘Towards a Re-Ordering of Water Law in India’, Indian Juridical Review, National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, Vol. 1, 2004. 31. That was a broad outline of the needed transformation of thinking. A fuller statement in the form of a ‘Declaration’, preceded by a detailed discussion of the issues, will be found in another paper by the author: ‘Beyond Drainage Basin and IWRM: Towards a Transformation of Thinking on Water’ (Iyer 2004c), not yet published, but available for reference in the website of the University of California Santa Cruz e-Scholarship Repository, 2 May 2004, http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgirs/CGIRS-2004-7.

References Adhikary K.B., Q.K. Ahmad, S.K. Malla, B.B. Pradhan, K. Rahman, R. Rangachari, R.K.B. Sajjadur, B.G. Verghese (eds) (2000). Cooperation on the Eastern Himalayan Rivers: Opportunities and Challenges. New Delhi: Konark Publishers, under the auspices of Bangladesh Unnayan Parishad, Dhaka, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and Institute for Integrated Development Studies, Kathmandu. Barlow M. and T. Clarke (2002). Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, published in India by New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2003. Chopra, K. and B. Goldar (2000). ‘Sustainable Development Framework for India: The Case of Water Resources’—Final Report, Delhi: Institute of Economic Growth, for the UN University, Tokyo. Gleick, P. (1996). ‘Basic Water Requirements for Human Activities: Meeting Basic Needs’, Water International, no. 21, International Water Resources Association. ——— (1999). ‘The Human Right to Water’, Water Policy I, ElsevierScienceLtd, http://webworld.unesco. org/water/wwap/pccp/cd/pdf/educational_tools/course_modules/reference_documents/issues/ thehumanrighttowater.pdf. Government of India (1987). National Water Policy. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. ——— (1994). Guidelines for Watershed Development. New Delhi: Ministry of Rural Areas and Employment. ——— (1997). Report of the Working Group on Participatory Irrigation Management for the Ninth Plan. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. ——— (1999). Report of the Working Group on Perspective of Water Requirements (National Commission on Integrated Water Resources Development Plan). New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. ——— (1999). ‘Integrated Water Resources Development—A Plan for Action’, the Report of the National Commission on Integrated Water Resources Development Plan. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources.

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Government of India (2001). ‘Reply to the World Commission on Dams’, letter No.2/WCD/2001/DT (PR) Vol.-III dated 1-2-2001 addressed to the Secretary General of the WCD (see WCD’s website www. dams.org). ——— (2002). National Water Policy 2002. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. ——— (2004). National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation for Project 2004. Resolution dated 17 February. New Delhi: Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development. India Water Partnership (2000). India Water Vision July 1999. New Delhi: India Water Partnership and Institute for Human Development. International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (2003). The Water Barons. Washington D.C.: Center for Public Integrity. International Law Association (1966). Helsinki Rules on the Uses of the Waters of International Rivers. London: International Law Association. Iyer, R.R. (2003a). WATER: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns. New Delhi: Sage Publications. ——— (2003b). ‘Water: Some Crucial Questions’, Indian Journal of Public Administration, Vol. XLIX No.3, July–September (Special Number on Water Resources Management). ——— (2004a). ‘Towards a Re-Ordering of Water Law in India’, Indian Juridical Review, Vol. 1. ——— (2004b). ‘The Meaning of Governance’, Indian Journal of Public Administration, Vol. L, No. 1, Golden Jubilee Special Number on Governance for Development, January–March. ——— (2004c). ‘Beyond Drainage Basin and IWRM: Towards a Transformation of Thinking on Water’, Not yet published, but available for reference in the website of the University of California Santa Cruz (e-Scholarship Repository, 2 May 2004) http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgirs/CGIRS-2004-7. Mishra, D. Kumar (2001). ‘Living with Floods: People’s Perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(29): 2756–61. Petrella, R. (2001). The Water Manifesto, London: Zed Books and Banglore: Books for Change. Rangachari, R. (1999). ‘Some Disturbing Questions’, Seminar, 478, June. Shah, M. (2002). ‘Water Policy Blues’, The Hindu, 7 June. ——— (2004). ‘Rethinking Watershed Strategy’, The Hindu, 29 January. Shah, T. (1993). Groundwater Markets and Irrigation Development. Bombay: Oxford University Press. ——— (2004). ‘Water and Welfare: Critical Issues in India’s Water Future’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(12): 1211–13. Shiva, V. (2002). Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit. New Delhi: India Research Press. The Hindu: Articles on the hydrology of water-harvesting: Chetan, P., ‘Hydrology of Rainwater Harvesting’, The Hindu, Open Page, 10 February 2004. Mihir, S., ‘Rethinking Watershed Strategy’, The Hindu, leader page, 29 January 2002. Iyer, R.R., ‘Water-Harvesting: a Policy Perspective’, The Hindu, leader page, 27 January 2004. Narasimhan, T.N., ‘Rain Harvest and Water Woes’, The Hindu, leader page, 6 January 2004. ——— ‘Water: a Broader Understanding’, The Hindu, leader page, 9 March 2004. Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council. 2003. WASH: From Vision 21 to Action. Power Point Presentation. Geneva: Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, available at the website www.wsscc.org.

3 Misgovernance of Droughts in India Jasveen Jairath

I NTRODUCTION The hunt for a suitable definition of governance (on water and droughts) from amid the exploding literature on the subject led to a never-ending abyss. The artificiality of seeking pure definitions without a commensurate deepening of insights into the problématique further discouraged the search. For the purpose of this chapter, therefore, the decision was taken to work with a simple understanding of the notion of governance—as one that refers to systems of ‘how’ decisions are made, as distinct from the ‘content’ of the decisions, ‘who’ makes them and, finally, ‘how they are executed’. The distinction between the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘who’, and the modalities of the execution of decisions, however, remains more at the intellectually analytical level and may not be substantially real. In the more practical existential form, all these aspects constitute an integral whole necessarily related as a composite process, constituting each other and reproducing itself as a totality. As a consistent togetherness these structures or levels reinforce each other. Embedded within this ‘whole’ of the decision-generating industry is always a particular political agenda and a representation of specific interest groups that gets articulated as the mechanism works itself out through practiced governance. It is therefore implied, first and foremost, that the issue of governance is not politically neutral. It is not merely a question of replacing one set of institutions with another—as often presented in popular fora such as Global Water Partnership (GWP Update 2002). Rather, it is an issue of displacing one set of power structures with another. I deliberately use the word ‘displacing’ and not ‘replacing’ because the former clearly connotes the process of change as a struggle and a contentious process, as opposed to the relatively benign stance indicated by the latter. An understanding of the governance system for droughts in India—its characteristics, dynamics, consequences and possible strategies for change—thus has to take off from a standpoint of ‘how’ ‘whose’ agenda is nurtured and propagated by the existing governance structure, and how this is situated in the overall structure and development of water resources development (WRD). Designing change of governance modes can follow from such an understanding of how the water resources of the country are developed—not as descriptions but as an unraveling of the underlying thrust of social forces that lead to observed patterns of harnessing water as a historical process of evolution. An understanding of droughts—commonly perceived as water

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scarcity—has to be linked to the total WRD process, i.e., as to how ‘decisions are taken’ about making water available for human use and how it is in fact ‘utilised’ by ‘which’ category of consumers. It is in this context that we have to assess how droughts are understood, discussed and decided upon. The following questions, for instance, need to be raised: what are the realities of droughts and how are these interpreted to arrive at a diagnostics of the situation that ultimately underscores related policies and actions? In other words, how does the discourse on droughts influence the governance of droughts that is consciously designed? What happens when designed governance mechanisms fail? What is the nature of de facto governance that exists ‘by default’ in the absence of a formal institutional mechanism of governance—howsoever weak and inadequate? This governance, by default, results from the independent, ad hoc and fragmented/isolated decisions that are taken by individuals to respond to experienced water scarcities. The net of such anarchy of decision making brings to fore some patterns of water scarcity impacts that were never designed by any agency. They occur due to uncoordinated decisions, taken in isolation from each other, and contribute to the emergence of the aggregate water scenario with its skewed characteristics of water availability. This is akin to the anarchy of market regulation—where the composition of total social-production follows by default from interaction of complex forces in the market place. This is in contrast to realising planned output by deliberate design. The discursive domain on droughts also influences this spectrum of decisions that entail acting on droughts in a particular direction. Hence, it is also a governance mechanism—albeit by default. This chapter thus takes—as its point-of-departure—the popular discourse on droughts. It explains how it legitimises the political agenda of prevalent governance mechanisms to lead to decisions that may in fact aggravate differentially experienced water scarcity, which are constituted within the overall WRD decisions, and not as something independent. Thus, observed adversities are not due to water scarcity per se but due to misgovernance. Such a position prominently recognises the role of human intervention as an agency of coming to terms with natural extremes of climate change and avoids fatalistic notions of droughts resulting from the ‘wrath of Gods’.

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Uncertainty, Scarcity and Risk in Context of Water In the context of recent development debates1 on the theme of ‘uncertainties’ and associated risks, with respect to sustainable availability of natural resources, we focus on the issue of water availability vis-à-vis societies and the accompanying water-related risks. In recent decades, it has been estimated that the scale and frequency of water-related risks due to human induced factors are overtaking ‘naturally’ caused disasters. The burden of loss is 13 times more in underprivileged countries, which points to a greater vulnerability of the poor within these countries.

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Droughts have accounted for 11 per cent of the total disasters—35 per cent of which were located in Asia. It has been estimated that economic losses from water disasters comprise 20 per cent of new investments needed in the water sector (World Meteorological Organization [WMO] 2004). Droughts have been a major source of loss in the last 40 years—India suffered the largest fatalities during the 1965–67 droughts, with a total of 1,500,000 victims. This is over and above even the combined droughts in Africa during 1972–75, where the fatalities were 250,000 (WMO 2004). The generally accepted view is that the recorded losses were underestimated and could be—at least—doubled, if the consequences of many smaller and unrecorded disasters that cause significant losses at the community level are taken into account. Risks are born of many natural as well as human induced phenomena and are typically manifested through droughts, floods and pollution of fresh water sources. As we will argue later, risks arise not only due to extreme climatic fluctuations but more because of a weakness in coping with the same, i.e., in poor proactive preparedness to face risks in underprivileged countries. Management of risk and uncertainty, therefore, constitutes an integral part of planning for water and livelihood security. Sectoral approaches that have been adopted in the past for the development of water resources in most countries have probably limited the capacity for effective management of risk and uncertainty. Integrated water resource management (IWRM) as the new paradigm of WRD—that recognises the interconnectedness of water with various social sectors—may be better able to handle such complex issues of risks associated with uncertain access to water. The level of risk from sudden natural disasters is contingent on the vulnerability of society, coupled with the probability that hazard will occur. Vulnerability, whether political, social or economic, is in turn a function of the sociological situation of a community and is related to inequalities, gender relations, ethnic and racial affiliations, and so on. Risk reduction amounts to reducing vulnerability and is very much dependent on the nature of human intervention in terms of its timing and content of actions. Following the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR 1990–99), the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) was adopted by all governments with the aim to mobilise governments, UN agencies, regional bodies, civil society bodies and private sectors to prioritise mitigation of water-related risks, which, probably, can never be entirely eliminated. In this context, three main components of risk management are pointed out (Dilley 2001): first, to know, identify and understand the risks; second, to implement measures to reduce these risks if possible; and, third, since uncertainties cannot always be known in advance, to share the risks or spread them over a larger area or population so as to dilute its concentrated impact. Acknowledging that it is never possible to reduce the risks to zero, the challenge is to minimise them.2 As stated during the international conference in Bonn: ‘It is impossible to design a system that never fails (fail-safe). What is needed is to design a system that fails in a safe way (safe-fail)’ (Kundezewicz 2001). The main challenge, however, is to overcome the high incidence of limitations of existing governance systems, particularly in the context of continuing poverty in the Third World countries.

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Limitations of Existing Governance International commitments need to be followed up with political action by governments acting towards proactive risk reduction. However, it is observed that politicians all over have incentives to balance the allocation of resources in a way that preserves their political support. As noted by WMO: ‘In the political environment therefore, policy responds more to shorter-term [emphasis added] concerns than to long-term structural measures. One practical consequence is that, to be effective, policy analyses and formulation needs to be adapted to preferences of policy makers’ (WMO 2004: 282). Second, as is reinforced later, ‘while supported by technically advanced methodology, programmes and investments, water sector risk management terms of political economy is still based on reactive (emphasis added) approaches and therefore has limited political currency’ (ibid.). This has serious implications for the governance of droughts as a long-term and proactive measure for disaster management that is integral to policy, planning and practice of water. International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) has identified the following constraints as widely observed for effective risk management: (i) Geo-political conflicts dominated the 1990s’ humanitarian agenda to the exclusion of reducing vulnerability. (ii) Risk reduction is not an integral part of water resources development and management (WRD&M) and neither is it integrated into the political economic allocation process in the water sectors or other strategic sectors. (iii) Risk reduction is viewed as a technical problem, and often the underlying factors that compel people to live in insecure conditions are ignored.3 (iv) Donors dedicate far fewer sources to risk reduction than to relief. (v) Cost recovery of risk reduction is unreliable as it is more in the nature of a public good. With increasing privatisation of WRD and reduced role of the state, national governments are facing increasing budgetary constraints for pro-active risk reduction measures (IFRC 2002). Commenting on governance of risk management the WMO study notes: Risk and uncertainty continue to represent weak links in water management systems … there is a call to national governments and international organisations for alternative management approaches and adjusted governance responsibilities that need to be recognised, assessed and acted upon … risk management and uncertainty are expected to emerge as major social and political challenges in water resources in the next decades … the evolution is towards wider social responsibility to control also the causes of disasters (WMO 2004: 285). Noting the shift from natural to human induced disasters and from known/manageable risks to greater uncertainty, it has been thus noted: Observed solutions based on engineering sciences are becoming increasingly ad hoc, fragmented and reactive and generally insufficient. In the last decade, debates on water

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Jasveen Jairath governance and on management of water risk have increasingly been redirected to include ethical demands and management concepts based on political and economic realities. This change in governance responsibilities and attitudes has importance to the immediate victims of the disasters, who tend to be the poor and marginalized populations, but with special impact on women and children (WMO 2004: 288).

Thus, there is a need for an ideological and practical imperative to revisit the issue of risk management through public discourse, at global, national and local levels.

Droughts and Poverty Droughts in the poor regions are often related to distribution problems, know-how and human and capital resources (Priscoli and Llamas 2001). Drought mitigation strategies may aim to reduce vulnerability through various measures, such as altering land use patterns and agricultural practices. Alternatively, water can be transferred from non-affected areas through contingency planning for protecting priority uses in areas affected by water scarcity. Reallocation of populations is another avenue that is explored but is limited by the social and political capacity of poorer countries to operationalise the migration and rehabilitation, which remain very ‘thorny’ issues. It is clear, however, that drought-related adversities are rooted more in poverty than in low rainfall per se. (See Bandyopadhyay [1989] for an illustration of complex linkages of rainfall and droughts.) Mitigation efforts, therefore, have to be embedded in povertyalleviation strategies through assured access to water for livelihood security. In traditional societies, water users had evolved localised systems of water management that were not ideally egalitarian but comprised a degree of local self-reliance dictated partly due to compulsions of simpler technologies. They were also more ‘in control’ over their natural environment as they had direct access to natural sources. With a shift of responsibility for these functions into the hands of the state, communities were increasingly alienated from their control over the management of water resources. Recently, with increased deregulation, privatisation and liberal market economic policies, states may also find a resource crunch due to which they are unable to fulfill their obligations towards risk prevention. This may lead to an increase in the vulnerability of the marginalised segments of population. However, it does mean that local communities had developed mechanisms to cope with periods of water stress by adjusting their lifestyles accordingly, during extreme climatic and economic variations. A serious weakness in the governance of risk mitigation is the poor adaptive capacity of underprivileged communities to accommodate the droughts in their already precarious lives. The poor, in fact, are most vulnerable to disasters (Moench and Dixit 2004). Flood and drought are also the major causes of poverty and displacement of poor populations. Very little data is available on the linkages between disasters and poverty, but statistics show that victims of disasters are concentrated in places where preparedness has been low, with most of the population living in low-quality housing and under-degraded environment. Exposed to health

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hazards resulting from disasters—without the capacity to prepare for the same or re-establish a life-supporting condition afterwards—the immiserisation of such communities is further aggravated.

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Highlighted here are some prominent aspects of the discourse on water scarcity. These reflect a technical interpretation of the issues involved and reinforce conceptualising them in terms of technical quantum (of water) divorced from their institutional context. This serves to reinforce the water shortage thesis as essentialism. This ‘inherentness’ of water shortage—sought to be established as an axiom—constitutes the rationale for water enhancing approaches that are proposed as exclusive options, often at the cost of more balanced packages that could be based on the relative assessment of quantum, distribution and the institutional aspects of WRD as an integrated bundle. It is argued that the scarcity discourse contains within it a technical and a social conceptualisation of the problématique that easily lends itself to technocratic solutions that are posed in a mechanistic framework. While not discounting the role and efficacy of technical and engineering inputs to solve the water crises, issues of technology choice, technical change and absorption/diffusion of particular technical trajectories need to be situated in a specific social/institutional context. Major decisions pertaining to technical choices are, very often, based on political considerations. Ignoring the sociological contextualising of the water problem and treating it as a balancing game of physical quantum amounts to methodological reductionism that abstracts from the complexities of how water is made available and utilised. The unrealism of such a viewpoint leads to equally unrealistic prescriptions that fail to deliver. The dismal performance of most large surface irrigation projects in South Asia has been extensively documented and corroborates the same. (See Paranjape and Joy [2004], for a recent review of the water sector developments in India.)

Relative vs. Absolute Droughts To begin with, we briefly highlight some of the typical modes of conceptualising water scarcity by the state in the popular media, academia and generally as perceived by the community—the lay as well as the better informed. It has been observed that portrayals of absolute scarcity of water along with its associated adversities (that are undeniably very real)—from different parts of the country—constitute the rationale for a focus on ‘absolute shortage of water’ in society. Such a picture is presented to the exclusion of a possible (but not adopted) perspective that water scarcity for ‘some’ can arise due to water monopoly by others. This causal and relational aspect of scarcity for some (that may affect their minimum livelihood needs) and the relative scarcity for others (that may be related to the accepted standards of living beyond their mere survival) tends to be obscured when a general notion of ‘water shortage’ is floated and is

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widely and uncritically accepted by all. This also raises the question of what is ‘scarcity’ and what is ‘surplus’. Clearly the notion of ‘less’ is vis-à-vis an assumed and accepted level of what is adequate. The implicit assumption of an accepted standard of enough or satisfactory water availability is, however, never explicitly articulated. As such, this water shortage, relative to a reference point, is presented as an ‘absolute’ water shortage. Second, these experienced water shortages may not be generated so much by less ‘naturally’ available water as by its poor management and/or distribution.5 For example, there is ample evidence that points to the experienced water shortages in locales relatively well-endowed with natural sources of water— while naturally water deficient regions do not suffer ’droughts’ to the expected extent due to better preparedness.6 The artificiality of water scarcity—created with reference to surface, ground and in situ water due to misplaced water practices and policies—has encouraged production patterns and lifestyles requiring concentrated over-exploitation of water, generating negative externalities for the economically and politically weaker segments of society (Bandyopadhyay 1989). The empirical evidence on the relativity of notions of ‘scarcity’ and ‘surplus’ is never brought to the fore and they are passed on as absolutely constituted terms. The foregoing is not to deny recognition of the serious implications of less ‘than normally expected’ availability of water through natural modes. However, how this less-than-normal water quantum is shared among socially, ethnically, economically and gender differentiated segments of society—to generate an equally differential experience of water scarcity—is the pertinent question that never gets posed. Unconsciously, such an understanding pervades deeply in the popular psyche. We have discussed some of the implications of fudging the differences between absolute and relative droughts and the associated policy implications of such popular misconceptions, in so far as they underlie the broad direction of decisions undertaken by public sector institutions for developments of water resources in the country under the banner of alleviating water shortages (Jairath and Mustafa 2002). Ironically, the consequences of such decisions generate new patterns of exclusion and inclusion to the new sources of water thus made selectively available. These new differentials in the access to water, therefore, create further relative scarcity for those excluded.

Exploding Population and Food Security A second strand of thinking that influences the understanding as a cause of, and response to, water scarcity is the perception of the rising population as a pressure on a limited natural resource such as water. Quoting the increase in population in developing countries such as India (an undeniable empirical statistic) it is argued, first, that this is one of the major causes of water shortages since more people’s livelihoods have to be supported from existing water sources. Alternatively, it is noted that the population growth has surpassed the growth in water resources and this imbalance is reflected in the observed shortages. Second, there is the need to produce an increasing amount of food as there are more mouths to feed. More food production requires more water. This explains both the cause of water scarcity—due to

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greater use of water for food production—and the need for greater investments in the water sector to make up for the existing deficit to increase food production. Implicit in this analysis is support for investing in large surface irrigation works. The argument offered is that such a step would support process of industrialisation, generate employment and meet increased demand for food through extension of irrigation, and so on. Based on the assessments of per capita consumption of food and population growth, projections of increasing food demand are postulated.7 Per capita calculations seriously violate the highly-skewed income distribution in most countries (in South Asia) that reflect the access to food through the market. To begin with—and as argued—the co-existence of surplus foodgrain that co-exists with under-nourished population (Bandyopadhyay and Perveen 2004) and starvation deaths clearly belies the suggestion that people are hungry because they are too many. Rather, the message that the issue of food deprivation of the poorer majority cannot be explained by its lack of availability within the country (in the present historical juncture) is loud and clear. Ironically, in the case of one of the worst drought years of 2001, the country decided to increase the export of foodgrains by 75 per cent in 2002–03—when there was a 15 per cent fall in production/procurement. From 48 lakh tonnes of exports in the preceding year, the exports went up to 124 lakh tonnes, which made India the sixth highest wheat exporting country in the world (Parsai 2003). In the light of incontrovertible evidence that points to discriminatory access to water by poor and marginalised sections of the population (Paranjape and Joy 2004), it is untenable to argue that increasing population growth is responsible for accentuating pressure on water sources. Mamdani (1973), in his classic research on demographic trends in India, notes that most of the increase in population takes place precisely in the poorer classes for various sociological reasons of old age security, infant mortality, increasing family income through additional labour, and so on. The adoption of family planning practices is strongly correlated with rise in income levels. Hence the suggestion that development is the best contraceptive. This being the case to apportion the blame for creating pressure on scarce water resources on precisely that majority—which is in fact denied the security of basic minimum water needs—does not hold water! (Sainath 2004: series of recent articles on livelihood implications of water deprivation in the southern states of India). Besides, water for livelihood accounts for not more than 10–15 per cent of total water consumption (Paranjape and Joy 2004). How can 15 per cent of the total social demand create water shortage, when a majority cannot even comfortably access water sources? Or, is it the dynamics of the balance—for 80 per cent of which irrigation is the highest consumer—that has to be explored to understand generation of scarcity of water due to monopolisation/concentration within particular constituencies. These hypotheses need to be explored through analysis of disaggregated data, before arriving at a conclusion that rising or high population causes water scarcity.

Poor Precipitation Third, water scarcity is typically explained through fluctuations in the natural precipitation in an area, region or country. Most drought studies explain the observed phenomena in terms

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of rainfall fluctuations, its spread over the annual cycle and its variation from an expected normal over the years. Two points need to be noted in this context. First, the evolution of drought-proneness of an area very often cannot be explained in terms of a secular decline in precipitation. For example, in Mahbubnagar district, Andhra Pradesh, there is extensive empirical evidence from the drought belt of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka to illustrate the point that water scarcities may be accentuated in spite of normal precipitation over extended periods of time (Jairath 2004; Bandyopadhyay 1989). That is, the emergence of water scarcity—as distinct from the natural/historical/longstanding aridity of a region—cannot be directly correlated to loss of natural water available without empirical substantiation. It is possible to observe rising indices of drought-like conditions—such as an increase in cultivable wasteland over a period that is not cultivated due to the non-availability of water—under conditions of normal average precipitation (Jairath and Mustafa 2002). This has reference to an abnormality in ‘available water’ relative to a shared expectation of the normal. Second, as pointed out by Bandyopadhyay (1989), the already drought-prone areas, or those areas with a very low level of precipitation, do not necessarily suffer from droughts even during lean periods, since they have evolved strategies of land/water use that provide an insurance against annual rainfall fluctuations. Where normal precipitation is low, and communities have learnt to adjust to low water consumption over the years, water scarcity cannot be confused for a drought-like situation. Just like other forms of extreme climatic fluctuations, the issue is not of natural hazard or climatic change, but of the capacity of social units to cope with a proactive process of preparedness. The reference here is not made towards what is broadly referred to as ‘coping’ by poor communities affected by droughts. Being prepared to face a natural/climatic hazard through socially secured systems that are depended on to guarantee a reasonable sustenance during the adversity is very different from the ex-post ‘coping’ that poor communities usually do—and which is derived from their vulnerability and precarious existence. ‘Coping’, for them, is an act of desperation in a situation of distress that is motivated by an attempt to mitigate the adversity. The point is to compare and contrast the relative ease of the wealthy with the distress of the vulnerable. During one of the worst and persistent droughts in the Anantpur village in Mahabubnagar district, economically well-of sections continued to drought-proof their existence through purchased/imported water. This is not to deny the constraints that, for instance, an abnormal drop in rainfall can create in a locality; but one has to examine whether local initiatives to cope with expected rainfall fluctuations (that may have evolved over the years) have been strengthened, consolidated or dislocated through investments in WRD projects. What has been the nature of state support to enhance stability and manage the crises? To what extent has the ‘adaptive capacity’ to handle the water scarcity, through various long and short term interventions in the past, been effective? A priori claim to hold rainfall fluctuations per se responsible for water scarcity related adversities are thus open to question. This is not to deny the relevance of precipitation as an explanatory variable, but its specific role needs to be elaborated in the local context.

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Technological Defining of Scarcity Water scarcity has been officially conceptualised as the onset of droughts that have been categorised as follows (this is more or less universally accepted): (i) Metrological—due to lack of precipitation. (ii) Hydrological—due to lack of water in streams and aquifers. (iii) Agricultural—when conditions are unable to sustain agricultural and livestock production (Hounam et al. 1975). Within this categorisation, there is a wide diversity of specific definitions that are adopted by different countries. See Singh and Ballabh (2002) for the case of India. Abstracting from the definitional details, however, the point is that official acceptance of such a representation of droughts indicates a technological interpretation of water scarcity. Such identification is then followed by interventions as a response to the situation arrived at through laid-out governance procedures. This has two pitfalls. One, communities that have been suffering from endemic water scarcity due to social and political reasons—in spite of not showing up as drought affected as per the above criteria—get ignored and continue to suffer impoverishment due to sustained water deprivation. Two, as a governance mechanism, it sets into motion a politically motivated scramble for ‘qualifying’ droughts by the politically shrewd in order to appropriate financial and material resources designated to alleviate the hardship of those critically affected by prolonged persistence of drought conditions. The misgovernance thus generated is, therefore, built into the mechanistic and statistical identification of droughts by the bureaucracy that consolidates its monopoly to certify the fact of droughts and thereby establishes its ‘control’ over the highly lucrative flow of resources designated for drought relief. The situation offers an ideal opportunity for corruption and other forms of misgovernance to flourish at the cost of those who continue to perish with thirst. In his aptly-titled book, Everyone Loves a Good Drought (1996), P. Sainath brings into sharp relief the nexus between corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, businesses and the locally powerful political elite to corner the resources meant to provide succor to those in immediate distress induced by water scarcity. Assessment of water security undertaken through such indices and statistical categories for the purpose of policy formulation and planning is thus based on misrepresentations of ground realities that are conceptually embedded. Such ‘constructed information’ reinforces arguments to support supply, augmenting WRD through, for example, projects like the interlinking of rivers.

Polarity of Natural vs. Human Induced Scarcities Water scarcity, howsoever interpreted, has been traditionally understood as being primarily a ‘natural’ disaster caused by lower than expected precipitation. It is ‘god given’—as is argued—and, thus, beyond our control. The only action that can possibly be taken is a passive response of ‘adjusting/adapting’ to the sudden and unpredictable reductions in rainfall. Such

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a viewpoint has, of late, been replaced by the recognition of the increasing contribution of human-induced factors towards creating water scarcity, factors that interfere with nature or are responsible for mismanaging water (WMO 2004). This leads to the well-accepted perception of managerial deficiencies in water management. It is argued that it is the problematic management and use of water, the associated wastage/inefficiencies, economic under-valuation, uneconomic allocation mechanisms, and so on, that leads to observed patterns of water shortages. The prescription following such diagnostics is that we need to improve the governance structure through reforming the managerial institutions in the water sector—like government departments, instituting water user organisations, urban water utilities, and so on. In some cases, it is argued that this may require private-sector participation, as—driven by the profit motive—their managerial efficiency is expected to be high. It also calls for revamping the whole technical system of water resource development, delivery systems, etc., through infrastructural investments. To categorise factors responsible for generating water scarcity into exclusive sets of natural or man-made parameters remains a variant of the essentialist perspective that considers explanatory variables in an either/or context. Complexities of social processes leading to water deprivation by some sections of the population may require a diverse set of interwoven factors to produce particular patterns of water access (or its denial). To situate the respective aspects in opposition to one another is to misdirect not only the discourse, but also the search for solutions. No doubt there is some element of truth in each of the foregoing professions. Natural/climatic factors do certainly create the physical limits to the quantum of water that is available for tapping. Mismanagement of water certainly creates problems of water delivery and wastage and there is no denying that this state of affairs is not desirable. But will technical and managerial strategies, by themselves, produce better distribution of water that ensures the basic livelihoods water requirements of the majority? Can equity be guaranteed through managerial reforms per se? On the other hand, if it is an issue of political control over resources that constitutes the fundamental contradiction, then the corresponding strategy of redressal would be through negotiations and contestations. It is not that there is not enough water for all in nature—it is the exclusion of the majority from God’s bounty that builds their thirst. It is not the harshness of ‘mother nature’, but the violation of her generosity that constitutes the denial of basic water to those who have no voice and no name. Hesitation to face this political reality upfront is often responsible for the ‘muddy’ discourse on water scarcity where the consequence (less water availability to the majority) is confused for the cause (less water is available for this majority), pre-empting proper diagnostics and resulting prescription. Painkillers and cosmetic remedies—such as a preoccupation with drought relief and other drought mitigation factors— engage the governance of water scarcity, while purely technical solutions such as river linking projects are propagated as a response to purely naturally perceived limitations of water availability. This serves to divert attention away from the more intractable issue of rights to water and strategies for their implementation through a radical reorientation of the pattern of water use that is unlikely to be realised voluntarily.

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Demand Management Of late, the notion of ‘demand management’ of water has gained currency as counter-posed to supply focused discourse and practice, that is characteristic of the state sector as a response to balance the prevalent exclusive focus on creation of supply facilities for water. Water management, it is argued, should focus on the analyses of water demand which is generally interpreted as the pattern of water use as it actually exists—and not that which may be desirable, based on considerations of equity, efficiency and ecological sustainability. This is followed by extrapolation of these past trends of water use to estimate water requirements at some future date. The steps that follow are: one, investigating how such an estimated demand can be met through augmenting water supplies; two, exploring strategies of increasing productivity of water use in existing uses; and three, focusing on strategies for reducing waste in water use (not wasteful avenues of use). That is, the emphasis is on the reduction of wastage in specific use without questioning if using water for that particular purpose as such may be a relative wastage from a broader social viewpoint. The issue of competitive use of water is seldom raised in the context of wastage of water. While it is difficult to find fault with most of the preceding points, it may be noted that any attempt to raise issues of reorienting the whole pattern of water intensive lifestyles and production system is conspicuous by its absence. There is no attempt to question the following: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

how existing water sources are used (mode of using); who uses them (issue of access/control); for what purpose are they used (issue of alternative uses); and regulation of water use or its absence (equity implications).

Conventional demand management is thus reduced to an exercise of water accounting that provides other avenues to rationalise the ‘need for greater water quantum’ thesis. Demands, however, emerge as the net of decisions taken across the economy in response to pressures of local, national and international markets, processes of globalisation, neoliberal policies of privatisation, the reduced role of the state, and so on. This mediates its own pressures of production and consumption that need water use for their reproduction. Thus, water demands are constituted through a complex social process (Moench et al. 2004) that has to be understood and unraveled prior to intervening for change. In this context, it is necessary to assess water needs as distinct from its demands and explore strategies of ensuring need satisfaction as a priority. For comprising a meaningful basis for long-term water resources development and management (WRD&M), planning demand management should be replaced by ‘use and need management’ that examines the totality of the patterns of water use in society as integrated with overall production paradigms and policies (or their absence) which stimulate particular patterns of water consumption through a corresponding system of incentives. This would need to be followed by strategies for instituting alternative incentive packages and institutional changes for shifting water use along lines that is consistent with declared social and developmental objectives. This is a process of struggle between contending

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interests and requires capacities for skillful negotiation and not merely a wishful expression for a stronger political will. For instance, strategies for the social mobilisation of water audits at the local level could be one of the action points for developing a meaningful water plan that could then be advocated for implementation—to the extent that water can be planned and regulated at the local level. This is an area that begs detailed research, data collection and experimental trails of proposed alternative water use patterns at localised levels that can be dovetailed into aggregative/macro basin level planning.

D ROUGHTS D ISCOURSE AND L EGITIMISATION OF W ATER R ESOURCES D EVELOPMENT (WRD) The foregoing aspects of the discourse set the stage for a WRD trajectory that was followed in India, which takes less water availability as the starting point of departure—without further critical assessment of the problem. While such a standpoint cannot be disputed, its reductionist orientation of concentrating on the creation of supply structures to the exclusion of concomitant attention to conditions of water regulation and utilisation constitutes its major weakness. Without going into the details of WRD in India in the post-Independence period that has been sketched elsewhere (Paranjape and Joy 2004), it will suffice to note its prominent features: • Large scale, top-down, technocratic focus based on state intervention (public sector) for surface irrigation through river water harnessing. • Indirect support of private irrigation through credit and infrastructural support for privately-owned bore wells from 1970 and onwards. • A gradual decline of irrigation by other means such as community maintained tanks in South India and Ahar and Pyne systems in Bihar. • Dug wells along the Indo-Gangetic plains, and so on, as these became dysfunctional due to externalities of public and new forms of private irrigation. These developments were associated with significant ecological adversities such as water logging, salinity and declining groundwater table in the recent decades—all due to poor regulation of water use through supply structures that were created. Their creation itself was beset with a number of financial and operational inefficiencies as well as the range of governance problems that afflict the water sector; which have been well documented in literature. Commenting on the weak and misgovernance in the water sector on the World Water Day Vaidyanathan (2004) notes the following: …the emphasize [sic] and preoccupation (of government plans and policy pronouncements) continues to be overwhelmingly in favor of massive investments to augment water supply… the sad and brutal truth is that the situation on the ground is getting worse, not better.

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Conflicts are worsening; pollution is unabated; groundwater levels continue to fall; rivers are drying up; and there is no sign of greater efficiency or prudence in using water. The root cause of this is weak governance and massive misgovernance of water by the state…. Locally powerful people use their political connections and bribery to get water for unauthorised crops and for longer duration than prescribed. Punitive action is seldom taken…failure of governments to ensure that allocations and scheduling of water in public systems conform to clearly specified rules, to enforce regulations concerning groundwater extraction…another area of misgovernance is in the implementation of programmes for water supply schemes, soil conservation, and watershed development…instances of incomplete works, works of poor quality and sometimes no work at all are numerous…substantial kickbacks in local works to elected representatives and the bureaucracy at the district and sub-district levels have become more or less a common practice…the entire system has become a brazen but highly effective mechanism for siphoning public funds ostensibly meant for the benefit of rural areas and poor people…without addressing these problems of weak…and bad governance it is futile to expect significant progress in improving the quality of water resource management, averting over-exploitation and degradation…. Notwithstanding the diversity of water analyses comprising the discourse, it is widely recognised that WRD in India has been associated with serious problems regarding access to water and the quality of supply creation. For the governances of droughts, this has the following implications. First, as previously argued, the rationale of WRD decisions has been basically derived from the discourse on droughts that is strongly grounded in uncritical acceptance of the notion of water scarcity as naturally ordained. This legitimises the powerful thrust on water augmentation policies and practices. A serious developmental fallout of broader misgovernance of such WRD has been the observed discriminatory access to/control of water, thus, ‘augmented’ by that very section of the population in whose name the investments are justified. Ruining the freshwater sources through pollution of surface/groundwater sources and depriving the poorest in rural areas from drinking water through hand pumps (that are thus rendered dysfunctional) due to over-pumping of water for water-intensive crops by the large land owners are glaring illustrations of cases in point. The following experience of the Watershed Organisations Trust (WOTR) further reinforces this: A rough estimate shows that more than Rs 25,000 crore has been spent so far on drought relief, but the number of scarcity villages are only increasing [emphasis added]. Maharashtra ranks first in the country for the number of large and medium dams, despite which only 15 per cent of the area is irrigated. Irony of the fact is that there are 160 sugar factories in this scarcity state and almost 60 per cent of the water is being used for sugarcane cultivation in less than 4 per cent of the area… (The Watershed Family 2004). Competitive displacement of the weaker members of community from the access to water that they formerly enjoyed—as in the case of dug wells drying up due to over-pumping by

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the landowning class—further illustrates the creation of absolute droughts for those deprived. Evidence about such discriminatory dislocations of the socio-economically vulnerable sections in a region has also been documented (Whitcombe 1972) for the United Provinces during the colonial period. As noted earlier, it is ironic that the excluded are typically the same segment of population, for whom water deprivation has been recognised in the official discourse and used to rationalise the creation of water supply. This, thus, illustrates the creation of relative and absolute droughts precisely for those whose drought was supposed to be alleviated through such WRD. It is the first paradox that begs for an answer from the governance managers. Second, hard realities of severe and glaring water-induced adversities that are, in fact, experienced by the most vulnerable—and, sometimes, even by the relatively well-off—do assume a serious matter of concern for the state as the custodian of people’s welfare. Separate and independent governance mechanisms, therefore, have evolved within the country to respond to this incontrovertible evidence of physical suffering that communities do in fact experience in different parts of the country and during different time periods. We briefly outline these governance modes that are instituted specifically to handle the phenomena of droughts. At the outset, however, it may be noted, first, that these mechanisms are, by and large, disconnected from and independent of the WRD trajectory as previously noted (i.e., they do not constitute an integral part of planning, designing and executing a water project as a part of state intervention); and, second, that they constitute a set of reactive measures to an ‘officially recognised disaster’ and remain top down, palliative and cosmetic in nature. As such, they are highly inadequate to provide the professed ‘relief’ from water-induced hardship to those who desperately require it, and before it is too late—considering it is not feasible to provide relief to a dead person. We note here, one, the weakness of the designed governance mechanisms for handling droughts; two, malfunctioning of even the poorly designed modes of governance and three, the traumatic consequences of governance by default that the drought affected are forced to bear with—in the event of designed systems breaking down, being inaccessible or simply non-existent.8

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Institutions to decide and act upon the ‘disaster’ caused by droughts operate mainly under the aegis of the state. The limited role of the private sector is noticed in areas where adequate return is assured—for instance, through the marketing of bottled water in remote water-stressed areas, offered, of course, at a price that would exclude the neediest. There is a small niche occupied by civil society, through social welfare organisations, undertaken as voluntary work during times of extreme and sudden distress.9 The governance of droughts is primarily under the charge of the ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development. To begin with, a process of drought declaration is initiated if more

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than 50 per cent of the crop is found damaged. This activity is under the charge of the district collector, the Centre has no role to play. A report is then sent from the district to the revenue department and, after the districts are identified, a consolidated report is sent to the central government. Then the central government dispatches a team or taskforce to evaluate the situation, based on whose assessment, it then releases assistance from the Calamity Relief Fund (CRF) and the National Calamity Contingency Fund (NCCF). After receiving the funds and foodgrains, the district collector undertakes a final distribution in various forms—food, drinking water, financial and/or other resources, etc. Typically, state intervention for the short-term management of droughts takes the form of implementing drought-relief measures. Relief measures—undertaken in an area after it has been officially recognised or declared as drought affected—comprise the following: employment generation programmes in drought affected areas; provision of drinking water and actual food during critical time; and special programmes for women, children, the aged, and the infirm. Employment generation is undertaken under the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana (SGRY) and its sub-component of food-for-work, sponsored by the central government. In addition, states also take up special relief programmes under CRF/NCCF through various development departments like minor irrigation, Public Works Department (PWD), Forest, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), and so on. Employment programmes are implemented through public works, such as de-silting of tanks in rural areas, road construction, and the like. Provision of drinking water for people and cattle is undertaken by deepening of bore wells, sinking of new ones, repair of hand pumps, transport of water through tankers, purchase of water from private bore well owners and supply to drought affected areas, etc. (See the report of the National Institute for Rural Development [NIRD 2003] for a survey of recent management of drought relief in some of the affected states.) The management line of the above programmes runs through the general administrative machinery. However, the involvement of water organisations/departments is conspicuous by its absence. Free supply of electrical power to the farm sector as a form of drought relief is a populist slogan of many political parties. Without digressing into the political agenda underlying provision of free power in agriculture to farmers as an immediate relief to cope with droughts, it may be pointed that such a facility: • Encourages deeper mining of groundwater sources in areas where water levels are already falling at an alarming rate—thus contributing to increasing the water crises in the long run. • Comprises special subsidy to the landed class while it causes water deprivation to the landless/resource poor who are dependent on hand pumps for their bare survival needs, which becomes dysfunctional due to declining water tables. • Constitutes an incentive for water intensive land use patterns and discourages exploring and adoption of low water use production and life patterns. • Assumes that free power translates itself automatically into free water. Lured by free electricity, many farmers go for multiple drilling of bore wells for agriculture inspite of a

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failure to strike water. This constitutes tremendous financial burden—very often leading to indebtedness and ultimately suicides in rural areas (Sainath 2004). • Fails to maintain infrastructure (electricity) as a result of insufficient resources with the government agencies and transfers the burden of maintenance on users—which neutralises the financial advantage of free power. • Comprises a subsidy that is biased towards larger landowners as they are larger consumers of electricity—land based inequities are thus reinforced. • Remains more of a fire-fighting measure and does not build any long-term security in terms of access to a water source.

Watershed Programme: Long-term Strategy A separate track of interventions that aim at conservation of water through watershed activities in the rural areas undertaken in the Desert Development Programme (DDP) and Drought Prone Areas Programme (DPAP) districts attempts to achieve this through implementing measures for groundwater and in situ moisture at the level of micro-watersheds. It is administered through the Ministry for Rural Development (MRD) from the central government and Commissioners of Rural Development in the state and finally through collectors at the district level. The Watershed Programme of the MRD is probably the only major one, on a large-scale, to bring about a structural change in the situation of water security. There is a conscious attempt to introduce institutional reforms and reorient the governance of water conservation as a droughtproofing system through micro-watershed based projects implemented by Project Implementing Agencies (PIAs). This initiative does attempt to tackle the problem of water scarcity at a longterm structural level, albeit from a technocratic perspective—in spite of the prominence given to the participation of local communities in the decision making—to implement the programme through an institutional structure that is laid out in the well-known Guidelines for Watershed Development (Hanumantha Rao 1994) that have been the basis of the activities under this programme since the 1990s.10 People’s participation to evolve systems of democratic governance for decentralised water management at the local level is explicitly incorporated in the design of the programme. However, like most state interventions, its top-down character has robbed it of the potential of co-opting all the stakeholders—including the weakest—in the implementation process that could have entailed political empowerment at the field level. While decentralisation of the governance of the watershed institutions was explicitly on the designed agenda of the programmes, field researchers point out serious limitations of grounding the same. A study of the watersheds and joint forest management (JFM) projects in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, on the issue of decentralisation process, note: ‘…current decentralisation policies have not actually changed the structure of rights or the distribution of benefit streams from the Natural Resources themselves. The basic political statement over Natural Resources remains unchallenged, despite the apparent momentum of the agenda for decentralisation….’ (Baumann and Farrington 2003).

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Referring to the asymmetric control over a natural resource (NR) such as water, the study further argues: ‘…centralising political forces constraint both the political and ecological scope of the decentralization agenda…’ (Baumann and Farrington 2003). However, the study notes the displacement of the control of line departments in the local management of NRs and, in that sense, there has been a shift in the governance pattern. But for the lay and the weak, this has not translated itself into empowering access to increased share of water. In terms of political interest, representation of such governance patterns as discussed in the beginning, the study further notes: ‘…decentralisation was a demand of the ascendant agrarian groups from intermediate castes and has provided an instrument for them to secure benefits from the state, from which they and been debarred…’ (ibid.). Certainly, social mobilisation (as proxy to people’s participation) in the project areas has been stirred, but only around the financial resources that a local political leader can draw to the village in which the poor share through time-bound employment opportunities. Collective action on common NRs had been missing, as it was not considered to be worth it. This is still a far cry from broad-based water management at the field level founded on the recognition of livelihood water rights for all, wherein all interest groups can negotiate for their rights over NRs.

Design and Operation of Governance The earlier section delineates main contours of the design of drought governance in a short-term/immediate as well as long-term perspective. Abstracting from the malfunctioning of these systems, to begin with, it may be noted that relief-oriented interventions are crafted in alienation from the field conditions by those disconnected from the sociological emergence of droughts during periods of lower than expected precipitation. They remain ad hoc, fragmented and piecemeal in their execution and have uncertain access by the needy, if at all. The criterion for eligibility for a claim to relief is exposte recognition of the problem. The situation, however, requires proactive preparedness for dealing effectively with the adversity. The criteria, as noted earlier, tends to exclude recognition of droughts that result from chronic water deprivation of, for example, the landless/marginal landowners even during reasonable rainfall years—when crops do not fail drastically and aquifers do not plunge to the abnormal. Symptomatic recognition of droughts is followed by an equally symptomatic prescription for the malady. While short-term/immediate measures in case of such calamities are certainly required to limit the actions to a contingency, this firefighting approach leaves the fundamental problem intact. Such a technocratic and rather simplistic perception of droughts—as being caused by low rainfall—underlies the temporally limited and palliative approach through relief measures that are repeated every drought year, while these years continue to recur with religious regularity. Droughts continue to resonate to the rhythm of the rainfall with increasing amplitude—with neither WRD nor ‘relief’ enabling independence from such climatic fluctuations—which the global north has realised. Accepting rainfall fluctuations as the cause of droughts reinforces the inevitability of naturalistic determinism, thereby blunting the need for evolving strategies for ‘preparedness’. As per the Journal of Hydrological

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Sciences: ‘It is noted that droughts are normal occurrences in climatic systems and not just the extremes. It is in this perspective that preparedness and planning for droughts has to be risk based rather than crises-based…’ (Panu and Sharma 2002: S27). The challenge of drought-proofing is, precisely, to attain independence from vulnerability to natural (and normal) fluctuations in rainfall. Governance thus has to be oriented towards evolving strategies of pro-active preparedness based on the social management of water resources at the local level—gradually evolving to macro levels. Thus, a bottoms-up approach— where drought management is an integral constituent of water management—is required to replace the cosmetic approach that is effective neither in the short run, nor as a long-term structural solution. Whatever be the design defects inherent in governance of handling immediate disasters, its operational features further dilute the effectiveness of interventions undertaken. To begin with, rather than being dictated by priority of regional needs, the process of drought declaration is itself more a process of political negotiation between the central and state governments. Considerations of political alliances through political parties, in and out of power, play a major role in influencing the actual outcome in terms of the amount of foodgrains and funds allocated under the National Calamity Contigency Fund (NCCF)/National Calamity Fund (NCF). This bargaining for relief is subject to imperatives of populist politics where extraneous considerations prevail to clinch the ‘deal’ for relief allocations. Water-starved people, thus, constitute a pawn in the game of power politics. They are ‘used’ to legitimise a claim to resources that escapes those for whom it is intended—to ultimately reach the pockets of middle layers of brokers comprising a club of politicians, contractors, businessmen, government officials and the like. Sections of the politically powerful elite develop a vested interest in the occurrence of droughts and its official declaration. For instance, scams surrounding the Food-For-Work (FFW) programme launched as a drought relief measure during the 2003–05 drought years in Andhra Pradesh, highlight the involvement of prominent politicians in hijacking rice that was allocated under FFW and selling it in the open market to avail of margins due to price differentials (The Hindu 2003). Sainath lays bare these linkages with stark candor in Everyone Loves a Good Drought (1996). The governance system thus plays into the hands of the governors and—criminally—at the cost of those languishing in thirst and hunger for years together.

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As the state-sponsored governance bypasses those for whom water scarcity is an immediate livelihood constraint—and whose condition is most precarious, in that they have no buffer to absorb even the most transient fluctuation of water supply—we now examine how their decisions are governed. Over the years, communities have evolved their own localised responses to recurring fluctuations in rainfall through flexible land-use patterns, food habits, lifestyle adjustments and culturally reinforced practices that encourage frugal water utilisation (Bandyopadhyay 1989). Sharma (2004), in his study on governance of water during the colonial

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period, points to the metaphors in local language, that reflect the ideological exhortation to anticipate saving for a dry—and not for a rainy day! While these may not have been satisfactory on many occasions, the differentials in risk-sharing had also prevailed. However, there was a degree of localised integration of social units including modes of problem-solving—social discrimination notwithstanding. With the onset of modern states, local ties have been replaced by new forms of linkages through impersonal and distant market forces. The state assumes the role of providing social welfare, especially in situations of acute and sudden water distress. The poorest—who have been dislocated from previous forms of social absorption that was locally understood/accessible to them—are now exposed to alien state machinery over which they do not perceive any control. Nor can they access institutional machinery due to sociological backwardness. In the eventuality of state governance breaking down during times of distress, the already vulnerable segments of society are left at the mercy of market forces without any institutional support. Under these insecurities, when vagaries of the market add on to those of natural factors, the poorest make their own decisions born of desperate attempts to survive through various means—taking loans from private moneylenders at usurious rates of interest, migrating for employment, trafficking of women and minors and, as a finality, committing suicide. Patterns of social dislocation observed—at a macro level—due to droughts are the net of a multitude of atomic decisions taken by this most vulnerable section of population to eke out a living amid dire physical stress. These are desperate measures to survive in a hopeless situation and not coping strategies as is often referred to in the literature on droughts. Rather, it is the failure to cope with the odds that calls forth these responses from the poorest. This is referred to as governance by default, i.e., a system of decision making in a situation where no systems are available. The tragedy and irony of interpreting the same as coping cannot be better illustrated than by the study of the Palalmaru labour from Mahabubnagar, where women and children migrate (from drought induced villages) as bonded labour to distant places through a well-evolved system of intermediary contractors who advance credit at rates that ensure perpetual bondage of the families to contractors (Jairath and Mustafa 2002). Some present-day prominent politicians from the area have made their money during yesteryears through such labour contracts. While women are often sexually abused by the contractors lobby, children’s education is made impossible—thus creating generations of labour-fodder. These options are however only for the able-bodied and productive women and men—the aged, sick and weak are left behind in the villages to perish. The media reports, almost daily, of suicides due to indebtedness in the drought-prone areas of South India (Sainath 2004). Ironically, even the petty moneylender—the only one to lend to the poorest who are at least ‘bankable’—is also ruined by bad debts. The second order spread of drought-induced impacts takes its toll from the likes of, for example, the carpenter who committed suicide because his livelihood had been threatened— since he received no orders for wooden ploughs, as ploughing opportunities for smaller (nontractor using) farmers had weakened due to declining agricultural operations. Finally, starvation deaths reported every other day in the media are yet another form of ‘coping’ permanently! Rather than interpreting such stark observations of human adversity as a telling comment on the failure of WRD practiced hitherto (and in spite of heavy investments), the official

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perception uses the situation to reinforce arguments for yet more of the top-down, supplyfocused water developments. Thus, the governance of droughts by default lends itself to fault the governance of water.

C ONCLUDING R EMARKS To recapitulate the basic points we note that: • Governance of droughts is disconnected from mainstream WRD. • Drought mitigation strategies are exposte/reactive and focused on fire-fighting. • Proactive interventions—such as the watershed strategy—that are adopted have inbuilt contradictions that are self-defeating. • Increased privatisation of drinking water biases, service delivery towards those with purchasing power—constituting weak insurance against droughts for the poor. • WRD is typically fragmented and along sectoral lines, and excludes risk management and planning as an integral constituent. • Local self-management of water, supported through minimal exogenous water dependence, should be the preferred strategy. Lifestyle and production patterns should be adjusted to the requirement of local self-reproduction with respect to water availability close at hand. This requires local-level capacity developments to understand water in a holistic context and to negotiate among politically contesting interest groups for greater water security for the majority. We have earlier pointed out how, on the one hand, intellectual obfuscation of the process of generating resource scarcity constitutes a legitimising force for governance of supply augmenting WRD. On the other hand, de-linking scarcity from WRD helps the governance of droughts to be dealt with as a natural disaster in isolation of forces that contribute to its emergence. Conceptualising droughts as absolute water shortage rationalises water augmenting supply-side trajectory of WRD in the public and private sectors that are beset with wellrecognised governance problems. In particular, the inequity in access to benefits from such investments and ecological externalities imply that such harnessing of water creates new forms of differential access/control that directly exclude significant segments of population from a provision of water security. This is further aggravated by the indirect adverse effects of intensive water use (for the already vulnerable) that is concentrated in the hands of the socio-economically privileged social strata in urban, rural and industrial sectors. While some of the socially weaker sections have no doubt shared the benefits of WRD, their continuous, and sometimes increasing, water deprivation is entirely out of proportion with investments carried out in the water sector after independence (Paranjape and Joy 2004). Paradoxically, therefore, it appears that while actual scarcities are deeply entrenched, the plight of those who suffer is used to reinforce walking along the

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same track of WRD that has failed or accentuated the scarcities. Water poverty of the poor subscribes to legitimising governance decisions that reinforces exclusion of these very poor through perpetuating monopolistic control over water by few. Actual droughts lend credence to the manufactured discourse on water scarcities that constitutes the ideological legitimisation of a WRD trajectory, which generates a new set of actual water deprivation among the poor. Thus, ideological misconstruction of droughts leads to its existential construction.11 Hence, the vested interest in cultivating ‘ideological fodder’ for supply-oriented WRD. The present governance system of droughts in India represents sectoral interests of this group. The shift to an alternate system of governance that prominently contains the interest of the most marginalised among the better off is bound to be a struggle that would involve the entire range of policy makers, bureaucracy, legal institutions, end users and the like. Second, mainstream WRD would require being reoriented to integrate pro-active risk management as well as building broader water strategies from an analytic assessment of end users in different water uses. It will require the dislodging of the vested interest that has grown with the maintenance of status quo. This is not likely to be a smooth process. Inertia and resistance to change has to be factored in while designing the strategy. The challenge is to develop suitable negotiating capacities among socially weaker sections as well as skills, in order to mobilise popular support through networking and advocacy. The problem has to be attacked from multiple angles in an integrated manner. The strategy has to be composite and the problem has to be handled on a turnkey basis, avoiding the dangers of an ad hoc, piecemeal and fragmented approach.

Notes 1. Development theories in the post-war period led to an increasing disillusionment with the idea of material progress due to its attendant negative fallouts on the ecological, social and economic front due to exploitative capitalism/industrialisation. A general sense of pessimism prevailed among the development theoreticians. Prominent among them were the apocalypse authors (Bull 1995; Hobsbawn 1994; Kaplan 1994) who predicted the ‘coming anarchy’, ‘clash of civilisations’ and similar, pessimistic-scenarios. An important offshoot of these post-modernist/anti-modernist traditions was the idea of a ‘risk society’ proposed by Ulrich Beck, that focused on the influence of unintended effects of technological development in societies that made any planning futile. Around the same time, the acceptance of the ‘scarcity of natural resources’ also gained currency; further rationalising the argument of the anti-development lobby that advised the poor of the Third World to ‘…forget about the whole notion of scarcity because it forms a part of a strategy to impose capitalist logic on those who do not need it….’ These views were however strongly contested for their relevance—particularly for the global South. Prominent among the critics was Furedi, who challenged the idea that risk, as socially experienced, is something new or recent and that it is associated with only the post-Fordist, capitalist phase. Colonised people had to survive risks due to expansion of western capitalism, since the beginning. Second, he found it opportunist that the West should start talking about the risks only when they are threatened by it—as opposed to formerly exporting it to the South. Third, the notion of an inherently ‘risk society’ projected the misconception that risks are evenly spread—thus discounting geographical and social asymmetry in the spread of risk. It also undermines the necessity for emancipatory actions to

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

Jasveen Jairath be selectively directed towards those who are most vulnerable to risks. Finally, implicit in this notion is a sense of technological determinism and fatalism, thus underrating the power of human agency to overcome risks. Recognising the risk-induced constraints to investment and the huge losses incurred the world over, many international agencies have come forward to take initiatives in this regard: the World Bank has emphasised the need to mitigate risks to attract investment (World Bank 2001); the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has assumed operational responsibilities for natural disaster mitigation, prevention and preparedness within the UN system. Similarly, the World Health Organisation (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation (FAO), the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and GWP have categorically recognised the imperative of adopting integrated risk-based approaches to WRD (WMO 2004). Commenting on the technocratic conceptualisation of risk reduction, the WMO report states: ‘while risk reduction programmes and technology are very important, the call is for enhanced responsibility for social water risk and recognition of a number of basic economic, institutional, legal and commercial constraints to the achievement of effective risk management’ (WMO 2004: 284). This section is based on Jairath (2004). See Priscoli and Llamas 2001, and Bandyopadhyay 1989 for elaboration on and substantiation of this point. See Jayan (2004) for analyses of droughts amidst heavy rainfall in Kerala. See Bandyopadhyay and Perveen (2004) for a brief overview of the issue in the context of the river linking project. While he rightly questions the statistical validity of such exercises, there remains a serious flaw underlying the argument that assumes that food security (like water security) is only a matter of producing a larger quantum of food (water). The latter refers to some of the practical strategies that the poorest are forced to adopt due to their existential desperation born of droughts—euphemistically referred to as coping mechanisms in the literature on droughts. The gruel centres set up by volunteers in Andhra Pradesh during the summer of 2003 are a case in point (The Hindu 5 June 2004). See Concept Note (Soppecom-GIDR-CISED 2004) for details about the programme—its operational characteristics as well as the extent of its coverage and the constraints encountered. The idea was inspired through the various writings of Lyla Mehta (2000, 2001) on her work on droughts in Kutch, Gujarat, India.

References Bandyopadhyay, J. and S. Perveen (2004). ‘Interlinking of Rivers in India: Assessing the Justifications’, Unpublished paper. Kolkata: Centre for Development and Environment Policy, IIM, Calcutta. Bandyopadhyay, J. (1989). ‘Riskful Confusion of Drought and Man-Induced Water Scarcity’, AMBIO (Journal of Human Environment of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 284–92. Baumann, P.J. and Farrington (2003). ‘Decentralizing Natural Resource Management: Lessons from Local Government Reform in India’, ODI No. 86, June. London: Overseas Development Institute. Beck, U., A. Giddens and S. Lash (1994). Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge, England: Polity. Bull, M. (1995). Apocalpse Theory and the Ends of the World. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Dilley, M. (2001). ‘The Use of Climate Information and Seasonal Prediction to Prevent Disasters’. Paper presented for the World Bank during the World Meteorological Organisation Executive Council, Meeting Geneva, 30 April–3 May. Furedi, F. (1997). Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectations. London: Cassell. GWP Update (2002). ‘Dialogue on Effective Governance’, http://www.gwpforum.org/gwp/library/ Governance.pdf. Hobsbawn, E. (1994). The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph. Hounam, C., J. Burgosm, M. Kalik, W. Palmer and J. Rodda (1975). Drought and Agriculture. WMO technical note No. 138. Geneva: World Meteorological Organization. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2002). World Disasters Report. Geneva, 18 June. Jairath, J. (2004). ‘Why Interlinking—Muddy Discourse and Compulsions of Legitimacy’, in M.F. Ahmed, Q.K. Ahmed and M. Khalequzzaman (eds), Regional Cooperation on Transboundary Rivers—Impact of the Indian River Linking Project. Dhaka. Jairath, J. and M. Mustafa (2002). ‘Management of Scarcity and Scarcity of Water Management’. Paper presented in the Workshop on Sustainable Livelihoods and Drought Management in South Asia: Issues, Alternatives and Futures, 28–30 October, Islamabad, Pakistan. Jayan, T.V. (2004). ‘Water Woes in Wet Kerala’, Down to Earth, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 26–29. Kaplan, R. (1994). ‘The Coming of Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet’, Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 273, No. 2, pp. 44–76. Kundzewicz, Z. (2001). ‘Coping Capacity for Extreme Events’. Paper read at the International Conference on Freshwater, 3–7 December, Bonn. Mehta, L. (2000). ‘Drought Diagnosis: Dryland Blindness of Planners’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(27): 2439–45. ——— (2001). ‘Water, Difference and Power: Questioning Notions of Water users in Kutch, India’, International Journal for Water, 1(3/4): 343–59. Mamdani, M. (1973). Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste and Class in an Indian Village. New York: Monthly Review Press. Moench, M., E. Caspari and A. Dixit (2004). Rethinking the Mosaic: Investigations into Local Water Management. Report of the National Water Conservation Foundation (NWCF), Nepal and Institute for Social and Environmental Transition, Boulder, Colorado, USA. Moench, M. and A. Dixit (eds) (2004). Adaptive Capacity and Livelihood Resilience: Adaptive Strategies for Responding to Floods and Droughts in South Asia. Kathmandu, Nepal: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition. NIRD (2003). Rapid Interactive Research Study on Management of Drought: A Study Across 12 States Affected Most by Drought. Unpublished Report, Hyderabad: NIRD. Panu, U.S. and T.C. Sharma (2002). ‘Challenges in Drought Research: Some Perspectives and Future Directions’, Journal of Hydrological Sciences, 47(Special issue): S19–S30. Paranjape, S. and K.J. Joy (2004). Water Sustainable and Efficient Use. Monograph. Ahmedabad: Centre of Environment Education. Parsai, G. (2003). ‘Foodgrain Stocks Reduced’, The Hindu, 29 August. Priscoli, J.D. and M.R. Llamas (2001). ‘International Perspectives on Ethical Dilemmas in the Water Industry’, in C.K. Davis and R.E. McGinn (eds), Navigating Rough Waters–Ethical Issues in Water Industry. Colorado, American Water Works Association, pp. 41–64. Hanumantha Rao, C.H. (1994). Watershed (NEETI-NILWA) Development Programme. Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh.

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Sainath, P. (1996). Everybody Loves a Good Drought. Calcutta: Penguin. ——— (2000). ‘Salted gruel sustains their hopes’, The Hindu, 5 June. ——— (2004). ‘How the Better Half Dies’, http://www.indiatogether.com/php/search.php?words=+Sain ath&x=10&y=12. Schuurman, F.J. (2000). ‘Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained? Development Studies in the Twenty-first Century’. Third World Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 7–20. Sharma, S. (2004). ‘Elusive Rains and Parched Lands: Situating Drought in Colonial India’. Unpublished Paper. New Delhi. Singh, K. and V. Ballabh (2002). ‘Incidence, Impacts and Management of Droughts in India: An Overview’. Paper presented at the Workshop on Sustainable Livelihoods and Drought Management in South Asia: Issues, Alternatives and Futures, 28–30 October, Islamabad, Pakistan. Soppecom-GIDR-CISED (2004). Concept Note on Watershed Development in India: Network for Advocacy, Research and Capacity Building, Unpublished report. The Watershed Family (2004). The Newsletter of the Watershed Organization Trust, First Quarter. Vaidyanathan, A. (2004). ‘Imperatives of Water Governance’, The Hindu, 3 March. Whitcombe, E. (1972). Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, Vol. 1: The United Provinces under British Rule, 1860–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press. WMO (2004). ‘Mitigating Risk and Coping with Uncertainty’, in The 1st UN World Water Development Report: Water for People, Water for Life. Geneva: World Meterological Organization.

4 Gender Issues in Water Governance: Review of Challenges and Emerging Strategies Seema Kulkarni, K.J. Joy and Suhas Paranjape

I NTRODUCTION The positive intention of improving gender participation in water access and control has not translated into positive policy actions. Apart from structural reasons like patriarchy, one of the main reasons for this has been a lack of conceptual clarity in gender goals in water and its synergy with goals in the governance of water resources. New strategies for gender inclusive governance, as understood in its broadest sense, cannot emerge unless a synergetic conceptual framework is developed. This chapter highlights some of the issues that concern both the grassroots organisations and academia working on issues of gender equity. It also highlights the need for reconceptualising issues related to women and the problems in water governance and management for overall better outcomes. Finally, it makes an attempt to bring out some broad principles and alternative strategies to make water governance more fair, equitable and just from the perspective of gender equality. Pursuing a gender-just agenda in the context of natural resources as a whole has never been an easy task. At one level, the continued insistence of the policy makers in treating the household as a coherent unit with the male head representing the common interest of all, despite the large number of studies pointing to gender biases in intra-household differences in incomes, access to productive resources and health care, has left gender inequities unaddressed. The other set of problems crop up from the assumption that women are a homogenous category with an unchanging affinity to natural resources and unchanging roles. The issue is compounded by the complexity of the larger sectoral problems that demand immediate attention. The need of the hour is to develop a robust alternative framework that is able to place issues of equity within the broader agenda of reform in natural resource management as a whole, and water in particular.

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G ENDER I SSUES

IN THE

W ATER S ECTOR

Addressing gender equity in the water sector has been even more difficult because of various factors, one reason being the nature of the resource itself and its close linkage to access to land. Right to water effectively means the right to use available water, and availability is determined by a range of factors and changes from season to season. Unlike land or forests, the right to use water undergoes frequent changes thereby making it difficult to establish norms of equity in general. Addressing gender equity in access to the resource is compounded with unequal relations at the intra-household level and heterogeneity across caste, class and resource ownership. Unless both these issues are tackled upfront evolving solutions may not be an easy task. The first task, therefore, is to understand how women are perceived as a category.

Understanding Differences among Women Grouping women as a homogenous category is the first kind of fallacy that needs to be tackled. It is important to understand that women are not an abstract homogenous category and come with large differences across class, caste and tribe in the Indian context. Women from oppressed castes and tribes face a dual oppression, both as women as well as of the caste/tribe to which they belong ( Joy and Paranjape 2001; Kulkarni and Rao 2002). These differences in social relations amongst women undermine any notion of groups formed through homogeneity of common interest as women. The notion of homogeneity has its relevance in the broader context of addressing patriarchy; however, various experiences point out that grouping them as a category in their relationship to water or other natural resources has only been counterproductive. It is often argued that this sort of a position could lead to fragmentation and may in fact be counterproductive to the broader struggle against patriarchy. Once this difference is recognised, it may be easier to understand that water needs vary across caste, class and tribe. Defining equity thus becomes a complex process. It calls for the unpacking of ‘women’ as a category. For the Dalit women, social taboos prevent gaining access to drinking water. The needs of women farm owners are considerably different from those of women wage labourers or from those in landowning households deriving water rights through their husbands. For non-land owning Dalit and adivasi women, water needs could revolve around water-based enterprises like fishing or share-cropping.

Planning Around Potential Uses as Opposed to Current or Actual Uses Until recently, much of gender planning around natural resources was placed in the context of women’s current tasks of collecting fuel, fodder, water and related survival tasks. Gender planning done through these conceptual frameworks focussed largely on reducing the time

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spent by women in these survival tasks. In the water sector, women are thus seen as those who spend hours collecting water for domestic use. In fact, various studies do point to how women’s tasks revolve around collection of water and the impact that this has on their health and livelihoods. Time spent on collection of water for domestic use has meant reduced opportunities for women to participate in ‘productive’ activities. This static notion of women’s roles in survival tasks has translated into policy prescriptions that in fact perpetuate the existing gender roles. Policies are therefore geared to involving women in decisions around domestic water. Much of policy thinking revolves around how time spent on collecting water could be reduced, how within the irrigation systems bathing spaces could be introduced, and so on. Although this is a reality that cannot be ignored, what is also important is to keep a bearing of what are the possibilities of making a transition from current to potential roles if the property regime were to change. In fact, some studies show that wherever women have had access to water for irrigation they have used it more productively than their male counterparts (Zwartween 1997). The focus then shifts from the current survival roles of women to a visualisation of changing roles in a more egalitarian society where men and women have equal opportunities in access to productive resources and the decision making around it. These critiques point to a need for increasing control of women over productive resources and their voice in related decision making processes. Current and potential water needs of different categories of women would have to be assessed if equitable access to water has to be operationalised. Although water needs differ for different groups, the decisions around the development and management of the sources from which these needs would be met would have to be taken commonly. It therefore goes without saying that the common minimum principle to be adhered to, if gender equity is to be addressed, is to allow formal membership to all men and women in Water Users Associations/committees.

Integration rather than Separatism A natural fallout of the above assumption leads to a separation of two spheres, the domestic and the productive. The first represents women and the second represents men. Policy prescriptions have emerged based on this conception where men are seen in the domain of productive water use and women in the sphere of domestic water use (ibid.). This neat categorisation has led to a non-threatening policy agenda, making it convenient for the policy makers to pacify women advocates1 seeking visibility of women in the domestic water sector without having to address the deep-rooted gender inequities in access to productive resources and the decisions around it. The problem of separate spheres also emerges from, as we shall see in a later section, the non-integrationist perspective dominating the water sector. Planning around water has been fragmented into several compartments across uses, sources of drinking water, sanitation, groundwater and surface water. Any alternative strategies would therefore have to challenge these unrealistic assumptions that have plagued both the gender equity issues as well as issues in water governance.

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Need for a Synergy between Water Sector Reform Goals and Gender Equity Goals Confounded by this already complex set of problems, the feminist movement in the water sector is now forced to take note of emerging concerns in the wake of the water crisis, which is partly emerging due to ever increasing demand on the water and partly due to poor governance. Lack of effective governance in the groundwater sector has deepened the drinking water crisis in the rural areas, the impact of which is largely borne by the rural women. Overemphasis on large storages has largely undermined the efforts for harvesting local water resources, which further compounds the crisis and increases differences between requirement and availability. The environmental and social impacts of large storages, particularly on rural women, are well documented. Over draft of water has led to depletion of the groundwater source and problems of salinisation, arsenic and increase in fluoride levels in water, rising energy costs and finally drying up of the sources, which has further deepened the drinking water crisis (Shah 2004). Solutions to these problems come by way of the global governance agenda, which directs states to open up the water resources to private interests for its efficient management, for example, by the World Bank (WB) and Asian Development Bank (ADB). By these dictums, water is to be considered as a scarce vulnerable resource that needs to be treated as an economic good and therefore needs to be used efficiently. Measures like water pricing, cost recovery and opening up of the water resources as a whole to private interests are therefore being seen as selfoptimising mechanisms. In fact, recently, water has been made part of the General Agreement on Trade in Services and amenable to World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) agreements. Projecting the scarcity aspect of water resources has thus put the question of equity on the back burner. The only way that it will get any hearing is if it can prove that investing in women and the poor can lead to efficiency in the management of the resource. The possible connections with the impact that these issues may have on the local water needs and women’s day-to-day work around these needs, therefore, appears to be too localised to be considered amidst such larger issues. The local and regional issues are likely to be ignored in the global governance agenda where the efficiency issue is likely to dominate any other considerations.

D OMINANT D ISCOURSE IN W ATER G OVERNANCE R EFORM AND ITS I MPLICATIONS ON W OMEN Understanding Scarcity The new policy approach perceives the problem as primarily a scarcity problem thereby guiding its policies towards managing demand rather than extending supply. With this as the primary approach, what follows is a set of directives that treat water as an economic good, which has to, through its use, recover costs incurred on its development and management. Demands on

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water are increasing, and claims on available basin waters have already been established by the powerful leaving little or no space for the resource poor women and men to gain access to water. Abundance or scarcity of water cannot be judged without considering the various competing claims and demands on water and understanding how the resource is being currently used. Posing scarcity as the only problem forces water-deprived poor men and women not to stake any claims to water. Any new investments that could take water schemes to remote areas are thus thwarted on the grounds of scarcity. Various studies have shown that although scarcity of water is a critical issue, the problem is usually more complex, and this needs to be understood before policy prescriptions are made. Crisis in the groundwater scenario points to a scarcity situation arising out of unrestricted extraction of water leading to low water tables and poor quality of water (Vaidyanathan 2002). Studies on surface irrigation systems point to glaring gaps in management of the resource and inequitable distribution as being responsible for the crisis. Unaccounted losses due to seepage, evaporation and misuse in the distribution network have led to the scarcity-like situation. It is estimated that only about one-third (30–35 per cent) of the water released from reservoirs actually reaches the fields (Vaidyanathan 2002). Again, it is important to note that the water released is far more than the actual consumptive use (Vaidyanathan and Shivasubramanian 2003). It is also estimated that more than 90 per cent of the water used for domestic uses and industrial needs flows back into the streams, rivers and underground storage as effluents. Much of this ‘lost’ water can be reclaimed if managed properly. What emerges here is that if scarcity is understood with this lens then policy initiatives would have to be geared towards redefining and reducing vested rights and imposing water savings on groups with these rights. This saved water then has to be extended to a large number of water-insecure men and women with a careful prioritisation of use.

Water as an Economic Good: Pricing, Cost Recovery and Decentralised Management—The Self-optimising Principles for Efficient Management of Water The growing rationale for treating water as an economic good to be priced emerges from the perception of looking at water as a scarce resource over which there are competing demands. It is argued that if water is treated as an economic good, it would then be managed efficiently. Pricing here is considered as one of the most critical remedial measures to address the ills which have plagued the water sector. If water is increasingly recognised as a commodity to be priced then women’s access to water for non-marketable produce or survival tasks may be jeopardised, as increasingly men see greater advantage in either selling or using available water to generate cash incomes (Green and Baden 1995). In such a scenario, it is usually the ‘paying’ crops that get preference over the ‘non-paying’ food crops, largely cultivated by women. Water also has other social and cultural dimensions. Given this nature of the resource and the socio-cultural value that it commands, treating it purely as an economic good may not really become a very viable option.

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The economic criterion also raises some critical issues of what is really economically affordable for women. Most studies and experiences indicate that women rarely have control over their own or their households’ income. In many of the drinking water schemes, guaranteeing assured supplies has prompted women to agree to the ‘user pays’ principle. However, willingness to pay cannot be equated with the ability to pay. This issue therefore puts forth some critical questions before feminist water advocates: how does one arrive at what is the necessary quantum of water for meeting women’s livelihoods; and how can it become affordable? The other dimension of treating water as an economic good is making it a tradeable right. This then means that water can be marketed as a free good. This has very serious implications on the rights of the communities and particularly on women who are, in the present scenario, responsible for the collection of water for domestic use. Cost recovery is the other principle that is seen as critical for bringing in water sector reform. In one of their newly formulated schemes, the Minor Irrigation Department of the Maharashtra Government, with support from the German bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KFW), promises to involve the beneficiaries in the resource development stage itself. It is referred to as the Participatory Irrigation Development and Management (PIDM). The scheme is designed in such a way that the beneficiaries themselves are to bear a large part (60 per cent) of the distribution cost. This would be done through a combination of contributions in the form of labour, cash and bank loans. Here, it was found that a large part of the labour contribution was being done by the women from the beneficiary households. In many other studies from across the world too, experience shows that the operation and maintenance of the irrigation schemes or watershed works, which goes towards cost recovery, is largely borne by the women of the household. In the case of drinking water, the World Bank’s own statement is very telling: ‘Women who are trained to manage and maintain community water systems are more accustomed to voluntary work and better trusted to administer funds honestly’ (World Bank 1992: 113 as quoted in Green and Baden 1995: 96). Cost recovery implemented in this manner may, in fact, manifest itself in the form of increased labour for women. The third mechanism of decentralised management is seen as the acceptable side of economic efficiency. It is considered as the human investment in recovering the costs on the physical structure. Without a broader restructuring of the water sector as a whole, institutional reform in itself may not address the concerns of either equity or efficiency of use. Participation remains restricted to simply managing the resource at the community level with the rules for water resource development and allocation at the project or basin level continuing to be set by the state or, increasingly now, by private interests. Decentralisation often does bring in a promise of improved participation of women and other resource poor groups; however, decentralised planning does not guarantee that women would be allowed membership to Water Users Associations (WUAs) to play a role in the decision making processes. Decentralisation almost always translates into community participation, but the notion of community as a homogenous unit often ignores the social and economic differentiations within. Thus, unless conscious efforts are made to recognise these differences

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and involve women, Dalits and other resource-poor groups, there is little likelihood that such institutional reforms would guarantee rights to women, or for that matter the other resourcepoor groups. As far as women’s participation is concerned, this has translated into separated spheres— irrigation and domestic—where women’s formal participation is seen to be in the domestic sphere and men’s in the irrigation sphere. For women who are already constrained by sociocultural roles, participation becomes even more difficult when formal rules restrict it in the WUAs. From the point of view of women, control by the irrigation department is now replaced by that of the WUAs, where they have little or no space. Thus, the implied cost savings from decentralised management systems with appropriate cost recovery and pricing mechanism from a feminist analysis may represent hidden costs in terms of increased labour of women at the community level (Green and Baden 1995).

R EVIEW OF A PPROACHES TO A DDRESS G ENDER E QUITY IN THE W ATER S ECTOR Feminist advocates working in the water sector are grappling with a range of these challenges facing both the water sector as a whole and those within, addressing issues of gender equity. Responses have ranged from arguing for gender participation on grounds of equity, poverty, efficiency and welfare (Razavi 1997; Agarwal 1994; Jackson 1993). Many of these responses are also shaped by the larger concerns within the water sector. This forces the feminist advocates to link gender equity to more ‘legitimate’ concerns, such as better management of water, improved efficiency and cost recovery.

Efficiency Approach Efficient use of the scarce resource is an issue that has gained very high priority for water advocates of all hues and colours. Almost all policy agendas are talking of improving efficiency in water use. Picking on this thread, one strand of gender advocates has employed different methods to prove that investing in women can be productive to the water sector. There has been an effort to document different case studies to argue that if given the opportunity women can be as efficient as men. These cases have shown that wherever water entitlements have been given to women the outcome has, in fact, been very positive on women as well as on the resource. Although this exercise does contribute to documenting of information on women and productive use of water, it waters down the whole gender equity argument and puts gender activists on a continuous defensive to prove how effective women’s contribution is in improving irrigation efficiency. In the present scenario, the efficiency approach becomes more amenable to policy makers rather than a zero-sum equity one.

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Comparisons are often made with the Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme where it is claimed that the twin concerns of efficiency and equity can go hand in hand with gender participation (Agarwal 1994). In fact, Agarwal argues that in JFM women’s nonparticipation will affect the programme efficiency negatively. The argument holds weight in sectors where women’s current roles have helped them to attain the requisite skills for the improved management of the resource. From this point of view, the same argument could be applied to gender participation in the drinking water sector. But we have seen the pitfalls of overemphasis on this sort of a conceptual framework. Also, skills acquired by women in the arena of domestic water use due to their present tasks does not allow us to conclude that they would naturally be efficient users of irrigation water as well. However, it would be equally erroneous to disqualify them from the process because they are not its current users. Moreover, efficiency of use is closely linked to what stakes you have in the resource on a long-term basis. In the present governance system, women do not see a long-term stake in access to water for productive use and hence may not necessarily be convinced of the need to use it ‘efficiently’. Another argument put forward by feminist economists in the context of natural resources in general, points to women’s unpaid labour on household farms as an economic waste. Women represent an independent labour force, and the same labour, which was provided free, could have been used either on women’s own plots or in other wage work. The efficiency argument also cannot be applied to women in the same way as it can be applied to men. The different degree of representation of men and women in the processes of human reproduction and sustenance has affected their respective capacities and productivities. Women carry the burden of reproductive labour, which limits their capacities to engage in more remunerative works. The issue is to create a level playing field through introduction of a meaningful and enabling policy framework. The need for a reformulation of efficiency with an understanding of women’s work in the reproductive arena therefore becomes critical.

The Needs Approach The needs approach exhorts policy makers to address the needs that women have around water to meet their household subsistence requirements. Most often these needs revolve around the domestic water arena and translate into policy demands where women’s participation is sought largely in committees on drinking water, sanitation and addressing needs for creating bathing and washing spaces in the canal irrigation systems. Assessment of the level of participation in this sector too points to the fact that women’s involvement has been limited to identifying locations of the hand posts and pipelines or bathing spaces. Little effort has gone into involving them in decisions regarding sustainable and reliable source development and management. More recently, because of the competing demands on the resource, the complexity of the gender inequity issue and varied differences between different categories of women the antipoverty approach is gaining significance. This approach clubs together all the poor women and men in the same category and argues for an alliance of the two genders to resolve the larger water sector problems. Very often this sort of an agenda sidelines the issue of women’s subordination, which is not essentially an issue of poverty alone as factors that cause poverty

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are not necessarily the same as those that cause a gender disadvantage (Jackson 1993). Again, policy makers are more comfortable with this sort of an agenda as it does not touch upon the inequities in access to resources.

Equity Approach The equity approach, although simple and seemingly more straightforward as far as addressing gender equity is concerned, is besieged with several problems. As mentioned earlier, where demands over water are increasing, scarcity becomes the major issue. In a scarcity situation, arguing for independent rights over water for productive use for women becomes increasingly difficult as it is argued that it adds to the already existing conflicts between men from different groups. To add to this is the fact that women from different classes and socio-cultural traditions have different water needs. Defining equity in such a complex scenario therefore is no mean task. The most acceptable definition of gender equity within the productive sphere in water is the recognition that women farm owners need access to water as much as men farm owners. Like their male counterparts, they too would have to bear the burden of investing in water infrastructure. It follows then that they too should be involved in the WUAs and encouraged to participate in the decision making processes around this. Legislation and law enforcement that strengthen women’s access to land and forests and empowers them is widely documented (Agarwal 1994). Similarly, access to water means a direct benefit to women farm owners (Koppen 1999). These women are therefore seen as direct beneficiaries for targeting irrigation facilities. Within policy makers, this is an agenda that has been acceptable and is largely included as a priority issue in the policy framework. This selective uptake by policy makers is interesting. However, it is one positive step whereby it is now accepted that women owning land in the designated commands need to be involved both in entitlements as well as membership of WUAs. However, this is limited to women who own land and therefore are seen as natural beneficiaries of either surface irrigation water, if they fall in the command area, or eligible for groundwater extraction. This represents a very small population of women. A large section of women are landless, some belong to landowning households while others are entirely landless. For those who are unpaid workers on their household lands, it is the male heads who manage the water resources, and therefore access to water does not represent a direct gain for the women. It is the men who negotiate for water and are therefore the primary beneficiaries of the irrigation agencies (Koppen 1999). Women’s rights to water are therefore derived from the male head of the household. Land ownership rules are set by the socio-cultural framework of the society and influenced by patriarchal structures. This exclusion from land ownership has neither created a need or a demand for water for productive use from women. This is an underlying historical gender issue, which cannot change through isolated sectoral efforts. This does not imply the primacy of the land rights struggle over the water rights one. A few spaces created in every sector will go a long way in challenging these deep-rooted inequities. For example, a policy framework

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which challenges the linking of water rights to land rights could go a long way in challenging gender inequities in access to land. For the landless women, therefore, such a policy framework would open up opportunities of involving themselves in water based non-farm enterprises.

Negotiating for a ‘Least Worst Scenario’ Despite the limitations of each of the approaches, feminist water advocates will have to continue using them to negotiate for the ‘least worst scenario’. However, what clearly emerges from each set of arguments is that gender equity issues cannot be addressed in the current paradigm of the water sector, which looks at water in a compartmentalised way and treats it universally as a commodity to be priced without understanding the varied needs of different users. Very often equity will come at a cost. Does it then follow that the burden would be borne entirely by those who were thus far deprived of the water resource? What emerges from this argument is the need for restructuring the water sector on more sustainable, participative and equitable lines, which would provide more space for addressing gender equity.

R ESTRUCTURING THE W ATER S ECTOR ON S USTAINABLE , E QUITABLE AND P ARTICIPATIVE L INES Although it is now broadly agreed that unless strong measures in the form of pricing, cost recovery and efficient use are introduced the crisis would further deepen. However, opening up to private interests in itself may not bring about the desired changes. All of these so-called self-optimising mechanisms can work well where there is a level playing field, which needs an enabling policy framework and an interactive process between the various stakeholders. In the past few years, the concept of integrated water resource management (IWRM) has come to the fore as the means to ensure equitable, economically sound and environmentally sustainable management of water resources and provision of water services. Here, we put forth a viewpoint developed by Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM) along with grassroots movements like Mukti Sangharsh Movement and Pani Panchayat that have evolved over the last decade or so. We also attempt to expand this discussion in the direction of the broader gender equity and water sector restructuring. Just as we see the need to develop synergies between the broader goals of good governance in the water sector and gender equity, we also see the need to confront tradeoffs which have the potential to dilute these broader concerns of gender equity in the water sector. Gender equity in entitlements and voice is therefore argued on the basis of an equity approach rather than efficiency or welfare approach. While doing so we recognise that women as a category are not homogenous and therefore any operationalising of equity would require planning based on the social and economic differentiation. Restructuring based on an integrated

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water resources management allows for a shift away from the instrumental approach based on women’s current water uses and tasks around it. Women’s active role in productive use of water therefore becomes central to this approach.

Integration of Various Kinds of Water Resources Planning in the water sector has failed to understand the common pool character of water. Water has often been compartmentalised as surface water, groundwater, local water and exogenous water. Each of these is handled by independent departments with little or no interaction with the other. In fact, this lack of integration is cited as one of the most important reasons for the crisis in the water sector. If planned in an integrated manner, the resource can be extended to a larger number of people with a closer control on quantum of assured supply available at an appropriate time. Integration of local and exogenous resources has the potential to overcome the limitations of both kinds of sources. The local water harvesting efforts, if inadequate for meeting livelihood needs of the local population, can be supplemented by exogenous water. The underlying assumption here is that it is the local system rather than an individual irrigator from a designated command which actually receives the water supplement from the exogenous system. This creates a space for men and women, landed or not landed, to participate in the process as users of the water resource. Integration of various sources and planning processes based on this principle creates a space for all in that unit, whether it is a watershed or a sub basin or basin, to participate on equal terms. It then becomes a common resource for all those residing in that particular unit. Citizenship, rather than ownership of land or other factors, then becomes the main criterion for both access as well as participation in the decision making processes. However, the principle of integration also calls for further detailing in terms of locating an appropriate geographical/hydraulic unit. Although it is broadly agreed that a watershed could form a unit of organisation, there are questions of whether the exogenous waters could fit into these norms. Operationalising the principle would require further study and experimentation.

Equity in Water Entitlements: Disconnecting Water Rights from Land Rights—Minimum Water Assurance for Livelihood Security Like the resource, equity too cannot be a static concept and will vary in time and space. What is considered as optimum use today may not be so later. It is for this reason that equitable rights are to be considered as provisional rights subject to later study and negotiation rather than fixed rights, which are likely to perpetuate monopolies. The concept of equity ranges from its simplest definition within the currently designated commands to the most complex forms of extending rights to the landless and women. In

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surface irrigation, these rights are accrued to those who own land in the designated commands and rights over groundwater are restricted to those who can invest in the infrastructure in extraction of water from under their fields. In both these cases it is almost always the men, ‘the head of the households’, who are honoured with this right. It matters little then that it is largely the women who are working on the construction sites of the dam or labouring on the irrigated fields. Almost never does this contribution translate into direct gains over water entitlements for women. Entitlement to water is a right that attaches itself to land and not to individuals, and is linked to property that is owned rather than to the human beings who use it. Unless we redefine the concept of rights to water as those extending beyond command areas and property owned, it might be difficult to argue for women’s and landless households’ access to water. Right to water, therefore, should be understood as a matter of minimum assurance to all of the water required for livelihood needs irrespective of their ownership of assets. This is the point of departure from other viewpoints that continue to link water rights to land rights thereby eliminating a sizeable number of the people, especially women, from gaining water entitlements. Disconnecting land rights from water rights provides a space for the landless and women in gaining access to water as well as water deciding mechanisms. However, delinking water rights from land rights has its negative side too. In fact, in some countries like Australia, Peru and Bolivia there has been a policy initiative to delink water from land rights making it a free commodity available to trade. However, what is proposed here is not to make water a free commodity for trade but rather to address the livelihood concerns of the poor and other deprived groups. There are differences in the ways in which equity could be achieved and to what extent it could be achieved. However, equity in access to water has to be seen as an important component of the water sector reform strategy. In the context of equitable access to women, it becomes important to assess the current and potential water needs of different categories of women. Allocations will therefore have to be based on these kinds of assessments, which form an integral part of the area resource development plans and would differ across socio-cultural and biophysical contexts. In some areas it may mean carrying water over larger areas to ensure equitable access to women, thereby increasing the infrastructure investments. It therefore has to be recognised that equity comes at a cost. Hence, policy focus cannot be merely of managing the existing systems alone but also of augmenting and extending water supplies through additional infrastructural investment for better livelihood outcomes for all. Here, the role of alternative technology in agriculture, water and energy sectors would play a critical role in minimising investments and optimising resource use to ensure equity.

Equity in Voice: Need for Expanding the Definition of Water Users Associations ( WUAs) At present, the water sector can largely be seen to be divided into two spheres—the domestic water sector, usually referred to as water and sanitation, and the irrigation sphere, also referred

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to as the productive sphere. The sources of water in both these spheres are common and include local and exogenous ground and surface water. The domestic sphere is almost entirely governed by the public sector and so is the irrigation sphere. Groundwater, however, is almost entirely in the private domain. Two kinds of participatory organisations therefore exist based on these two distinctly perceived water uses. First is the community-level drinking water committee, which comprise largely of women, and the second is the WUAs, which comprises largely of male landholders within the designated commands. Despite the fact that water sources are common for both the spheres we see that decision making is never done on a common platform. Not only has this segregation perpetuated gender roles in the water sector, it has also led to the scarcity and mismanagement crisis in the water sector. The proposed alternative therefore calls for an expansion of the concept of the WUA, which is at present restricted to the management of the surface systems for irrigation purposes alone. The domestic and irrigation spheres have to merge for better planning of the local, exogenous and surface and groundwaters. This immediately allows space for membership to at least one woman and one man from each household located in the concerned water unit who use water for their daily survival.

Pricing of Water Service and Recovery of Costs As we have seen earlier, pricing of water is a contentious issue especially in the context of women. The economic disadvantage that women face within the household as well as the community at large needs no further elaboration. In such a context there has to be a greater focus on introducing measures that have a bearing of this disadvantage. The alternative would therefore have to base itself on a distinction between basic service for livelihood needs and extra or economic service. The concept of the minimum assurance of water for livelihood needs is closely tied to the concept of a basic water service that should be provided to everyone at an affordable cost and as a matter of right. Any extra service above such basic service would conceptually be extra service and should be tied much more closely to achieving economic efficiency (SOPPECOM 2002). In the case of water entitlements for single or deserted women, or women household heads, it might in the initial stages be necessary for an enabling policy support for creating a ‘level playing field’. This could come in the form of initial credit and skills support with a specific policy of withdrawal in place. The other contentious issue is recovery of costs incurred on resource development. Part of this recovery should come out of the pricing of economic service. This could ease the pressure on those, like women, who would use their water right essentially for meeting livelihood needs. SOPPECOM also feels that certain measures could be introduced whereby recovery in kind would be feasible.

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F INAL C OMMENTS : C HALLENGES IN THE E MERGING F RAMEWORK Feminist water advocates have continuously had to battle at different ends. One of these has been to systematically link up to the design of restructuring the water sector as opposed to drawing a list of demands within the current mainstream water resource development paradigm in a coherent framework. There has been a tendency to highlight the relevance of gender issues in a language that is familiar to the policy makers within the water sector. There has also been a compelling need to link gender equity goals to the ‘legitimate’ goals of water sector reform in order to be heard. The arguments that have taken a large amount of space have been on proving that if given an opportunity, women can manage the resource efficiently. The positions that have so far been taken are those that would face least resistance—a process of negotiation for a least worse scenario rather than one which is based on changing power equations within the sector. The issues bothering the feminist advocates is whether equity should be argued on its own merit or should efficiency and welfare approaches also be used to argue for independent entitlements and voice for women. Moving gender from the periphery to the centre has been no mean task for the advocates, particularly in this sector where demand cannot arise from the masses of women as it is not closely linked to their realities. Demands have come up in the domestic water sector simply because it is related directly to their current realities. Demands for water for productive use would come up only in a changed scenario, which calls for actions at different levels. An enabling policy framework would allow for the initiation of this process. The question very often raised is whether it actually matters if women are left out, given the many other sectors and initiatives that are intended to address their concerns. We argue that it does matter, on two grounds first, because women play a central role in natural resource development and management, for which water is a very critical resource, and they therefore have a right to an equal say in the way the resource is developed, managed and used; and second, because we do not consider water to be just another input into agriculture but an independent productive resource on par with land, which has the potential of challenging the power equations at all levels. Better governance in the water sector in the context of gender issues, therefore, calls for a need for synergy with issues in the water sector while attending to specific concerns of women in the context of water sector reform. However, the need to develop a synergy between gender concerns and concerns in the water sector should ensure that gender concerns of equity are not watered down in the process. Policy and practice, therefore, have to steer clear of basing themselves on gender stereotypes on the one hand and those that imagine two parallel worlds, one of men and the other of women, on the other hand.

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Note 1. Women advocates is a term that represents a stream of thinking that looks at gender equity from the point of view of visibility of women in development. In the water sector it refers to those who envisage women’s role in the sphere of the domestic, rather than the production role within the household economy.

References Agarwal, B. (1994). A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ballabh, V. (2004). ‘Governance in Water Sector’, Theme paper for the workshop on ‘Governance Issues in Water Sector’, organised by Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) to commemorate 25 years of its existence, 14–19 December. Green, C. and S. Baden (1995). ‘Integrated Water Resources Management: A Gender Perspective’, Institute of Development Studies, 26(1): 92–99. Jackson, C. (1993). ‘Doing What Comes Naturally? Women and Environment in Development’, World Development, 21(12): 1947–963. Joy, K.J. and S. Paranjape (2001). ‘Women and Water: Relationships, Issues, Experiences, Approaches’. Unpublished paper. Pune: Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM). Kulkarni, S. and N. Rao (2002). ‘Gender and Drought In South Asia: Dominant Constructions and Alternate Propositions,’ paper presented at a workshop on Droughts in South Asia, Islamabad, Pakistan, 28–30 October. Razavi, S. (1997). ‘Fitting Gender into Development Institutions’, World Development, 25(7): 1111–125. Shah, T. (2004). ‘Governing the Groundwater Economy: Comparative Analysis of National Institutions and Policies in South Asia, China and Mexico’, paper presented at the workshop on ‘Governance Issues in the Water Sector’, organised by the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) to commemorate 25 years of its existence, 14–19 December. SOPPECOM (2002). ‘Restructuring the Water Sector A Framework for Restructuring of Water Sector in Sustainable, Equitable and Participatory Lines’. Unpublished note. Pune: Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management. Vaidyanathan, A. (2002). ‘Water Resource Development, Scarcity and Conflict’. Unpublished mimeo. Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Vaidyanathan A. and K. Sivasubramanian (2003). ‘Efficiency of Water Use In Indian Agriculture’. Unpublished draft paper. Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Van, K.B. (1999). ‘Sharing the Last Drop: Water Scarcity, Irrigation and Gendered Poverty Eradication’. Gatekeeper Series No. 85. London: International Institute for Environment and Development, Sustainable Agriculture and Livelihoods Programme. Zwarteween, M. (1997). ‘Water: From Basic Need to Commodity, A Discussion on Gender and Water Rights in the Context of Irrigation’, World Development, 25(8): 1335–49.

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Section II Pricing, Subsidies and Governance of Surface Water

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5 Pricing, Subsidies and Institutional Reforms in Indian Irrigation: Some Emerging Trends1 K.V. Raju and Ashok Gulati

I NTRODUCTION The irrigation sector in India suffers at least from two interrelated problems. The first is a severe pressure on the resources for normal operations and maintenance (O&M) as the cost recovery from canal irrigation is extremely low and the state budgets are unable to allocate more funds because of the overall fiscal crunch. The second is the reduction in construction funding for new or on-going canal networks, leading to undue delay in the completion of projects, and in turn, the rise in costs and reduction of benefits. These issues are also linked to the low price of water. Unless urgent steps are taken to reverse these trends, such as innovative institutional reforms, the Indian irrigation sector could be headed for near collapse or at least a situation where it would remain much below its potential for food production. This chapter examines two issues: (i) Irrigation subsidies and their implications; and (ii) emerging institutional reforms in the irrigation sector. The issue of irrigation subsidies is far more complex than ordinarily imagined. There is far less discussion on irrigation—perhaps because the apparent magnitude of irrigation subsidies does not compare with that for either fertilisers or power. However, water being a critical component in Indian agriculture2, subsidies on irrigation deserve just as much attention as the other two. Irrigation has undoubtedly been instrumental in achieving self-sufficiency in food production, but it has come at a cost. The neglect of the rational pricing of canal waters has resulted in rising subsidies. Public irrigation subsidies may be less of a mystery than power and fertiliser subsidies in terms of who really benefits from them. Of greater concern here are the ramifications of these subsidies in different spheres—like financial status of input supplying agencies, environmental consequences, efficiency in resource use, and so on. Trends suggest that these may have grave implications for the agricultural sector if left unattended. Hence, there is a need for reform. Before opening the Pandora’s Box of issues, it is essential to first conceptualise, define and then quantify the notion of irrigation subsidy. How does one do this? In the past there have been varying views on this issue and a whole range of estimates have been put forth. Several of

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these may significantly understate the magnitude of irrigation subsidies and hence undermine the gravity of the problem—in particular, the financial burden of these subsidies on the input-supplying agency and the state. A major part of this chapter is therefore devoted to this exercise. Accordingly, in the second section we discuss the concept and different approaches to quantifying irrigation subsidy. We also present our estimates of irrigation subsidy and compare them with some possible alternatives. The next step is to link the issue of irrigation subsidies with the larger scenario of the irrigation sector, specifically to examine the diverse consequences of these subsidies and review the problems that have gained currency. The third section examines in detail the impact of irrigation subsidies on different spheres, with the fourth section summing up the state of Indian irrigation today. Following this, in the fifth section, we spell out an agenda for reforming the regime of irrigation subsidies with a hope that it would lead to a sustainable, financially sound and efficient use of the resource, namely canal water. Among other things, the issues addressed here are: What kind of pricing policy should be followed to keep the growth of subsidies under check and ensure that irrigation has self-generated funds? What other reforms are necessary and feasible in the area of irrigation subsidies? The concluding section wraps up the discussion with a map of possible future reforms.

I RRIGATION S UBSIDIES The subsidy on public irrigation is not stated explicitly by the government. It has to be determined from government data sources and is often done so by more than one method. The method commonly employed for this purpose is based on the concept that the irrigation subsidy can be approximated as the losses that the input supplying agency bears on account of supplying irrigation water at concessional rates. These estimates implicitly define irrigation subsidy as the difference between cost of supplying water for irrigation and revenue received as payment from the users of irrigation water. However, this definition of the subsidies is incomplete and the estimates are inaccurate for a number of reasons. First, the cost of providing the service is not a true reflection of the cost of delivering irrigation water. Apart from the operations and maintenance costs, and other current expenses, huge capital expenditures are incurred on the provision of irrigation. Second, most state governments are beneficiaries of loans forwarded to them by the Central Government. While a part of these are grants (normally one-third), a larger part are in the form of loans (usually two-thirds). This then entails an interest burden as well (at 8–10 per cent). Third, some scholars stress that depreciation also needs to be taken into account, which would then reflect the consumption of fixed irrigation assets on a replacement cost basis (Dhawan 1999). Only its inclusion will yield the true extent of the subsidy.

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Approaches to Quantifying the Irrigation Subsidy The concept of irrigation subsidy adopted in this chapter is based on the difference in the cost of supplying irrigation water and what the farmers pay for irrigation water as its direct price. It is based on the perspective of the supplying agency. Accordingly, our focus is on estimating the cost of providing public irrigation water through major, medium as well as minor irrigation schemes and the payments made by farmers for this water. The cost of irrigation in major and medium schemes consists of three components: (i) the capital cost, (ii) the working cost of O&M, and (iii) depreciation. The capital cost is incurred over a number of years. In a representative major irrigation project, it would be quite common to find that capital costs are spread over roughly 20 years out of which there might be some years, say the first seven years, when no potential is created and only capital expenditure is incurred. Thereafter, some irrigation potential may be forthcoming even as capital expenditure continues to be incurred. Gestation lags—the time gap between expenditure incurred and irrigation potential created—vary from project to project, but are generally longer for major projects and shorter for medium projects. Thus, in estimating the true capital cost of each hectare of potential created, one has to adjust for this lag factor by incorporating an appropriate social rate of discount. Depending upon value of this discount factor, the capital cost of irrigation will differ significantly (Gulati et al. 1994). The O&M costs are added to capital cost and then payments made by farmers for irrigation water are deducted to obtain the public subsidy for major and medium irrigation. By this token, the minimum subsidy on every hectare of irrigation utilised through major and medium irrigation schemes would turn out to be above Rs 10,000 at 1997–98 prices. This is, at the national level, an average for irrigation potential created during 1963–95, and is obviously dependent on the way one calculates the capital cost of irrigation. So far, the focus has been specifically on government major and medium irrigation works covering the area of canals. It is important, however, to consider other sources of irrigation as well and examine the extent of subsidisation through them. Minor irrigation3 has already become ‘major’ in a sense as it irrigates a larger area than the so-called major and medium irrigation schemes. The notion of subsidy on public minor irrigation is difficult to conceptualise. For one, among the various categories of ‘minor irrigation’, the largest share is of well irrigation, which has a large number of private owners. Here, the subsidy is primarily through cheap power supplies. The government may also provide subsidies that serve to defray part of their capital cost for wells, pump sets, and the like.

The Approach of this Paper In defining and quantifying public irrigation subsidy for major and medium irrigation for the purpose of this chapter, we follow the Vaidyanathan Committee report (Government of India [GOI] 1992a) on pricing of canal irrigation water. This committee suggested that the pricing

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of canal irrigation water must cover the entire O&M expenses and 1 per cent of cumulative capital expenditures incurred in the past at historical prices4. This can be viewed as the cost of canal irrigation that needs to be recovered from the farmers. Deducting the payments made by farmers from this cost of irrigation water, one would obtain the relevant public irrigation subsidy on canal waters. The same methodology used for major and medium irrigation is applied to public sector minor irrigation as well. Thus, the capital expenditures and the O&M expenses of minor irrigation are grouped with major and medium irrigation subsidy to arrive at an aggregate public irrigation subsidy in the country.

Quantification of Irrigation Subsidies The exercise of quantifying subsidies on major, medium and minor irrigation schemes in the country was thus carried out along the approach described above. These estimates of irrigation subsidy are presented in Figure 5.1. The share of the southern region (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) increased marginally from 23 per cent in triennium ending (TE) 1982–83 to 24 per cent in TE 1999–2000 (projected), as did the northern region from 27 per cent to 32 per cent during the same period. While the share of the eastern region declined from 17 per cent to 12 per cent, the western region (comprising Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh) still has a share of around 26 per cent (see Figures 5.2[a] and [b]). The western region has maintained such a high share possibly because the costs of canal irrigation are much higher in this region due to undulating terrain. It must be emphasised at this

1994–95

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24

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36

Constant prices (1981-82 = 100)

1996–97*

Rs billion

48

Current prices

1995–96*

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4.1 4.6 4.6 4.6 5.4 5.2 6.3 5.6 7.3 6.0 7.4 5.9 10.8 8.1 19.7 13.7 23.5 15.3 23.1 13.9 25.7 14.1 28.7 13.8 32.9 14.4 34.4 13.9 39.5 14.4 44.1 14.9 44.4 13.9 46.6 13.8 49.4 14.0 52.2 14.7

Figure 5.1: Subsides on Major, Medium and Minor Irrigation (1980–81 to 1999–2000)

Source: Authors. Notes: Irrigation Subsidy is computed as O&M + 1 per cent cumulative capital costs at historical pricereceipts of major, medium and minor irrigation. ∗ indicates estimates for these years are based on projected values. Coverage is staggered.

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Figure 5.2 (a): Regional Shares in Irrigation Subsidies—TE 1982–83 Others 8% Western region 25%

Northern region 27%

Southern region 23%

Eastern region 17%

Figure 5.2 (b): Regional Shares in Irrigation Subsidies—TE 1999–2000 Others 6% Western region 26%

Eastern region 12%

Northern region 32%

Southern region 24%

point that the coverage for the computation of subsidies is not complete since information was not available for some states during certain years. It would be interesting to see how these estimates compare with those obtained from other approaches, particularly those constructed from the government documents. In order to do this, three different series are computed. The first is the government estimate drawn from the National Accounts Statistics. The second is the approach used in this study following the Vaidyanathan Committee recommendation that O&M expenses and 1 per cent of cumulative capital cost must be charged as the price of irrigation water. Yet another estimate is obtained to see what the subsidy numbers would look like if only O&M expenses were considered—so that subsidy here is simply O&M expenses minus gross receipts. These three series in juxtaposition (Figure 5.3) reveal that government estimates are significantly higher than our estimates of irrigation subsidy. This is particularly true of the later years. However, our estimates are somewhat higher than the O&M method estimates, which consider only O&M costs. Admittedly, the approach used in this chapter has its drawbacks; these estimates take into account neither depreciation nor interest rates. However, this approach has the advantage of simplicity. Earlier, the Finance Commissions had been pleading for recovering at least

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K.V. Raju and Ashok Gulati Figure 5.3: Estimates of Subsidies on Major, Medium and Minor Irrigation: A Comparison

60,000

Our eestimates stimates ((Vaidyanathan Vaidyanathan Committee method)

Government estimates

48,000 36,000 24,000

1999-2000

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2.5 per cent of the cumulative capital costs, which was reduced to 1 per cent. Pure theory may give figures of this implicit subsidy that are much higher than what is politically or even economically feasible to charge farmers. The unanimous decision of the 17-member Committee on the Pricing of Irrigation Water, to charge only 1 per cent of the historically accumulated capital expenditures, with full O&M expenses of the current year, perhaps reflects that the remaining capital expenses have to be borne by the rest of the society, maybe as a price for food security in order to keep food within the reach of the masses. This is broadly in line with the practice that currently prevails in most countries.

C ONSEQUENCES

OF

I RRIGATION S UBSIDIES

The role of irrigation in enhancing agricultural production is well established and a significant increase in production, especially food grains, over the years can be attributed to increasing irrigation in the country. It promotes faster adoption of High Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds, fertiliser consumption and other inputs associated with intensive agriculture. As a result of this package use of inputs, the yield on irrigated plots in 1992–93 tended to be 2.3 times greater than the yield on non-irrigated plots (Dhawan 1999). Econometrically, it is not an easy exercise to segregate the impact of each of these highly complementary inputs like water, HYV seeds, fertilisers and insecticides on agricultural production. Although it is the combined impact of all inputs that is reflected here, the fact is that irrigation as the facilitating factor for all the other inputs lies at the base of this. It has thus led to the growth of self-sufficiency in food. But the cost at which this has been achieved has not been studied in detail. Slowly but surely, the bulging subsidies have taken their toll on the irrigation sector itself. If neglected

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any further, their impact on finances, environment, and investments and agriculture as a whole could be disastrous.

Financial and Economic Consequences The price of canal water is pathetically low and completely unrelated to the productivity or scarcity value of water, or the cost of delivering it. It accounts for just 8 per cent of cropping expenses and is equal to barely 5 per cent of the average incremental production of irrigated areas over rainfed lands (World Bank 1999b). Moreover, water charges are fixed in nominal terms that remain unchanged for years, so that in real terms they have been falling. In most states, the agency levying the water charges and those responsible for its collection (usually the responsibility of the Revenue Department) are different. Partly as a result, collection has tended to remain low. The overall loss amounts to around 7 per cent of the total planned expenditure on all irrigation schemes. The inability to recover costs has led to growing state revenue deficits so that currently irrigation alone is responsible for a third of the states’ revenue deficit (World Bank 1999a). With inadequate cost recovery and inability to generate funds, the irrigation departments have to increasingly rely on the state government to meet even its O&M activities. Since irrigation subsidies have to be absorbed at the state level and the budgetary situation of most states is under severe strain, it has resulted in increasing cuts in further state expenditure on irrigation. A subsidy reduction of 20 per cent could have helped raise expenditure by at least 20 per cent. Alternatively, a subsidy reduction of even 5 per cent in 1986–87 would have doubled expenditure on O&M of Rs 4.93 billion incurred that year. This would have entailed an over three-fold rise in the collection of gross revenue from farmers in that year, that is, Rs 167 billion (Vaidyanathan 1993).

Physical Constraints The result of curtailed expenditure on irrigation is the poor maintenance of projects and neglect of existing irrigation systems (leading to poor quality of service) on the one hand, and the inability to complete on-going projects because of paucity of funds on the other. These have led to a rapid deterioration of physical infrastructure, particularly of surface irrigation facilities and drainage infrastructure. Although this is partly due to poor design and construction, it is to a larger extent due to the lack of adequate maintenance. Broken-down distribution systems and siltation of canals and drains tend to reduce irrigation efficiency and lead to irregular supply.

Wastage and Inefficiencies in Water-use The contribution of water is generally taken to be about a quarter to two-fifths of the additional agricultural production. When a farmer uses water as an input until its marginal value

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product (MVP) is zero, he overexploits the resource. This leads to large-scale emergence of water-intensive crops like paddy or sugarcane in irrigated tracts. It is well known that in almost all of the canal commands, the actual area under paddy or sugarcane turns out to be much more than was initially planned in the project. Surface water-use efficiency under the existing projects in India is estimated to be as low as 40 per cent (Navalawala 1994). As against this, in the advanced systems of the West as much as 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the water diverted in large surface systems is available for plant use (Repetto 1986). This enormous wastage of water during conveyance and on the field arises as much due to poor design of structures as on account of lack of incentives to conserve water. In the absence of financial accountability and operation autonomy, project authorities do not have any motivation to take water-conserving measures, such as the lining of canals for supplying water, on a volumetric basis. In the absence of large-scale investments in drainage, vast areas either become unfit for cultivation or returns on them are much below their potential.

Inequity A disquieting consequence of under-pricing of surface water is the intensive watering of fields by farmers at the head, leaving the tail-enders with sparse supplies. Apart from lowering the productivity per unit of water used, this leads to inequity. Irregular and unpredictable supply also contributes to the inequity in the distribution of water between head and tail-enders. The intensive water-use, particularly at the head reaches, is responsible to a significant extent for shrinking effective command areas of the system compared to what is originally envisaged. This is one of the major reasons why the irrigation potential utilised in canal commands is usually 15 to 20 per cent less than the potential created. Moreover, only 26 per cent of the villages were reported as having a government canal in 1997–98. This reflects considerable inequity in the distribution of irrigation service and, therefore, of subsidies.

Decline in Public Investment Rapidly increasing subsidies on canal irrigation exercise a strong negative impact on public sector investments in agriculture. The mid-1960s saw a considerable increase in public investment in response to the need to achieve food self-sufficiency. The 1970s were characterised by the contribution of private investment in agriculture with the introduction of the profitable HYV technology and also had high complementarity with public investment. The public resources for surface irrigation were, however, spread thinly on a number of projects during the 1980s. As many as 500 major and medium irrigation projects, at various stages of completion at the end of the Seventh Plan, entailed a spillover cost of Rs 390 billion (GOI 1992b). These time overruns contribute to the higher real cost per hectare of irrigation potential created. The current trend suggests that in order to fully exploit the remaining irrigation potential of 25 million hectares through major and medium schemes, it would take another 50 years! Even if no new projects were undertaken, the potential of on-going projects would take two decades to realise.

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‘T HE V ICIOUS C IRCLE ’

AND THE

N EED

FOR

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R EFORM

The consequences of irrigation subsidies that have been delineated above form elements of a vicious circle (see Figure 5.4) (World Bank 1999a). The water pricing policy in India is such that it does not even cover the cost of O&M of the irrigation systems, let alone the full capital cost including O&M. This leads to severe financial pressure on the state since it has to absorb the subsidies. The fiscal constraints of the irrigation service agency and the state leads to inadequate budgetary allocation towards O&M of these systems resulting in physical deterioration of the irrigation system, which affects water delivery and supply. The poor irrigation service is also caused by institutional constraints like the lack of incentive and accountability on the part of the monopoly of the government agency to assure quality supply. There is no link between irrigation qualities provided, revenues generated and staff incentives. Further, there is lack of coordination among departments dealing with agriculture and those dealing with irrigation, within the irrigation department itself, and between agencies dealing with different types of irrigation, such as lift irrigation, canal projects, groundwater schemes, and so on. The irrigation departments are highly centralised and function with a top-down approach failing to establish any linkages with the farmer-users. Lack of farmer involvement results in inappropriate design of irrigation systems, which also leads to poor irrigation service. Farmers are as a result dissatisfied. Unreliable supply with iniquitous distribution of water leaves many disgruntled and unwilling to pay (higher) water rates. Indirectly, the poor irrigation service also affects the farmers’ ability to pay, since inadequate irrigation (combined with inefficient wateruse technologies) results in low yields and incomes. The water pricing policy too may impact incomes in another way. This has happened when severe inefficiency and wastage in water use lead to environmental problems in the long run, which have an adverse impact on yields and incomes. The unwillingness of farmers to pay more for irrigation services coupled with the possible inability to do so preclude any change in the water policy in terms of raising the water rates charged from irrigators. No policy maker would want to risk such an undertaking. Nor is it fair to increase water rates without concomitant improvement in the quality of service. Improvements in quality in turn are constrained by funds and the inefficiency of the input irrigation agency. Thus, the vicious circle perpetuates.

W HAT

IS THE

W AY O UT ?

As far as the irrigation sector goes, we find ourselves in a Catch-22 situation. Given that the input-supplying agency is in financial doldrums, as are the states that ultimately bear the burden of the subsidy, it is imperative that these agencies recover the costs so that they become financially viable. This would entail a manifold increase in water rates. To reiterate, farmers would be unwilling to accept such a step unless they derive some benefit in terms of better delivery of the input. For this to happen, the physical condition of the irrigation systems

Inadequate agricultural extension

Low field efficiency

Farmer dissatisfaction

Low willingness to pay

Source: Based on World Bank (1999a). Note: line indicates weak link.

Low incomes

Low ability to pay

Water pricing policy

Institutional complaints

Poor irrigation service

Poor irrigation systems

Low cost recovery

Low water charges

Poor O&M

Inability to fund adequately O&M

Decline in public investment

Low/Declining priority in planned funds for irrigation

Environmental consequences like groundwater depletion

Figure 5.4: The Vicious Circle in Indian Irrigation

88 K.V. Raju and Ashok Gulati

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needs improvement. However, this is itself predicated on the availability of funds on the one hand and an institutional overhaul on the other. If the vicious circle in Indian irrigation is to be turned into a virtuous circle it can be accomplished only through a multifaceted reform programme. One of the elements of the vicious circle that should be targeted is price reform with the aim of ensuring that the irrigation agency is made financially self-sustaining with the capability of providing efficient irrigation service. Since price reform without improvement in quality of service is inconceivable, it must be accompanied by fundamental changes in the institutional framework. Simultaneously, good agricultural practices and efficient water use technologies must be promoted so that excessive use and wastage of water are prevented. How can these be accomplished?

Price Reform Pricing of canal waters is a state subject (like power) and hence tends to differ widely across states. In addition, prices also vary across crops within the same state and across the seasons for the same crop. Pricing can also differ across different regions or projects within the same state. Although there are some states like Punjab which give free irrigation water from canals, in most states, pricing is based on crop area and the season. Since technically it is difficult and expensive to measure water supplies on a volumetric basis to millions of small cultivators, volumetric pricing seems to be a far cry at least in the foreseeable future. The debate on the principles underlying the pricing of irrigation water has for long veered round to the view that the farmers must pay at least the short-run marginal cost of providing water comprising O&M charges and a small part of the interest on the capital invested (Rao et al. 1999). Earlier, the Fifth, Sixth and the Seventh Finance Commissions, in agreement with the Jakhade Committee, had recommended that the pricing of canal irrigation water should recover 2.5 per cent of the capital invested besides the working expenses. But given the poor financial performance of canal irrigation the subsequent Finance Commissions, the Eighth and the Ninth, recommended only the recovery of O&M expenses. However, the Tenth Finance Commission did reiterate the need to recover at least 1 per cent of the capital cost besides the working expenses. The Vaidyanathan Committee (GOI 1992a) was the last major report on this subject. In practice, however, the pricing of canal waters did not cover more than 20 per cent of the O&M expenses in the mid-1990s. It is well known that over years the capacity of the farmers to pay for higher irrigation charges has increased due to spread of HYV seeds, commercial and high-value crops coming in the commands of canals and higher productivity through better cropping operations.5 Besides, despite over-staffing, the actual expenditure on O&M per hectare of irrigated area is considerably below the accepted norms. As against the generally-accepted principle of appropriating as water charges between 25 to 40 per cent of the additional net income generated per hectare on account of irrigation, only about 2 to 5 per cent of such income is being collected as water rates. Therefore, at least a five-fold increase in existing water rates may be necessary; both on theoretical grounds and from a practical viewpoint of managing the projects. However, political will is essential to initiate this process.

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The next obstacle is in the collection of water charges. Collections remain low and mechanisms to collect (done by the Revenue Department) are not effectively coordinated with the irrigation agencies. Cost of collection is more than the sum collected in some states (for example, Bihar). This speaks volumes in terms of the urgent need to usher in institutional reforms in these irrigation agencies/departments that are saddled with enormous staff and rampant corruption. Price reforms in Indian irrigation, if they were so simple, would have been carried out long back. The fact that the subsidy situation has worsened over time should compel us to recognise the situation as far from simple. It is intertwined as much with the state and the nature of politics, as it suffers from a lack of understanding of who is being subsidised and by how much. As a result, the suggested approach of reforming the regime of subsidies is often divorced from the ground reality and therefore remains a non-starter.

Institutional Reform Why Institutional Reform? In the context of irrigation subsidy reform, the preceding section brings to the fore two points, particularly in the context of canal irrigation. First, the implicit willingness-to-pay that the above analysis reveals is with respect to irrigation charges as imposed by the state. However, in practice, due to the monopolistic position of the state with regard to water, actual payments made by consumers (inclusive of ‘scarcity rent’ paid in one form or the other) may be higher. Estimates of these payments do exist for some parts of the country (Wade 1987). A large part of the willingness-to-pay may already be captured by these payments. Second, higher willingness-to-pay is related to access to the services of the input in amounts and at the time the farmer requires. As the consumer pays more, he/she also expects qualitative improvements in supply. It is exactly for this reason that price reforms in Indian irrigation must be accompanied by institutional reforms. Price reform is essential but not sufficient for a well-functioning irrigation system.

Recent Efforts at Institutional Reform A number of expert committees in India, starting with the Taxation Enquiry Commission in 1953 to the Committee on Pricing of Irrigation Water (GOI 1992b), have expressed the desirability of improving the management of irrigation systems so as to make them more responsive to the needs of user cultivators. However, experience shows that this shall not succeed unless these systems are distanced from political interference and also de-bureaucratised. The recent debate on these issues among the experts all over the world has resulted in a remarkable consensus on the need to: (a) make the project authorities financially accountable by according them operation autonomy; (b) associate the user farmers with the decision making process in the projects at various levels; (c) entrust the Water Users Associations (WUAs) with the tasks of managing the systems in their area of operation as well as collecting the water charges on the basis of some workable formula linking the rates with the quantity of water consumed; and (d) allow private sector participation in irrigation systems’ renovation and modernisation and

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collection of fees. In the following sections we focus on two major reforms: (i) setting up of financially autonomous irrigation agencies as a part of the financial reforms; and (ii) irrigation management transfer to WUAs.

Financially Autonomous Irrigation Agencies Canal irrigation financing in India suffers from two distinctive problems: (i) the funding for construction of on-going or new canal networks has been shrinking, leading to undue delay in completion of projects, which in turn raises costs and reduces benefits; and (ii) the resources for normal operation and maintenance are also under severe pressure, as the cost recovery from canal irrigation is extremely low and the state budgets are not able to allocate more funds because of the overall fiscal crunch. Less attention has been given to the potential of domestic financial markets to provide such funding. Since the 1980s, the Indian capital markets have emerged as an important source of funds for corporate units in the private and public sectors. Primary capital mobilisation by private sector companies in the form of equity and debt rose from less than Rs 2 billion in 1980 to over Rs 43 billion in 1990–91 and then recorded a quantum jump to over Rs 260 billion by the end of 1994–95 (GOI 1996). During this period, several state governments have also begun to tap into this domestic financial market to finance irrigation development. This is not the first time that such an institutional reform is being proposed. Indeed, the working group on major and medium irrigation projects for the Eighth Plan considered the issue of inadequate funding for projects in the Seventh Plan. Against the spill over liability of Rs 260 billion for major and medium projects that remained uncompleted from previous plans, the outlay was only Rs 115 billion. To enable the central government to assume a more positive role, in 1988 the Ministry of Water Resources formulated a proposal for the establishment of an Irrigation Finance Corporation to provide financial assistance to projects of national importance in the irrigation sector (GOI 1995). Though this proposal was supported by a large number of states, the Planning Commission did not approve it. Over the years, the states that had important ongoing projects established autonomous irrigation finance corporations. In South India, Karnataka’s Krishna Bhagya Jal Nigam Limited6 (KBJNL) is one of them (Gulati et al. 2004). In a normal course, the state budget could have supported the entire Upper Krishna Project (UKP) execution, but then the project completion could have been anywhere from 15 to 20 years, since the state budgetary allocation of around Rs 10 billion is meant for all major and medium projects in the state. In 1995, the government contemplated an outlay of Rs 57.45 billion (then revised it to 82 billion in 2001) for the completion of UKP. It included Rs 30.5 billion from market borrowing, Rs 24.5 billion from the Government of Karnataka and another Rs 2.45 billion from internal generation. KBJNL focused primarily on mobilising funds and completing the physical work before 2003. Encouraging support from the government’s top functionaries (like the chief secretary and finance secretary) and having the right persons in the key positions (like executive director, finance, with good experience) helped it to move faster in the desired direction. This

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has produced three main outcomes: (a) successful mobilisation of funds; (b) less immediate financial burden on the state; and (c) project implementation more or less on schedule. Although KBJNL has made considerable progress in mobilising capital for construction, it has not made structural reforms within the organisation, nor has it paid attention to repayment. (Gulati et al. 2002). The organisation depends on the government’s budgetary support even for interest and principle payment to bond subscribers and shareholders. Though KBJNL was originally designed to be a financially autonomous body, its functioning is mainly on the lines of a government agency. Inspite of some financial success, the main objectives of the Financially Autonomous Irrigation Agency (FAIA) remain unfulfilled. Clearly, there is a lack of vision among the management staff about what an FAIA can do. It also indicates inadequate conceptualisation of KBJNL as an autonomous body. However, one more corporation known as Karnataka Neeravari Nigam Limited (KNNL) has been formed on the lines of KBJNL, to raise funds and manage eight irrigation projects in the Krishna basin of Karnataka. Four more corporations are being planned on similar lines. This is not the first attempt in India in this direction. The Andhra Pradesh State Irrigation Development Corporation was registered in 1974 to function on corporate lines and access private and institutional finance. But cost recovery never even approached actual expenses; the corporation accumulated heavy losses and could not service its bank loans. It no longer attracts bank finance due to its arrears. The Gujarat Water Resources Development Corporation, wholly owned by the Government of Gujarat and registered under the Companies Act, engaged in groundwater exploration, and construction and management of the public tube wells but faced worsening financial and operational conditions ever since its inception in 1975.7 The 1994 Finance Committee suggested the corporation should be wound up (Kolavalli and Raju 1995; Shah et al. 1995). Four Indian states (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh) have now set up corporations, or Nigams, that focus on mobilising funds for surface irrigation. All four states started their corporations mainly to overcome the reduced budgetary allocations for the irrigation sector. These corporations were broadly established on the lines of public-sector companies, to mobilise funds. Emphasis was on mobilising funds from institutions, particularly those that were directly or indirectly regulated and/or were linked to government rather than individuals.

Irrigation Management Transfer to Water Users Associations The Vaidyanathan Committee (GOI 1992a) recommended that on the institutional front, user groups be involved in the management of the irrigation systems and that their role is gradually increased from management of minors to distributaries and then to main canal systems. The preconditions of carrying out this recommendation are: that there exist WUAs who can take delivery of water from irrigation authorities on a wholesale level and that there are measurement devices installed to measure the volume of water at the distributory level. At present, both these pre-conditions are not satisfied in most of the irrigation projects. As

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a result, the recommendations of the committee can only be implemented in the long run, with the gradual development of WUAs on the one hand and fixing measurement devices on the other. The Government has been quite slow in moving in this direction; nevertheless, a beginning was made in the Ninth Five Year Plan to set up a working group on Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM), which recommended that farmers’ involvement in the management of canal irrigation works should be taken up on high priority. To start with, 2,000 pilot projects were to be taken up to cover at least 2 to 3 per cent of the canal area irrigated in the country, in the Ninth Plan itself. Gradually, this was to be increased to bring 50 per cent of irrigated area under PIM. Although this required quite a bit of spade work in terms of defining water rights, the role and jurisdiction of WUAs vis-à-vis that of the state irrigation departments, and how the disputes would be settled, and so on, a beginning was made in some states. The announcement of a one-time management subsidy to states for the forming of WUAs in the Central Government Budget of 1999–2000 was another positive step in inducing institutional reform. Efforts at forming WUAs in India have so far been isolated attempts on a small scale. There were 4,420 WUAs functioning in the early 1990s (before the ‘big bang’ in institutional reforms in Andhra Pradesh). The area under their operation was, however, only 0.33 per cent of the total irrigated area in the country (Rao et al. 1999). It has been observed in many of these institutions in India that the main focus was the management of the irrigation systems through the involvement of farmers. Cost recovery and other financial aspects were not the motivating factors for such organisations. It has been pointed out (Gulati et al. 1999) that this aspect may be of much greater importance to the future of irrigation systems since state funds are shrinking and central government support is limited. This is true especially because few of these WUAs have really emerged as robust institutions and most die out once external support is withdrawn. In this context, it is noteworthy that so far the impetus for irrigation management transfer in different states in India has come from external agencies—Indian government policy and donor pressures (Brewer and Raju 1995). This may influence the type of WUA and the legal framework within which these institutions operate. The need of the hour is, however, a state-wide policy where the institutions are designed to suit the physical, technical and socio-political framework of the individual state. One way to sustain these institutions is by making farmers co-owners of the systems through, for example, equity shares, in a way that would allow them to participate in the management, design and construction of the irrigation systems. This must be backed by a strong legal framework. It is only very recently that there has been a large-scale effort at institutional reform initiated by the states themselves. The most progressive state in this regard is Andhra Pradesh (Raju 2001) . It has taken a lead in passing an act to transfer the management of irrigation systems to farmers’ organisations. By 1999–2000, Andhra Pradesh alone had more than 10,000 WUAs; nearly 80 per cent of them were of minor irrigation tanks. So far, the WUAs have been set up at minor and distributory levels. Beyond the distributory level, the WUAs manage distribution of water and collection of dues thereof. There are indications that the institutional reforms

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undertaken in Andhra Pradesh are reasonably successful in some respects (irrigated area expansion, water efficiency, small reduction in agency expenditure, users participation in operation and maintenance) although it is still too early to tell. But macro-level issues are yet to be touched: (i) Project-level users organisations (federation of three-tier organisations) have not been formed. (ii) It is feared that each project-level federation may encompass more than one administrative district and that their ‘power’ to regulate and operate the water distribution may go beyond the elected leaders of the state assembly. Some federation’s budget may be larger than the budget of a minister at the state level. This is a direct threat to the elected leaders of the local area. (iii) Reservoir operations have to be restructured to meet the demands of the WUAs and their federations. The agency has to provide the guarantee to supply at the agreed levels, for which it is unprepared and finds it difficult owing to lower efficiency of the main system and lower than designed storage level in the reservoirs. (iv) Most importantly, the financial sustainability of WUAs. Even after more than four years of the WUAs’ formation and functioning, they are not empowered to collect water fees and retain the agreed portion. At any given level of the three tiers of users organisation, to what extent WUAs can financially sustain is still untested. Other states would do well to watch Andhra Pradesh and draw lessons from its experience. Many states are indeed inching ahead on this line of action, most notably Rajasthan, Karnataka, Haryana, besides Gujarat and Maharashtra, which already have an informal system of PIM. The donor agencies, such as the World Bank, are also insisting on forming farmers groups and an upward revision of canal irrigation water rates under their Water Resources Consolidation (WRC) projects in states like Tamil Nadu, Orissa, and Haryana.

Direction of Change in User Involvement Overall, it appears that the change is in the right direction. But the speed of change is slow, and one will have to wait and examine the exact nature and design of this experiment. The degree of success will depend upon how far the user groups get interested in managing the canal networks, as also on how much autonomy is granted to project authorities and how much transparency is introduced in the management of funds. Learning from the experiments tried out so far, conditions for the success of WUA’s can be outlined (Kolavalli et al. 1997). The result of a number of studies of Indian WUAs suggests that the major factors influencing their viability include wide-ranging and comprehensive changes in the legal framework and policies, autonomy of the WUAs, a new accountability of the Irrigation Department to the WUAs and attitudinal changes in the bureaucracy (Navalawala 1994; GOI 1997). With the Constitution (Seventy Third) Amendment Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 1993, the strengthening of grass-root institutions like the Panchayati Raj, it is possible to think of transferring management to local-level institutions. The overall performance of WUAs in canal,

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lift and tank irrigation in the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have also been studied. The major pointers obtained from this and other studies are: (a) When faced with a legal fiat that water shall only be sold to groups of users, farmers are quick to come together. (b) The existence of some flexibility in determining water charges helps as allocation rules in successful WUAs often differ from region to region and depend on crops grown and corresponding irrigation schedules. (c) External support for WUAs may be necessary to create capability. An NGO or the irrigation department may play this role for a limited period of time. (d) The creation of WUAs changes the strategic position that the irrigation department and its line agencies have had for a long period of time. The likely reactions of this set of vested interests must be taken into account. Additionally, their experience needs to be tapped within the new institutional framework. Although certain factors have been identified as crucial to the success of WUAs, ultimately the key factor is designing institutions that are appropriate for a given socio-economic, legal and political context. Full agency control is often reported as a form of management; in practice, it usually involves some user representation, informal though it may be. Similarly, full WUA control is also rare in practice. ‘Agency O&M, user input’ is the more common form of irrigation management. Under shared management, agencies are responsible for O&M, but not completely. WUAs share some O&M responsibilities while chiefly representing users. Many irrigation management transfers today are characterised by the WUAs subsuming the responsibilities of O&M while the state agencies continue to own and regulate the system. Another interaction system is where the WUA not only manages the system (that is, has O&M responsibilities), but also owns the system. The state agencies have only a regulatory function here. What model is followed depends largely on the system level. At the river basin level, for instance, the state usually plays a dominant role and the users, very little. For the main system level, again the state retains ownership and O&M responsibilities, although user representation may enable them to participate in decision making. Shared management and O&M by WUA are usually found at the system or distributory level. WUA ownership, agency regulation is often seen as the culmination of management transfer programmes at the distributory level. In addition to the formation of WUAs, the ownership of canal networks starting from the distributories through the issue of water bonds must be given priority. Another policy is the establishment of tradeable water rights (Meinzen-Dick and Bruns 2000; Rosegrant and Binswanger 1994). This would require investment in irrigation technology—for conveyance, metering, diversion and institutional improvement, and would result in more efficient water-use. It has also been suggested that individual irrigation systems be made financially autonomous, like corporations, so that their income depends chiefly on the revenues that they collect for the irrigation service they provide. This would provide incentive for a stricter collection of revenue from users apart from superior services that would facilitate better recovery. Although, in terms of efficiency these corporations would be better performers than government departments, they

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are likely to be natural monopolies. It would therefore be essential to ensure transparency in the transactions and capital expenditures of these agencies. The need to keep their expenses transparent and under control is even more if private sector participation were introduced. In this context, each state should have an independent regulatory commission—an Independent Regulatory Commission for Canal Irrigation (IRCCI) like those for electricity supply, with decentralised agencies at the user-group level. Institutional reforms would provide the right environment for undertaking price reforms by depoliticising or disengaging the state from the management of irrigation systems. It would make individual irrigation systems financially autonomous in a way that their incomes are dependent on the revenue they collect from users of the service that they provide. Additionally, it would enable the linking of the payments for irrigation service with the quality of service offered by the agency in charge of the irrigation system, which has largely been absent so far. Unless this functional link between the revenue and service and performance (Gulati et al. 1994) is accomplished, the chances of successful reforms in this critical sector will remain very low.

C ONCLUDING R EMARKS From the above analysis, several facts come to the fore in the context of irrigation subsidies in India. • Pricing of water is way below the level that any theory would suggest, be it demandside pricing based on the Marginal Value Product (MVP) or supply-side pricing based on Long Run Marginal Costs (LRMC). • The collection of charges is poor, making the actual receipts per unit of water even lower than their price. • The quality of service provided by irrigation agencies is not satisfactory; so the farmers often have to resort to hiring/buying water from fellow farmers. This alternative costs the farmer more than what he pays to the irrigation authorities indicating that he may have the ability to pay. • However, the farmer is unwilling to pay higher charges since he does not anticipate a related improvement in the quality of the service and higher charges for the same quality of service is strongly resisted. • Raising canal water charges under the given institutional structure and quality of service becomes a ground for contest between the bureaucracy and policy makers on the one side and farmers and their representatives on the other. There is large inefficiency in the input-supplying agencies, the project authorities in case of canal irrigation. The situation offers an opportunity for reform and is surely a win–win situation for the farmers as well as policy makers. This can be achieved by ensuring that the quality of irrigation

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service is linked to the price being charged; and that the costing of this service is transparent and there is an effort to keep these costs down through innovative methods. Canal irrigation subsidy can be reduced/rationalised without adversely affecting agricultural output. The capacity to pay for higher irrigation charges is there with the farmers, and many are also willing to pay, but they need to be assured of better irrigation service and plugging of leakages in irrigation funds. For this, one has to grant greater autonomy to irrigation authority; involve farmers in management and decision making; establish an independent regulatory commission; and make the system more transparent than what it is today by allowing ‘right to information’, especially the one related to contracts to private parties. With these institutional reforms, one hopes that canal irrigation in India will be able to overcome not only the issue of subsidy and recovering O&M expenses and 1 per cent of cumulative capital expenditures at historical prices, but will also be on a sustainable path of higher efficiency—both physical and financial.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this paper was presented in the Conference on Economic Reforms and Food Security: The Role of Trade and Technology. A South Asia Initiative of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, and Indian Council of Agricultural Research, held on 24–25 April 2002 in New Delhi. 2. This is reflected in plan outlays on irrigation. During the last 45 years, starting with the first Five Year Plan (FYP) in 1951–52 to 1996–97, the nation has spent almost Rs 920 billion at historical prices on irrigation. This includes the expenditure by the government and from institutional sources, but excludes the expenditure financed from farmers’ own resources, on major and medium irrigation, minor irrigation, command area development (CAD) and flood control. At 1996–97 prices, this figure stands at a staggering level of Rs 2313.87 billion (GOI 1997, see Annex Figures 1.1 to 1.5). 3. Minor irrigation officially defined as projects with less than 2000 ha command area includes surface irrigation through tanks, watersheds, lift irrigation and even small canal networks, but largely well irrigation consisting of dug wells and shallow and deep tube wells. 4. The choice of 1 per cent of cumulative capital cost is itself highly debatable and arbitrary. But this was decided on unanimously by the Vaidyanathan Committee based on the ‘Delphi Principle’. 5. In the case of sugarcane in Maharashtra, for example, irrigation cost per hectare as a ratio of gross revenue from sugarcane farmers declined from 11.2 per cent in 1968 to only 5.9 per cent in 1995. Its share in net revenue decreased from 19.3 per cent in 1968 to 9.7 per cent in 1995. In the case of paddy in Punjab as well, the ratio of irrigation cost to net revenue per hectare has fallen from 38 per cent to 13–14 per cent. 6. At the root of the KBJNL formation lies the sharing of the Krishna river water. The river flows through the Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh states. In 1971, the Krishna Waters Dispute Tribunal (KWDT) was set up to allocate utilisation levels of Krishna waters. The Tribunal reported its findings by 1973 and the states provided the answers for the queries raised by the Tribunal. In 1976, the Tribunal said that the award (popularly known as the Bachawat Award) may come under review by May 2000 AD. (However, due to lack of initiative from these states, the award was not reviewed and the old status continued into 2002.) Thus a deadline was set to utilise the given water allocations by three states. Under this Award, Karnataka is to utilise 734 TMC (20.7 million ha m) of water from Krishna river. The Upper Krishna Project (UKP) was developed to take advantage of the award. The state government sought World Bank assistance for UKP during 1980. The World Bank gave two credits: one expired by

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1986 and another by June 1997, for a total loan of Rs 5.48 billion. Meanwhile, in 1988, the state felt the need for an authority to look into required land acquisition, which was posing a major problem in project implementation. 7. The corporation has accumulated a loss of over Rs 700 million and depends on the government for large subsidies to continue its operations. It faces constraints on what it can charge for its services and cost escalation adds to the deficit every year. Nearly 20 per cent of the deep tube wells that were not being adequately utilised have been closed down; the corporation began leasing out the tube wells to users in 1987 to reduce costs. It had a staggering wage bill of Rs 220 million for a staff of 6,400, while its annual gross income was only Rs 60 million.

References Brewer, J.D. and K.V. Raju (1995). ‘Irrigation Management Transfer Policies’, paper presented at the Workshop on the Status of Irrigation Management Transfer in India, 11–13 December. Ahmedabad: Indian Institute of Management. Dhawan, B.D. (1999). Studies in Indian Irrigation. New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers. Government of India (1992a). Report of the Committee on Pricing on Irrigation Water. New Delhi: Planning Commission. ——— (1992b). Eighth Five Year Plan: Vol. I & II. New Delhi: Planning Commission. ——— (1995). Private Sector Participation in Irrigation and Multipurpose Projects: Report of the High Level Committee. Volumes I & II, Main Report and Annexures. Chaired by P.V. Rangayya Naidu. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. ——— (1996). The India Infrastructure Report: Policy Imperatives for Growth and Welfare. Report submitted by the Expert Group on the Commercialisation of Infrastructure Projects. Chaired by Rakesh Mohan. 3 Volumes. New Delhi: National Council of Applied Economic Research. ——— (1997). Economic Survey, 1996–97. New Delhi: Ministry of Finance. Government of Maharashtra (1996). Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation Act, 1996. Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra. Gulati, A., R. Meinzen-Dick and K.V. Raju (1999). ‘From Top Down to Bottoms Up: Institutional Reforms in Indian Canal Irrigation’. Working Paper. Delhi: Institute for Economic Growth. ——— (2004). Institutional Reforms in Indian Irrigation. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Gulati, A., M. Svendsen and N.R. Choudhury (1994). ‘Major and Medium Irrigation Schemes: Towards Better Financial Performance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29(26). Hanumantha Rao, C.H., B.D. Dhawan and A. Gulati (1999). ‘Towards Reforms in Indian Irrigation: Price and Institutional Policies’, paper prepared for the NCAER-IEG-World Bank Workshop on Reforms in Indian Agriculture for Growth, Efficiency, Equity and Sustainability, 5–16 April, New Delhi. Kolavalli, S., A.H. Kalro, G. Naik, S. Ramnarayan, J. Brewer, R. Sakthivadivel and K.V. Raju (1997). ‘A Study on Irrigation Management Transfer’, in B.M. Desai (ed.), Agricultural Development Paradigm for the Ninth Five Year Plan Under New Economic Environment. New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd. Kolavalli, S. and K.V. Raju (1995). ‘Turnover of Public Tubewells by Gujarat Water Resources Development Corporation, in Irrigation Management Transfer’, selected papers from the International Conference on Irrigation Management Transfer, Wuhan, China, 20–24 September 1994, Water Reports, no.5. edited by S.H. Johnson, D.L.Vermillion and J.A. Sagardoy. Rome: FAO and IIMI. Meinzen-Dick, R. and B.R. Bruns (2000). ‘Negotiating Water Rights: Introduction’, in B.R. Bruns and R. Meinzen-Dick (eds), Negotiating Water Rights. New Delhi: Vistaar.

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Navalawala, B.N. (1994). ‘Planning Perspective of Farmers’ Participation in Irrigation Management in India’, paper distributed at the International Conference on Irrigation Management Transfer, Wuhan, China, 20–24 September. Raju, K.V. (2001). ‘Participatory Irrigation Management in Andhra Pradesh: Promise, Practice and a Way Forward’, working paper No. 65, Bangalore: Institute for Social and Economic Change. Repetto, Robert (1986). Skimming the Water; Rent-Seeking and the Performance of Public Irrigation Systems. Washington D.C: World Resources Institute (WRI). Rosegrant, M. and H. Binswanger (1994). ‘Markets in Trade-able Water Rights: Potential for Efficiency Gains in Developing Country Water Resource Allocation’, World Development, 22(11): 1613–25. Shah, T., V. Ballabh, K. Dobriyal and J. Talati (1995). ‘Turnover of State Tubewells to Farmer Cooperatives: Assessment of Gujarat’s Experience, in Irrigation Management Transfer’, in S.H. Johnson, D.L. Vermillion and J.A. Sagardoy (eds), Irrigation Management Transfer: Selected Papers from the International Conference on Irrigation Management Transfer, Wuhan China, 20–24 September 1994, Water Reports No. 5. Rome: FAO and IIMI. Vaidyanathan, A. (1993). ‘Second India Series Revisited: Water’. Madras: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Wade, R. (1987). Village Republics: Economic Conditions for Collective Action i9n South India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. World Bank (1999a). Water Resources Management Sector Review. Irrigation Component: From Physical Expansion to Performance Improvement. Pre-final draft, 14 April. Washington D.C: The World Bank. ——— (1999b). India: Water Resources Management Sector Review. Final Draft, 16 May. Washington D.C: The World Bank.

6 Recovery of Irrigation User Cess and Governance of Canal Systems Manoj T. Thomas and Vishwa Ballabh

I NTRODUCTION Large canal systems have been a key component of India’s irrigation network. The emphasis in India, post-Independence, was on attaining self-sufficiency in food grains production due to which increase in the irrigated area was considered a means for increasing food production and the accent was on large irrigation projects. Thus, investment in large canal irrigation systems was a key public strategy for achieving food security. This has contributed substantially to India becoming self-sufficient in food grains production. However, over the years, the efficiency of the irrigation potential created from these large canal irrigation projects has been low, and recovering operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses from the users has also been a problem. These projects have thus become a sort of ‘sink’, which keeps on drawing money, without being able to provide returns on the large capital invested in these projects. This tends to have a negative influence on new investments in the sector and investments on operations and maintenance. The lack of recovery and poor maintenance in turn, leads to the under utilisation of capacity (potential), inequity in irrigation, uncertainty, indifferent quality of irrigation, wastage of irrigation water, water logging, salinity and alkalinity, besides financial losses (Mitra 1996, Chapter 5). This chapter looks at the problems in recovery as emanating from defects in governance. The issue of recovery of irrigation cess in large canal systems is seen here in the context of reform and reinvention of public services through privatisation, public and private partnership, and overall decentralisation and more inclusive governance and management of irrigation systems. From the diverse meanings ascribed to the term governance, the user in this chapter has been viewed from two broad perspectives: first, from a multiple actor and multiple agency point of view where state, market and civil society have all been assumed to have roles, not only in overall governance of water—collection, storage and distribution—but also collection and assigning of costs for each of these services in the water sector; and second, governance

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as viewed in new public management (Hill and Hupe 2002: 14). Feldman and Khademian (2002) see the governance structure as relationships created through the interaction of people in different and reciprocal roles that are relatively dynamic; and public managers as a key client of these interactions. In the changed environment in the 1990s, there was a call for a changed mode of functioning of the public services, especially with regard to the need for increased accountability of the organisations to the public and to the users. In this context, the entire gamut of issues related to governance like the changed role of policy, monitoring organisations and rules gained importance. Governance is a means for ensuring coherence between the different activities that a public agency has to undertake and the clients it has to serve. It has been suggested that for success in the public domain, organisations must act simultaneously in a number of domains and these actions have to be well coordinated and directed (Khandwalla 1999: 116). The new public management emphasises the values of markets and consumer focus. In the past decade, the concept of a ‘market’ has permeated even the domain of public services. Jorgensen (1993) refers to two circuits of distinct markets thereby making the public organisation an organisational entity competing with other public organisations for better appropriation, and also competing to satisfy the customers’ needs. The interaction of the two markets is presented in Figure 6.1. While payment by tax payers is not of a voluntary nature and they do not have incentive to exercise strong control on the functioning of public services, they, along with other indirect players like politicians and interest groups, need to be satisfied. Enlarging the concept of the customer, the government organisation is seen as providing public value to the people, in addition to providing private value to its beneficiary clients through a process of generalised exchange which is diffused and deferred in nature (Alford 2002). While the needs of the distant clients, such as tax payers, are more in terms of being kept informed, it is the immediate or direct consumer who gets more importance in the new public management. Recovery from the users is seen directly as a consideration for services rendered. This, therefore, shifts the focus on the quality of service delivery. Yet, recovery is a function of more than the quality of service delivery as it also depends on the performance in collection and the willingness-to-pay of the users. The development of the attitude of payment has been emphasised as an essential feature of the new public management. Bellone and Goerl (1992) suggest that the willingness-to-pay by any citizen is an important indicator of civic-oriented entrepreneurship. The drivers of public management reform in the western countries include demand for greater social equity, democratisation and empowerment, and humanisation of the public service (Wise 2002). However, this does not seem to be true in India. Mascarenhas (1993) attributes the causes of the call for public sector reform to the following: • Significant growth of public bureaucracies into complex entities which have also failed to deliver the goods. • Expenditure in public services being less productive and diverting resources from the private sector. • The emergence of conservative political regimes.

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Politico– administrative costs

Interested actors, budget authorities, politicians, interest group, media

Political support, appropriation

The public organisation

Produced goods, services

Market for goods, services

Satisfaction of needs, lack of complaints, fees

Clientele

Source: Jorgensen (1993).

One of the key changes in the reforms process is the change in the role of the state from an all-powerful entity to one of the many players in the field. The concept of the hollow state has been advanced based on premises of the important and efficient roles that other actors are able to play, or have the potential to play. It has been suggested that there can be a sharp rise in quality, efficiency, innovativeness and responsiveness to ‘customers’ when government departments and agencies are de-linked from the monolithic state (Khandwalla 1999: 257). The issue of irrigation cess recovery in this chapter has been examined from these perspectives. The chapter is divided into seven sections. The first section is the introductory section which provides the context and framework for the analysis. The second section explains the rationale for recovery as stated in literature. The third section brings out the issues in recovery of irrigation cess. The fourth section is a case study of the Mahi Right Bank Canal. The fifth section analyses the incentives of the different stakeholders. The sixth section explores the extent to which the newly emerging options can resolve the issues, and the seventh section brings out a few conclusions that emerge from the study.

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The oft-stated rationale for subsidising agriculture is through its role in stimulating development through increasing production, employment and investment; promoting risk-taking functions of farmers; promoting increased use of new inputs; and keeping the agricultural community in parity with the non-farming community (Gulati 1995). As a substantial portion of the canal systems are in the public domain, subsidising these systems involves mainly bearing of the construction, establishment and maintenance costs. However, in recent discourses of canal management, different reasons have been advanced for proper pricing and recovery of costs. First, the recovery of cost from canal water users should not be seen in isolation of larger social costs of maintenance of the overall system. The negative externalities in large irrigation systems include water logging, salinity, and the like, which are caused mainly due to neglect of drainage (Dhawan 1985). If we are to consider the environmental effects of pollution, the estimates of utilisation of potential created by irrigation has to be discounted because some portion of canal command becomes unsuitable for cultivation (Mitra 1996). The emphasis on cost recovery alone, with little relationship to specific environmental considerations, may not provide sufficient incentives to promote efficient water use (Asad et al. 1999). The current price of canal-irrigation water, which is highly subsidised, does not reflect scarcity value; hence, there is no incentive to adopt methods which could make for efficient use of scarce resources (Gulati 1995). Pricing thus needs to be seen as a means of ensuring efficiency of resource use. Second, the larger social benefits also need to be considered while considering the viability and pricing of irrigation. The incidental benefits of canal irrigation include groundwater recharge, reduction in instability in farm economy, improving water availability for the civic needs of urban and rural populations and benefits to livestock. If the benefits that accrue from these uses are incorporated, the payments that the users of canal irrigation currently make may even be sufficient. These incidental benefits are quite substantial and can be seen to be directly derived from irrigation. A significant portion of the large-crop productions from groundwater-irrigated lands in low-rainfall tracts, like those of Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Western Maharashtra, is a result of the seeped-in canal water (Dhawan 2000). Third, the government policies on minimum support prices also influence irrigation as the public-pricing support of high water-intensive cereal crops have led to their increased cultivation (Rao 2002). Contrary to this, the outputs of water-saving crops face an un-remunerative market and the other inputs are more of a ‘purchased and high-priced’ nature; hence a rise in irrigation rates would be a ‘serious disincentive’ to increased production of such crops (Government of India [GOI] 1992). The support for irrigation is thus argued in terms of a ‘strategic objective’ of self-sufficiency in food grains production. Fourth, according to the ‘total tax’ viewpoint, water charges are only one of the many taxes that farmers pay and have no relation to the costs incurred by the government in providing

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irrigation as they only involve a fiscal question; shortfall of revenues from one source (water charge) can be made up from other sources (other taxes) (GOI 1992). As per this view, the extent of recovery from the users of irrigation service is immaterial as the government anyway derives income from irrigation by way of different taxes, such as taxes on sale of agricultural commodities, differential land taxes for wetlands and local-level mandi taxes. To counter this, it is suggested that even though water charge is collected by the government, it can be considered a user charge rather than a tax. Everything that the government collects need not be a tax because if this is the case then it implies that there is no subsidy in any sector (ibid.). It is argued that there is a clear distinction between tax and non-tax revenue, as water is a key input to crop production and higher water charges can also increase productivity by contributing to more efficient water use. In the case of irrigation services provided by the public-irrigation systems to individual users, the latter can be identified and the magnitude supplied to each can be measured; and a user charge for this good/service is feasible and justified (ibid.). Fifth, the means of subsidising agriculture are either through high prices for produce or through low prices for inputs. Low user fee for water is seen as a means of subsidising agriculture. The advantage of the mechanism of low prices for inputs is that benefits are derived by the farmers only in proportion to the use of other inputs, including land (Gulati 1995). This, however, also ensures that the subsidy is cornered by those who have access to land and other agricultural inputs like fertilisers and pesticides. Subsidisation of canal water also adversely affects equity and is biased against farmers who use other sources for irrigation. Farmers currently pay much more for other sources of water—as much as a third of their produce for tube well water (GOI 1992). In such a case, subsidisation of canal water will further enhance the advantage of farmers who are fortunate enough to be located within the command area of the canal systems. Canal irrigation-based agriculture gets a disproportionate bulk of input subsidies and it is argued that ‘not charging for irrigation water is the biggest fraud on dry land farming’ as it prevents the resources from reaching the dry land farmers (Gulati 1995). Subsidy for canal irrigation also has the impact of favouring water-intensive crops like paddy in Punjab or sugarcane in Maharashtra. While all the above views convey some element of reality, the perspective that has become dominant is that subsidisation has to be reduced and at least a large proportion of the costs, particularly O&M costs, need to be recovered directly from the users. It could be argued that higher recovery would lead to better management of the canal system, which in turn would lead to higher doses of public investment and also boost private investment (see Chapter 5). Low levels of recovery lead to inadequate allocations for maintenance and repairs, resulting in deteriorating quality of services. Poor quality of services has a tendency to reinforce the vicious circle of low recovery rates as the users may not be willing to pay for inadequate services. Low recovery also leads to low resource mobilisation, which in turn leads to slow growth in irrigated areas and new schemes (GOI 1992). Therefore, an effective strategy for recovery of costs is considered essential for the quality of service and overall viability of canal systems.

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Recovery of irrigation cess is dependent on the pricing of services and the extent of recovery, which is ensured by the effective mechanisms for recovery. Pricing for water services is seen as a key element in cost recovery in canal-irrigation projects. Objectives for water pricing also include: (i) economic efficiency, so that water is allocated to its highest value uses; (ii) financial sustain-ability, to enable water management agencies and enterprises to cover development and O&M costs, and earn a reasonable return; (iii) income redistribution, to sectors or groups less able to pay than others; (iv) social concerns, in order to deliver water services to all regardless of willingness-to-pay; and (v) environmental sensitivity, to maintain water quality and mitigate third-party impacts (Asad et al. 1999). The perceived value of water in different uses determines the willingness-to-pay. However, the willingness-to-pay differs across sectors. At the margins, prices should be equal otherwise trading could enhance total surplus to society. But water is also essential for life, and has higher values for domestic purposes. Thus, there is generally higher marginal value of water in domestic and industrial use, and hence the willingness-to-pay is higher (Easter 1992). However, total water required for drinking purposes is only 2–3 per cent, and apart from the quality and transportation costs the domestic price should be close to zero given that the current water price for irrigation is only about Rs 0.30 per 10,000 litres. The principles of cost recovery imply that higher rates be charged for domestic and industrial demand and lower rates for irrigation. The taxation principle suggests that the farmers’ capacity to pay should be taken into account in determining the water pricing. Based on these principles, the Government of India (1992) has suggested that the rate be fixed around 5 per cent of the gross value of produce for food crops and 12 per cent for cash crops. But the rate as a percentage of value has been coming down over the years. Under-pricing of irrigation services is argued to have caused problems like major misallocation of water (at least in economic terms), wasted water resources, serious debt burdens or fiscal deficits for the government agencies charged with water management responsibilities and poor service delivery to users (especially the poor) (Asad et al. 1999). However, economic rationality (marginal cost pricing/cost-based approach or taxation-based approach) is not the only factor to determine water pricing. Political as well as other factors often count more than economic rationality. Another approach often discussed for encouraging efficient usage of water is volumetric pricing. Pricing, especially on a volumetric basis, is also suggested as an instrument of conservation (Meinzen-Dick and Mendoza 1996). The implied logic is that if the price of wateruse exceeds the price of conservation, users will reduce consumption. Volumetric pricing is preferred over pricing on the basis of area. However, area is a poor basis for calculating levy as it does not account for differences in cultivation seasons, need for non-consumption uses, different requirement of crops, quality of water supply, and so on (GOI 1992). The quantitative measures like area under irrigation fail not only to give an accurate measure of the quantity of water but also bypass entirely the question of quality or irrigation, which depends on timing,

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quantity and control over supply (Bharadwaj 1990). Irrigation needs vary across regions and according to uses—for example, in the south it is meant to meet full irrigation needs, while in the Indo-Gangetic plain it may be used only for protective irrigation (Dhawan 1986). While volumetric pricing may have several benefits over area-based pricing, it requires several preconditions to be fully operational and successful. It has been suggested that some of these constraints, such as high transactions costs, be circumvented by opting for volumetric supply to groups of farmers rather than supplying to individual farmers. A system of water rights has been proposed as an alternative to volumetric pricing (Rosegrant and Binswanger 1994). It is suggested that in accordance with a conceptual, practical and political perspective, the appropriate approach for ensuring that the scarcity value (that is, opportunity costs) of water is transmitted to users is to clarify property rights and to facilitate the leasing and trading of these rights (Asad et al. 1999: 25). This entails creating the necessary conditions for water markets to emerge. The objective of cost recovery involves a focus on increasing revenue as well as containing costs. Methods of increasing revenues include increasing service area, increasing focus on fee collection, which involves employing carrot and stick measures, and agreeing to undertake collection in kind (Oorthuizen 2003). Incentives for quick payment include discounts for early payments and penalties for delay in payment. However, the legal environment has not been supportive. The irrigation acts of different states have not empowered either the state governments or groups or associations to stop water supply to water fee defaulters due to which irrigators continue to get water supply inspite of non payment of water fees (Raju 1995). This implies that in the absence of adequate legal support, cost recovery may not be possible. The quality of service provided to the users is of direct relevance to the recovery of costs. On the one hand, maintaining quality of service requires investment in O&M, while on the other hand, farmers receiving a better quality of service would be better placed to pay the water charges. It is argued that users will be willing to pay provided that they are assured of a better quality of service including quantity, duration and schedule of water supply if the rules are fair, if they are not asked to bear the burden of high costs of public inefficiency, and if there is a concern for keeping the costs down (GOI 1992). The quality of irrigation services is poor because maintenance of the canal system is poor. The resource allocation for maintenance of canals is limited as it is treated under non-plan expenditure (Bharadwaj 1990). Proper maintenance is also essential for an equitable supply because unless upstream canals are well maintained the downstream farmers can derive no benefits, and this might lead to the problem of ensuring cooperative action between different villages (Reddy 1998). Most of the states in India not only have inadequate O&M expenses on large projects, but also spend most of the funds allocated for O&M on establishment costs, such as staff salaries and other administrative expenses (Gulati et al. 1994). Canal irrigation has some characteristics of public goods and some of private goods, as some of its benefits are not excludable. Hence, a two-part tariff—a well recognised principle of public utility pricing—is suggested for canal irrigation such that all land in the command pays a flat annual fee on a membership basis which entitles members to claim water and gives them the benefits of other facilities like roads and groundwater recharge; and a variable fee is linked to

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the actual extent of service (volume or area) used by each member (GOI 1992). A two-part tariff may be useful as it appears to be fair and it may also induce efficient resource use. However, the specific mechanism of administering the two-part tariff needs to be developed, taking enforceability of the system into consideration.

M AHI R IGHT B ANK C ANAL : A C ASE S TUDY The Mahi Right Bank Canal (MRBC) is one of the three large canal irrigation projects in Gujarat (the other two being the Ukai Kakrapar project and the Narmada project), irrigating over 485 villages in the Kheda and Anand districts and covering an area of 212,694 hectares (ha). The system consists of a diversion weir constructed across the river Mahi at Wanakbori in 1985, and the Kadana reservoir (in the Panchmahal district) in the year 1978–79. Although stated as a perennial river, the system does not have much water, especially during the summer months. The main canal is lined and is of a length of 73.6 km with a capacity of 198.10 cumecs (cubic metres per second). The total length of the branch canal is 223 km of which 218 km is lined and the length of the distributaries, minors and sub-minors stretch up to 2,362 km. The organisational structure of the MRBC project is given in Figure 6.2. The project is managed under the control of the Superintending Engineer (SE) located at Nadiad. The SE is assisted by the Executive Engineers of the Anand, Petlad and Nadiad divisions and four Deputy Engineers who report to the Executive Engineers. There are four to five Section Officers in each sub division who report to the Deputy Engineers. These Section Officers look after fixed areas and they oversee the function of Work Assistants who in turn are responsible for two to three minors. The Chowkidars who manage the actual distribution at the field level report to the Work Assistant. Thus, there is correspondence between the hydraulic system and the institutional structure (see for details Ballabh et al. 1992). The recovery aspect is looked after by the office of the executive engineer. The recovery Mamlatdar reports to the Executive Engineer. The mamlatdars are in charge of overseeing the activities of the Naib Mamlatdars and the recovery Talatis. The demand for recovery is based on the demand form, which uses the data from the chowkidar’s outlet book. In the demand form, the area, rate and total charges are mentioned. These are prepared by the Work Assistants based on the Red Book maintained by the chowkidar. The bills are prepared by the Work Assistants and presented in the next season to the irrigation recovery mamlatdar at the Division level. This is in turn passed on to the irrigation recovery Talati who is finally responsible to collect the irrigation charges. A comparative idea of the O&M costs, billed amounts and actual recovery can be realised from the data of the past five years as presented in Table 6.1. The total recoverable amount for the year is a very small proportion of the total O&M costs. This indicates that if the system has to become sustainable, the rates need to be much higher and then the recovery system has to be capable of recovery of higher amounts. However, the present system is not even able to recover completely the small amount currently due.

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Figure 6.2: Organisational Structure of the Mahi Right Bank Canal Irrigation System

Table 6.1: Comparative Figures of Recovery and Costs in MRBC (Rupees in lakh) Year 1999–00 2000–01 2001–02 2002–03

Recoverable amount for the year 176.31 9.96 100.80 216.35

Total recoverable amount

O&M cost

1,603.78 1,487.95 1,535.45 1,648.85

1,857.02 1,832.51 1,976.28 2,013.13

Recovery for the year 125.79 53.30 102.95 205.19

Recovery/O&M cost (%) 6.77 2.91 5.21 10.19

Source: Office of the Superintending Engineer, Nadiad.

Table 6.2 provides the information related to recovery of water charges from 1992–93 to 2002–03. It can be seen from the total that, over the period of a decade, the total-outstanding amount to be recovered from the farmers is steadily increasing. It can also be noted that there

Year

949.44 1,109.29 1,206.87 1,256.75 1,281.62 1,330.25 1,346.46 1,427.47 1,477.99 1,434.65 1,432.50

292.64 314.87 289.35 277.76 211.90 294.15 294.73 176.31 9.96 100.80 216.35

Demand for recovery for the year 1,242.08 1,424.16 1,496.22 1,534.51 1,493.52 1,624.40 1,641.19 1,603.78 1,487.95 1,535.45 1,648.85

Total recovery required for the year 132.79 210.98 239.05 252.89 163.27 277.94 213.72 125.79 53.30 102.95 205.19

45 67 83 91 77 94 73 71 535 102 95

11 15 16 16 11 17 13 8 4 7 12

6.31 0.42

Waivers

(Rupees in lakh) Actual recovery as Actual recovery as Actual recovery percentage of demand percentage of total for the year for the year demand for recovery

Source: Data was collected from three divisions of MRBC namely Anand, Nadiad and Petlad.

1992–93 1993–94 1994–95 1995–96 1996–97 1997–98 1998–99 1999–00 2000–01 2001–02 2002–03

Previous outstanding

Table 6.2: Recovery of Irrigation Fees in Mahi Right Bank Canal

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are year-to-year variations in recovery as a proportion to irrigation charges for a particular year and a systematic trend is not observed. In about a decade, the total outstanding amount from the farmers has increased from about Rs 9.5 crore in 1992–93 to about Rs 14.32 crore in 2002–03. This is particularly alarming in the context of under reporting of the irrigated area both authorised and unauthorised in MRBC (Ballabh et al. 1992). This shows that the actual demand for irrigation-cess recovery would have been far greater than those indicated by official statistics. This means that increasing water charges alone are unlikely to have any impact on existing water users and collections. This is because the existing water cess, which is presumed to be very low, is not fully collected from the farmers. Any increase in water cess is therefore more likely to increase the tally of the recoverable amount without having any impact on the actual recovery. Our efforts to correlate the aggregate performance of the canal system and recovery performance also did not lead to any conclusive result. Yet, it was noticed that during some years recovery was much better than in others. It is surprising to note that in the drought years 2000–01 and 2001–02, the recovery was much better than in the previous years. In these two years, unauthorised users were also relatively less than the previous years. It seems that the canal managers allocated water to those areas where the authorised demand for water was greater. The case of MRBC brings out two significant points: • Efforts should be made to design an appropriate strategy to recover water charges at the existing rate before it is increased. • Fluctuations of collections over the years suggest that proper accountability is not built in irrigation cess collection. It is left to the system managers and their will to collect irrigation charges. There is thus a strong need to build a system with appropriate incentives/disincentives for collection of irrigation cess. Thus, it can be concluded that, in the present context, improving the recovery system is of more immediate concern than increasing water cess.

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As seen in the previous section, the efficacy of the entire process of recovery is dependent on the actions of several individuals within the organisation, and without appropriate strategy and proper incentive alignment the recovery of water charges are unlikely to improve. While the organisation may require individuals to act in a specified manner, an individual may find it more beneficial to do something else. Hence, the incentives of the different players in the process need to be elaborated, especially to understand the consequences of changes in rules and policies.

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Incentives Facing Recovery Talatis In the recovery process, the talati occupies a key role in terms of actual collection of the dues from the farmers. The talati is also responsible for maintaining the records of payments and outstanding. Although in Gujarat, in most of the projects, the collection of fees is done by the irrigation department, the Mahi-kadana and Ukai-Kakrapar projects are exceptions where the appointment of talatis is done by the department but the talati reports to the mamlatdar, who is appointed by the revenue department. In the MRBC, there are 42 talatis for 600 villages. This implies, in work terms, that about 2 lakh farmers are to be met, for whom at times 25 years of records may have to be verified. Up to 7,000 accounts have to be maintained season-wise by each talati. Each account also has to maintain details of season-wise irrigation delivery, bills and crops. Owing to these high levels of calculations involved, the actual details may not be available with the talatis all the time. Therefore, records are not maintained due to the huge quantum of work. The talatis have to show a reasonable level of collection as specified by the executive engineer. However, they do not have any material incentive to exceed this performance level. They are not provided any cash incentives for better performance. Promotions are also very gradual and rare—in fact several of the talatis have served throughout the life of the project as talatis and do not expect any promotion.

Incentives Facing Recovery Mamlatdars The mamlatdar is the head of the recovery unit in a recovery circle and reports to the executive engineer of the concerned division—even though the area under his recovery jurisdiction may exceed the service delivery area of the concerned executive engineer. Mamlatdars are appointed by the revenue officer of the district and he derives his pay from the irrigation department during his posting in the department. Generally, the posting of the irrigation department is regarded as a ‘punishment posting’ and the mamlatdars do not have much incentive to perform their functions effectively. While the recovery unit is based at the division head quarters, the unit is typically isolated from the rest of the division. As one official put it in an interview with the first author: ‘Their work and their culture are totally distinct from the rest of the department and hence they remain separated.’ The executive engineer tries to exercise some control by setting targets for recovery for the recovery unit. The authority of the executive engineer is however tenuous. The effectiveness of recovery is also based partly on the initiative shown in correcting and updating the available data and the mamlatdar has nothing to gain by performing well in terms of improving the efficiency of recovery. Sometimes, retired persons are appointed as mamlatdars or the position is given as an additional charge due to which the functioning suffers even more. This was evident to us on a visit to the recovery unit in Nadiad. It was found that the Naib mamlatdar had gone out with one of his senior talatis to meet the mamlatdar, apprise him about the activities of the recovery unit, and more importantly get his signatures

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on some documents. As the mamlatdar at Nadiad was holding additional charge, he did not find time to come to the recovery unit. The implied logic for persisting with the system is that the establishment of recovery action is legally still vested with the revenue authority, which is the collector, and the appointment of a revenue mamlatdar in the irrigation department facilitates action. Thus, the mamlatdar has no incentive to ensure that the revenue collection goes up. He either looks at it as a temporary posting from where he desires to go to a better location, or as part-time work (additional charge). With such a person at the head of the recovery unit, the entire objectives of the unit are prone to be distorted.

Incentives Facing Field Level Staff (Chowkidars/Karkoons/Work Assistants) The task of managing the flow at the field level is done by the karkoons, work assistants and chowkidars. Their tasks include collection of demand forms from the farmers in advance and submitting them to the section officer, and later on ensuring that the water flow is in accordance with the demands stated by the farmers. These field-level staff have to ensure that in case some farmers use water in violation of the earlier stated demand, the excess land thus irrigated has to be noted and a written statement or ekrarnama has to be taken from these farmers. However, the field-staff categories have their own history. Work assistants are an intermediate cadre created by the government, as opposed to the traditional karkoons in government offices who do table functions. Many of them were appointed 15 to 20 years ago for a ‘work charge’ function, which has now been converted to the designation of ‘work assistant’. The responsibility under work charge was the execution of work; now the work assistants have the responsibility of managing flows of water in the fields as specified. The chowkidars, on the other hand, were earlier appointed as labourers but later made permanent , and hence are now utilised as chowkidars. As they are retiring, their numbers are reducing. The chowkidars are Rojamdars (permanent daily wage employees), whose functions are operating gates, controlling flow of water, assisting karkoons and so on. They are Class IV employees. The success of the irrigation system largely depends on the working of these employees. The collection of demand forms is an important task, especially as majority of the farmers do not give their forms. After repeated extensions of the dates for submission of demands, the farmers are coaxed by these field-level staff to submit the demand forms. Still, about half the usage is by farmers who do not submit the demand statements on time. The field staff has to ensure that the actual irrigation is recorded. However, the system does not seem to have adequate safeguards to ensure accountability of the field staff to record irrigation data properly. The work assistants/karkoons report to the section officer who supervises their functions. These field staff-have no chance of promotion and there is not much incentive for them to perform their tasks properly. In fact, it might be financially beneficial for a work assistant to allow a farmer to take water without prior information and not record the information if the farmer pays him a bribe.

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Incentives Facing Section Officers The section officer is an important key component of the entire irrigation delivery system as he forms the key link between the field-level staff and the central staff. This is especially true with regard to the function of recovery and demand estimation as the demand gets consolidated and the bills get issued at this level. However, the officers who function as section officers provide the greatest variety in terms of the nature of appointment, qualifications and levels. There are three categories of section officers. The first category of section officers are those who were earlier appointed as overseers (meant to assist the section officers) and who are Class III employees. The second category, the Additional Assistant Engineer, who also works as section officer, is a diploma holder in engineering and is also a Class III employee. The third category of section officers consists of the graduate civil engineers who are Class II employees. The section officers, apart from those who are graduate civil engineers, have little chance of promotion beyond the section officer’s level. They have the responsibility of monitoring the activities of the work assistants and chowkidars, consolidating the demand in their areas and also planning for water release in the fields. Thus, most of them also do not have any incentives to improve the recovery of irrigation charges.

Incentives Facing Higher Level Officers—Deputy Executive Engineers, Executive Engineers and Superintending Engineer The higher officers of the department are responsible for coordinating the irrigation demand estimation, the water collection and the recovery. The executive engineer and superintending engineer are Class I officers, while the Deputy Executive Engineer is a Class II officer. The executive engineer has the task of overseeing the processes of recovery as well as the distribution of water. The Superintending Engineer’s task is largely administrative and limited to giving directions to the project, while the Executive Engineer is the actual authority responsible for implementation of work. The recovery is done on a revenue-record basis and not on command basis. The recovery unit is the village. The beat of the engineering section is canal-wise, while the recovery talati functions on village or shej (which is a collection of villages for which the talati is responsible for recovery) basis. Hence, it is difficult for the Deputy executive Engineer to know how much dues are pending from the sub-division. The officers report that even if they get the information about specific defaulters from a region, they find it difficult to enforce recovery by withholding irrigation services to these specific fields, as they lack control over field to field delivery. Even if the department in alliance with the recovery unit initiates legal action against the defaulters, the officials are at times under political pressure to provide water and collect dues later. While the officials do not get any personnel benefits from enforcing collections, they can accumulate political goodwill by not initiating any forced collection activities. If the collections are reasonably high (as they are in MRBC), the pressure from the secretary or the chief engineer may not be high.

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Incentives Facing Farmers While the incentive of the officials to collect is very vital, the incentives of the farmers to pay are also very important in the recovery process. Some officials claim that the farmers are habituated to debt and are used to waivers. The record of rights is generally not updated and even though the land may be registered as one plot, the actual holding may be in several hands. Hence, even if the part owners of a plot are willing to pay, they may not benefit from it if the others do not pay. Therefore, unless the mutations of the land are periodically done, some of the ‘willing’ farmers also may not pay. It is reported that in some cases, farmers give money to the talati for bogus slips although no money is deposited in the real account. Even if the talati is caught and charged, the recovery of that farmer is not settled till the corruption case of the talati is finalised. It is reported that larger farmers pay more regularly because they are concerned about their status and would like to avoid the frequent visits of talatis to their houses for recovery. On the other hand, it is suggested that in the case of small and very poor farmers, the threat of coercion may be counterproductive. The officials also report that there may not be much difference in payments between the farmers at the head and tail-ends of the projects (even though there may be a slight difference between the head and tail-end in terms of quality of service). The stated reason is that the farmer in the tail-end is very dependent on the canal water supply and he has often different crop varieties or sowings which ensure that his requirement does not clash with the timings of the head-end farmers. One of the methods used for reducing the level of defaulters in the project is mention in the record of rights. In case of non payment, the arrears are recorded in the land-rights register. This process is presumed to have an impact in selling, mortgaging and obtaining loans from the institutional sources. This has to be preceded by the serving of a due notice to the farmers; the procedure, however, is quite cumbersome and generally not resorted to. Moreover, farmers also do not have any incentives to pay irrigation charges because the irrigation department has not developed any effective instrument to exclude those who do not pay irrigation charges year after year. Summing up, the case analysis of MRBC about irrigation cess demonstrates that the institutional structure design for the recovery are not appropriate on many counts. First, management of the recovery unit is characterised by dual control. While the appointment of the mamlatdar from the revenue division does take care of some legal eventualities, the irrigation department may find it difficult to enforce any clear strategy of recovery within the current structure. These officers are generally not concerned about the demands made by irrigation officers. They seem to be more accountable and loyal to their parent revenue department than to the irrigation division. They stay for short periods of time and do not have any incentives to improve the system. Second, the recoverable amount and recovery both depend on lower level functionaries such as Work Assistants, karkoons, chowkidars and talatis. These lower level functionaries also have very poor positive and negative incentives for

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recording, updating and maintaining proper records. In the absence of good information, it is no wonder that not only is there underreporting of the irrigation area but also problems in the recovery of the dues. Third, the revenue department has been brought in to help the irrigation department in the recovery process and overcome legal issues, but the provisions of revenue collection have rarely been used to recover the irrigation charges. Fourth, the farmers also do not have any incentive to pay and make sure that the recording is done properly since the irrigation department has not found any mechanism to exclude those who do not pay from the benefits of irrigation.

N EW P ARADIGMS

AND

A PPROACHES

Various approaches have been suggested to improve the governance of canal irrigation systems including recovery of water charges. These approaches vary from involving Water User Associations (WUAs) in participatory irrigation management (PIM), to privatisation of canal irrigation systems and private–public participation in various combinations and levels. This section tries to assess how these approaches could influence the process of recovery.

Participatory Irrigation Management Participatory irrigation management (PIM) is being suggested as the cure for several ills. The earliest attempts at PIM started in the 1970s as attempts to organise farmers at the outlet level in a bid to improve water-use efficiency and increase the realised irrigation potential. One of the measures in PIM is to involve the users and their groups in the management of distribution as well as in the recovery of irrigation fees. This could encourage the farmers to be more active in ensuring the updating of records as well as collecting the fees by enforcing peer pressure. The greatest advantage of the involvement of farmers or groups of farmers is that (even if the current dichotomy between delivery and collection is maintained) the farmers are a common party who will be aware of the distribution as well as payment. Therefore, this should be able to increase the area reported, the proportion of area irrigated after prior application, and so on. However, many such issues are merely conjecture as the mechanism of how to involve farmers in the process need to be evolved. The few efforts in this regard, especially in MRBC, have been in the nature of experiments, which have had a large allocation from the department in terms of personnel and the like and were not preceded or accompanied by any drastic change in the role of the irrigation department. It has been argued that a participatory approach need not cause delays in construction—what does take longer is the lead time, before construction starts, of about seven to nine months for the establishment of farmers organisations (Wade 1981). Some studies have found an improvement in the performance of canal systems on several indicators after being turned over

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to Water User Associations or WUAs (Naik and Kalro 2000). Pant (1999) finds an improvement in terms of improved water-use efficiency, higher rates and profitability of WUAs in Maharashtra. However, the high costs to be incurred by the government on repair and renovation of the existing canal systems before turning them over to the water users is proving to be a major constraint for PIM (Parthasarathy 2003). The need for a minimum level of rehabilitation work has also been evinced in other states like Madhya Pradesh where PIM has been attempted (Pangare et al. 2003). The implementation of PIM has also been impeded by the lack of a favourable legal environment. While irrigation acts vary across the states in terms of content, coverage and implementation, in general, the acts on which the operational guidelines are based provide little support for management transfer (Raju 1995). The two main models of PIM implementation in India are the large-scale impact model through policy changes as in Andhra Pradesh (see Box 6.1), and the model of scaling up through NGO interventions as in Gujarat (see Box 6.2). Box 6.1: The Andhra Pradesh Experiment in PIM The Andhra Pradesh experiment in PIM focused on large-scale impact through policy level changes, facilitating the creation of more than 10,000 WUAs in the state. Although PIM is reported as having resulted in a slight increase in recovery (by about 20 per cent), the major impact is stated to be in terms of increase in the area irrigated (mainly through a better access for the tail-end farmers). However, this increase in area has not apparently resulted in increased revenues because of underreporting of the area cultivated due to a nexus between the farmers and the officials (who collect the area statistics). Yet, in some cases, the WUAs have not had much impact because of the absence of participation as the contractors have been masquerading as WUA presidents in order to appropriate the funds presently available for the purpose. Source: Reddy (2003).

Box 6.2: DSC’s Experience in PIM Development Support Centre (DSC), an NGO, has been one of the main implementing agencies for PIM in Gujarat. DSC was able to cover 17,767 acres across 66 villages under PIM in Gujarat by the year 2002. In these villages, DSC has also been able to mobilise a fund of Rs 7.2 lakh from the farmers for rehabilitation works (of a total of Rs 63.7 lakh). The response of minor level committees has been encouraging and the organisation has also started forming distributory level committees. Source: DSC (2003).

The first model has had a wide impact but is facing some teething problems. In contrast, the WUA promoted by the NGOs through the mobilisation of farmers and involving them have relatively performed much better and consistently over a period of time. However, the number of NGOs with such mobilisation capability are very few and they operate in a limited area, thereby limiting the rate of scaling up.

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Financial Autonomy Financial autonomy is one of the measures suggested. However, if we look at the proportion of the O&M costs currently met, the component of complete financial autonomy seems far off. But the financial autonomy is expected to unify the tasks of distribution of water and recovery of water charges to provide positive and negative incentives both to the farmers and the department to increase recovery. This is expected to remove some of the problems associated with the duality in control of the distribution and the recovery aspects. In order to improve the incentive structure, it may be necessary to reorganise the present formation such that it is more responsive to the farmers needs by making the irrigation departments financially autonomous bodies (Gulati et al. 1994). Financial autonomy is argued to have the double effect of providing an incentive for increasing the agency income as well as an incentive for reducing costs (ibid.). Financial autonomy is supposed to bring not only accountability towards the clients, but also provide opportunity to the users to bring about suitable changes in crop mix dictated by market conditions (Mitra 1998). Yet, mere financial autonomy may not lead to improvement in performance, as was seen in the case of the Karnataka’s Krishna Bhagya Jal Nigam Limited (KBJL). The focus of KBJL was more on generating resources and completing the construction on time, while it failed to improve on service delivery, overall irrigation performance and financial sustainability (Raju et al. 2003). Financial autonomy may not be a panacea for all problems as is assumed in the recent enthusiasm for irrigation management transfer. Financial autonomy has not given rise to the behavioural changes that had been anticipated in theory. Agencies confronted with a change towards financial autonomy may not be more accountable to the users or improve the services (Oorthuizen 2003). Social and political relationships may shape a set of accountability relationships that would be different from financial accountability relationships. It is argued that among the multiple relations shaping accountability, financial relations need not be the most important one (ibid.). The assumption that farmers in large systems would take up responsibility of construction of field channels and management below the outlet level has not been validated in practice (Parthasarathy 2003). Financial autonomy could even lead to increased inequity between the head and tail-ends, as financial prudence may favour increased focus on upstream areas at the cost of the downstream areas (Oorthuizen 2003). Thus, the effect of financial autonomy has been confounding as far as the initial impact shows, and this phenomenon needs to be studied in detail.

Privatisation Privatisation, as a broad term in the background of the water sector, can be understood to be an increased involvement of groups such as the private–corporate sector that involves irrigation

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companies, consultancy outfits and firms, WUAs and NGOs, and also the general public through water bonds floated by the governing bodies (Saleth 1999). In the context of cost recovery, collection is one area where the private sector can be involved and this can be facilitated if the farmers’ income is enhanced due to irrigation (Easter 1992). It is also argued that the most desirable configuration of private sector participation involves simultaneous participation of private agencies in various facets of irrigation development and management (Saleth 1999). Taking the broader definition of privatisation, it would imply a sort of multi-stakeholder approach, which would try to fit each agency into an appropriate role as per its capacities. However, keeping in view the clout of certain multilateral agencies, the government and large lenders, the partnership is bound to be unbalanced. On the other hand, privatisation at the secondary level has also been suggested as a means for improving efficiency of distribution and use, and cost recovery (Ballabh et al. 1992). Privatisation, in the context of recovery, implies private provision of a part of the service or the complete irrigation service itself and, in this case, privatisation of the recovery function itself. Given the current built-in dependence on the revenue department for recovery, there needs to be a change in the legislation to facilitate any such operation. Privatisation would especially deal with the problem of lethargy of the mamlatdar as the recovery in charge would have strong incentives to recover in a private set-up.

Private–Public Participation The concept of public–private participation tries to allocate the most suitable roles to the different entities involved in the irrigation process. This has been suggested in the proposed outline for the management of the Sardar Sarovar Project (GOI 2004). Under this, the role of the government department has been outlined as financing the construction of the main canal network and operating and maintaining the main canal and branch canals. The irrigation department is also envisaged to have a supervisory role in the process of water allocation and the design and construction of the distribution network and also in the revision of irrigation charges. The private sector is supposed to have the role of financing the construction of the distribution network, operating and maintaining the canals, and also collecting the water cess from the WUAs or farmers. The WUAs are supposed to finance, construct and maintain the local distribution channels, undertake water distribution in collaboration with the private entity and collect irrigation charges from individual farmers. Effective public–private partnerships would also require the presence of regulators to resolve disputes, set reasonable level of tariffs and set service standards and penalties for deficient service (ibid.).

Decentralisation and Privatisation of Irrigation Bureaucracy One of the methods of getting over the ‘large organisation’ problem (as in the case of the irrigation department) is by devolving the larger goals of the organisation into specific objectives at

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each of the lower levels. It is suggested that management by objectives (MBO) can be as effective for the government sector as for the private sector (Rodgers and Hunter 1992). MBO consists of good management practices in government, participation in decision making and objective feedback (ibid.). The more direct approach is to try and break down the larger organisation into smaller units. According to one view, reforms need to focus on minimising the monolithic feature of bureaucracy and breaking it up into bodies, which remain accountable for the pubic purpose (Khandwalla 1999: 257). The assumption behind breaking up larger organisations into smaller manageable units is that smaller units are better at managing innovation (ibid.: 96). There could be different methods for achieving this outcome. The state could reduce its role either by fragmenting its monolithic organisations, or by transferring specific activities to autonomous bodies or private organisations (ibid.: 97). The importance of the consumer is also most important in the literature on total quality management (TQM). As it is the consumer who is to be served, the dimensions of quality have also got to be understood from the perspective of the consumer. The extension of the TQM concept to the public sector, however, needs some modifications. Swiss (1992) suggests that while traditional TQM emphasises control over inputs, in the government system it may be equally relevant to look at the outputs. As opposed to the for profit sector, it is suggested that in the government sector the stress is on inputs and processes that represent short-term business assessments, and therefore focusing on government processes is likely to lead to goal displacement (ibid.). In the context of recovery, decentralisation would essentially mean looking at the recovery and distribution aspects at lower levels, particularly at the level of the section officers. While this may necessitate certain changes like the merging of the boundaries of distribution and recovery, the decentralised structure may be able to help overcome one of the major problems of duality. Thus, the ‘reinventing the government’ literature has focused on innovative approaches to control the services including privatisation, contracting, focusing on the consumer, breaking up the monolith of the government agency and devolving objectives to the operational units. However, the entire concept of new public management has been criticised as being flawed, simplistic and merely involving the superficial repetition of current practices (Williams 2000). It is also argued that there are considerable differences between public and private organisations in terms of the services they provide, the clients they serve and the activities they perform, and hence there should be caution in borrowing ideas and principles across sectors (Haque 2001). Terry (1993) has questioned the use of the private enterprises concept of an entrepreneur in public administration as it does not go well with democratic values. On a different plane, it is argued that there is nothing ‘new’ because the ‘old’ is a mere stereotype. Lynn (2001) argues that the perceptions of the old bureaucratic paradigm are at best a caricature and disregard the true value of traditional management that extended more respect for law, politics, citizens and values than the new customer-oriented ‘managerialism’ and its variants. Also doubtful is the assertion that these cosmetic changes work. It is suggested that trying to influence the

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policy making of the agency by imposing procedural requirements on the agency’s decision making process may not work if the agency does not support it. Spence (1999) finds that agencies are able to construe the new requirements narrowly and use their substantive discretion to minimise the policy effects of the new procedures. The hollowing out of the state may leave voids because the other requirements may not be realistic. For instance, the community social organisation on which the hollow state wants to devolve some of its responsibilities is either not present, or if present lacks the capability to deliver services or effectively administer projects (Fredericksen and London 2002). Notwithstanding these criticisms, these approaches have not been tried out to de-bureaucratise the irrigation system. Given the enormity of the problem and near total bankruptcy of canal systems in India, there is a need to look at more innovative approaches to make irrigation bureaucracy functional both in terms of performance and recovery of irrigation cess. The approaches discussed above are not mutually exclusive. Rather they are to be considered as complementary to each other. For instance, decentralisation may be a prerequisite for effective implementation of PIM.

C ONCLUDING R EMARKS The recovery of irrigation has been a matter of concern, debate and discussion. Researchers and policy makers have advocated increase in canal water price for improving efficiency of water user. However, in this chapter, it has been argued that increasing of water charges is unlikely to have any beneficial impact either on the efficiency or the viability of the canal system because only a portion of the irrigation-cess is collected every year. In the literature on the subject, it has also been argued that irrigation recovery is correlated with quality of services. However, our effort to correlate the performance and actual recovery in different years in MRBC does not corroborate the above hypothesis. The new approaches and paradigms to improve the management of canal irrigation, such as PIM, privatisation, private–public participation and decentralisation in the context of water cess recovery in canal irrigation is also discussed. Except PIM, the other approaches have not been applied at significant scales. Even in PIM, there is a wide variation both in terms of the performance and collection of irrigation charges. The WUAs promoted by the irrigation agency have a tendency to revert to low-level performance whereas those promoted by the NGO’s have greater capacity to improve efficiency of canal water-use as well as revenue collection. These new approaches suggested may have a positive impact of recovery. This is likely to happen through better data management, better coordination of the process and improved incentives for the different actors in the process to contribute to the objectives of recovery.

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Jorgensen, T.B. (1993). ‘Public Resource Allocation’, in E. Kjell and J. Kooiman (eds), Managing Public Organisations: Lessons from Contemporary European Experiences. London: Sage Publications. Khandwalla, P. (1999). Revitalizing the State: A Menu of Options. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Lynn Jr, L.E. (2001). ‘The Myth of the Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood For’, Public Administration Review, 61(2): 144–60. Mascarenhas, R.C. (1993). ‘Building an Enterprise Culture in the Public Sector: Reform of the Public Sector in Australia, Britain and New Zealand’, Public Administration Review, 53(4): 319–28. Meinzen-Dick, R. and M. Mendoza (1996). ‘Alternative Water Allocation Mechanisms: Indian and International Experiences’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31(3): A-25–30. Mitra, A.K. (1996). ‘Irrigation Sector Reforms: Issues and Approaches’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31(13): A-31–37. ——— (1998). ‘Development and Management of Irrigation in Maharashtra: With Special Reference to Major and Medium Surface Irrigation Systems’, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(26): A-80–95. Naik, G. and A.H. Kalro (2000). ‘Role of Water User Associations in Irrigation Management in Maharashtra, India: Two Case Studies’, Journal of Indian Water Resources Society, 20(3): 130–42. Oorthuizen, J. (2003). Water, Works and Wages: The Everyday Politics of Irrigation Management Reform in the Philippines. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Pangare, G., R. Hooja and N. Kaushal (2003). ‘Status and Experiences of PIM in Madhya Pradesh’, Paper presented at GIDR National Seminar on New Developmental Paradigms and Challenges for Western and Central Regional States in India, 4–6 March, Ahmedabad. Pant, N. (1999). ‘Impact of Irrigation Management Transfer in Maharashtra: An Assessment’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34(13): A-17–26. Parthasarathy, R. (2003). ‘Objects and Accomplishments of Participatory Irrigation Management Programme In India: An Open Pair of Scissors’, Paper presented at GIDR National Seminar on New Developmental Paradigms and Challenges for Western and Central Regional States in India, 4–6 March, Ahmedabad. Raju, K.V. 1995. ‘Irrigation Acts and Rules for Irrigation Management in India’, Artha Vikas, 31(2): 10–23. Raju, K.V., A. Gulati and R. Meinzen-Dick (2003). ‘Innovations in Irrigation Financing: Tapping Domestic Financial Markets in India’, MSSD Discussion Paper No. 58. Washington D.C: International Food Policy Research Institute. Reddy, D.N. (1999). ‘Designer Participation: Politics of Irrigation Management in Andhra Pradesh–India’. Unpublished mimeo. Hyderabad: Osmania University. Reddy, V.R. (1998). ‘Institutional Strategies and Co-Production Strategies for Large Irrigation Systems in India’, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 53(3): 440–55. ——— (2003). ‘Irrigation: Development and Reforms’, Economic and Political Weekly, 38(12 & 13): 1179–89. Rodgers, R. and J.E. Hunter (1992). ‘A Foundation of Good Management Practice in Government: Management by Objectives’, Public Administration Review, 52(1): 27–39. Rosegrant, M.W. and H.P. Binswanger (1994). ‘Markets in Tradable Water Rights: Potential for Efficiency Gains in Developing Country Water Resource Allocation’, World Development, 22(11): 1613–25. Saleth, R.M. (1999). ‘Irrigation Privatisation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34(26): A-86–92. Spence, D.B. (1999). ‘Agency Discretion and the Dynamics of Procedural Reforms’, Public Administration Review, 59(5): 5–18. Swiss, J.E. (1992). ‘Adapting Total Quality Management to Government’, Public Management Review, 52(4): 356–62.

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Terry, L.D. (1993). ‘Why We Should Abandon the Misconceived Quest to Reconcile Public Entrepreneurship With Democracy’, Public Administration Review, 53(4): 393–95. Wade, R. (1981). ‘Collective Responsibility in Philippino Irrigation: A New Approach’, Economic and Political Weekly, 16(39): A-99–102. Williams, D.W. (2000). ‘Reinventing the Proverbs of Government’, Public Administration Review, 60(6): 522–34. Wise, L.R. (2002). ‘Public Management Reform: Competing Drivers of Change’, Public Administration Review, 62(5): 555–67.

7 Irrigation Water Pricing: Analytic of Competing Sources R. Parthasarathy

I NTRODUCTION In recent years, community management of water resources is believed to have significant potential in addressing stagnating agricultural productivity in the command areas of major irrigation projects. One oft cited reason for this is that existing irrigation systems are mismanaged and in a state of serious disrepair. The breakdown, it is argued, can be seen most vividly at the village level where government administration of water delivery has become so ineffective that in most cases farmers do not receive an adequate and timely supply. There is enough evidence to support this. Alternatively, irrigation is mismanaged such that too much water has led to problems like waterlogging, salination and soil degradation. There is, thus, a growing consensus that the solution to these problems is in irrigation management transfer (IMT), that is, turning over control of irrigation management to the end-users: the farmers. The participatory irrigation management (PIM) solution to the mismanagement problem, while ingenious in many ways, is not without its share of difficulties. First, many village communities are neither prepared nor have necessary experience in the operation and maintenance (O&M) of canals. Further, in most states, there are no concerted post-turnover capacity building exercises. The complexities of conjunctive use of water in a given basin are yet to be sorted out. There is, however, conflicting evidence whether the Water Users Associations (WUAs) can deliver water effectively and collect water charges so that the system will become self financing and less burdensome for the government. Second, it is not always clear who actually controls the allocation of water and who receives the benefits when WUAs manage the resource, having implications on the extent to which water charges collection could be handled by WUAs. Questions of rights to water and equity in access based on land tenure status and locations of plots in the canal network remain to be resolved. Third, there are multiplicity of uses for canal water and a diversity of claimants both within and outside the WUA. Thus, conflicts over rights to the resource can potentially proliferate seeking of mechanisms for resolving disputes. Ultimately, the resolution of such problems will depend on whether village communities and

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their WUAs can be empowered to make and implement decisions that enable an efficient, equitable and sustainable use of the resource. One of the crucial tests is the pricing of water, both for the sustainability of the decentralised administration as well as use-efficiency of the resource. This chapter aims to analyse some of these issues. After this brief introductory section, the second section presents an overview of the issues involved in pricing of water. Based on the data and information collected over the three-year period of PIM programme implementation, an analysis on the dynamics of fixing water rates by the newly formed WUAs is presented in the third section. The fourth section discusses the response to the hike in water charges by the members of the WUAs and the issues involved in levying higher than the government’s water charges by the newly-formed WUA. The last section presents the summary.

I SSUES

IN

W ATER P RICING

Central to the newer methods being tried out to manage water resources is the objective of maximising irrigation efficiency. Earlier studies (Caruthers 1981; Choudhury and Ali 1989; Maloney and Raju 1994) have suggested that one of the ways of maximising irrigation use is through improved maintenance of the irrigation systems. An estimate from Pakistan suggests that the marginal benefits to past and prospective O&M investments in canals and tube wells are significantly greater than unity; suggesting the need to allocate more funds for O&M investments of these components of the irrigation system (Choudhury and Ali 1989). It is assumed that with better care and maintenance not only will savings of water be brought about but also timely water availability and equity among farms will be ensured. For these objectives to be fulfilled, increases in the O&M outlay are only a necessary but not sufficient condition. In the contemporary situation where government intervention is viewed as the last resort, to argue for an increase in government O&M outlay can be justified only if there are sufficient returns to incremental investments. One of the alternatives to the demands on government funds for O&M works is recovering at least part of the costs through user charges. The Irrigation Commission of the Government of India recommended in 1972 that water rates should be so fixed that irrigation works do not become a burden on the state exchequer. The National Water Policy 1987 also stated that the water rates charged should be adequate to cover the annual O&M cost and a part of the capital cost of the project. In the early 1980s, the average annual revenue from the water rates covered about 8 per cent of the annual O&M costs in Gujarat. The Irrigation Department of the Government of Gujarat then appointed an expert group in 1985, which recommended a gradual increase in the water rates such that by 1991–92 the revised rates would cover about 33 per cent of the annual O&M costs. In 1988, the Gujarat Agriculture Commission too endorsed this recommendation. So far, the experience in Gujarat (as in many other states in India) is that the government has neither been able to charge an economic price for water nor even raise the water rates fixed in 1981. On the other hand, cooperatives set up by non-

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governmental organisations (NGOs) have shown that farmers can and are willing to pay a significantly higher amount than the government rates for irrigation water. Perhaps due to this experience, WUAs have been given the responsibility to fix water rates under the new PIM programme in Gujarat.1 Implicitly, the expectation is that the WUA will be able to do what the government could not for a long time. Indeed, some of the WUAs have revised the water rates. Yet, in areas where there are active water markets, the price fixation appears to be not only a dynamic process but also a complex one. The evidence presented in this chapter shows that revising water rates upwards is not merely a question of political will, as is commonly believed, but there are strong economic factors which need to be taken cognisance of.

Relative Importance of Different Irrigation Sources One of the features of the new WUAs being formed in Gujarat is the higher water charges levied by them than what the government charges. Some of the associations like those in Thalota2, Tranol3 and Lakshmipura4 have revised the water charges. Salient features of these PIM projects are presented in Table 7.1. Among these WUAs, the one in Thalota had initially fixed the highest rate, which was then two-and-a-half times higher than that of the government rates.5 While Lakshmipura fixed a water rate that was 30 per cent more than the government rate, Tranol charged a flat one-time rate of 20 per cent of the water charges and created an O&M fund. Except in Tranol, there has been considerable discussion on the hike in water charges adopted by the WUAs. Admittedly, the government water rates are abysmally low, however, the analytic of pricing of water appears to be complex. Partly, the complexity arises due to the existence of other sources of water like tube wells and partly due to the general attitude that water is a ‘free good’ the government supplies. In the case of the irrigation systems in north Gujarat like Daroi and Dantiwada, the supply of water for irrigation purposes is only during winter and occasionally one or two waterings are given during the monsoon season. Even during winter, full irrigation has been rarely possible, usually the number of waterings being two or three. It is pertinent, therefore, to determine the relative importance of the different sources of irrigation in the PIM project villages.

Water Pricing: Competing Sources In a scenario where the canal water charges are based on area and crops and the tube well charges are higher than the canal water, as the number of waterings from the canal increases the marginal utility of additional watering should be positive, while the average price (per watering) declines. However, in most of north Gujarat’s villages, farmers do not view marginal utility only by the cost parameter. This is because the water supply by the ‘tube well companies’6 is considered not only to be reliable but also efficient in terms of revenue. Further, many studies

Thalota

Source: Household survey, 1997–98.

Daroi Visnagar, Mahesana Presence of NGO Yes Males 703 Females 726 Population 2331 Workers Male 607 Workers Female 550 Number of Households 456 Cultivator 347 WUA Member 210 Date Of WUA Registration 2 Feb. 1996 Turnover 16 Dec. 1996 Total PIM Command Area (ha) 224 Total Cultivated Area (ha) 759.38

Name of the System Project Location

Name of the Projects/Details

Yes 2145 2236 7717 1858 1597 1316 748 174 18 Dec. 1995 19 Oct. 1996 245.68 3533.39

Dantiwada Patan

Lakshmipura CMIP Mahendrada, Junagadh Yes 1492 1489 4198 1317 1168 752 549 222 21 Oct. 1995 Not yet 463 3293.56

Chandrawadi

No 2261 2227 6674 2046 1712 1358 694 168 30 Nov. 1996 30 Nov. 1996 355.57 1382.06

Mahi Canal Anand

Tranol

No 3278 3883 7161 1887 1312 1134 601 91 2 Jun. 1998 Not yet 296 941

Mahi Canal Anand

Kunjrav

Table 7.1: Basic Characteristics of the PIM Project Villages, Gujarat

Ukai Hansot, Bharuch No 2004 2001 6084 1845 1548 1213 582 169 29 Nov. 1995 31 Jul. 1997 (part) 921.05 4841.14

Digas

Irrigation Water Pricing 127

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have shown output response to groundwater to be higher than that of canal water due to better control in terms of reliability, intensity and timings (Dhawan 1990). For crop cultivation, when the timeliness criterion is not met, the marginal utility of additional watering may sometimes be negative. For the supplier, however, as the number of canal watering increases the incremental cost is zero, while the average cost declines. In order to reduce the average cost of water, an increase in number of waterings is only a necessary condition, the sufficient condition being the efficiency in water distribution. Admittedly, by selling the canal water the WUA has helped reduce the perceived monopoly power of the government as the seller. However, in the process it is competing with another source that is an oligopoly. Thus, as a seller, the WUA behaves as if it is operating on a flatter demand curve than the tube well companies. In fact, when both the sellers (WUA and tube well companies) become competitors, there is a stimulus to expand the utilisation of their respective products (water) by selling more, since additional revenue is an addition to net profit. Theoretically, the competition between the two sellers in a community of irrigators will force competitive pricing of water. However, the community was found to circumvent this outcome for the following reasons. In the north Gujarat situation, the two sources of water are not equally endowed. Further, the water users know only too well that the underground aquifers might dry up or the cost of repairing the tube well will be expensive, and that the reservoir, when full, will increase the availability of the canal water thereby making water from the two sources a substitutable product to some extent. Hypothetically, therefore, till the time they become near-perfect substitutes, the more assured water source will command a higher price than the other. Perhaps it is this aspect that contributes to the resentment among the WUA members to the price hike of canal water. The other reason for the reported resentment is attitudinal.

F ARMERS ’ R ESPONSE

TO

W ATER R ATES H IKE

In Thalota, over 74 per cent of the irrigators use both the canal and tube well waters (see Tables 7.2 and 7.3). For some members, the logic of paying a higher rate to the WUA than what the government charges for water is not clear. It is also not clear as to why they should pay more to the WUA when an improvement in the reliability of water supplies is beyond its control. Importantly, there is a question regarding the possible uses of the profit the association makes. Under the Societies Act it seems that the WUA cannot distribute the surplus income among its members except for sharing some fixed portion (12 per cent or 15 per cent) as dividend. Therefore, some members have started questioning the very parameter that is commonly understood to improve the financial viability of the association. This indicates a need to think of alternatives to the present arrangement of registering the WUA under the Societies Act, preferably by introducing suitable legislation with respect to incomes and disbursements of the WUAs (for a detailed discussion on the aspect of legal registration, see Maloney and Raju 1994).

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Table 7.2: Mean Values of Land Area (in ha) by Sources of Irrigation, Thalota Canal

Tube Well

Well

1.85 18

1.60 18

1.14 1

2.33 188

2.68 10

2.25 251

No. of Farmers

1.85 20

1.24 55

1.18 7

2.59 192

2.68 10

2.26 301

Land Owned No. of Farmers

1.66 19

1.24 51

0.91 5

2.48 186

2.80 10

2.19 287

Land Cultivated No. of Farmers

1.88 20

1.33 55

1.26 7

2.70 191

2.88 10

2.36 300

Average Command∗ No. of Member Farmers Irrigated Land∗

Canal + Tube Well Canal + Well

All

Source: Household survey, 1996. Note: ∗ Some farmers have reported other sources.

Table 7.3: Percentage Distribution of Households by Communities and Sources of Irrigation, Thalota Details

Canal

Tube Well

Patels No. of Farmers

15 3

40 22

14 1

55 107

Thakores No. of Farmers

85 17

51 28

86 6

38 73

42 127

7 13

6 18

Others No. of Farmers Total Number of Farmers

Well Canal + Tube Well

9 5 20

55

7

193

Canal + Well

All

100 10

52 157

10

302

Source: Household survey, 1996.

The response to the hike in water charges is also varied among the different community members and by the size of their land holdings. A majority of the landholders who use both the canal and tube well belong to the Patel community, who also have a higher than average size of land in the village.7 Ninety per cent of the farmers who depend exclusively on the canal are from the Thakore community. The maximum impact of the hike, therefore, is on the Thakore community farmers, though the incidence is somewhat equal on farmers from both communities. Expectedly, the opposition to the hike is by and large from the members of the Thakore community. Other irrigators and the NGO (Development Support Centre) that quoted the prevailing water rates of the tube well and argued a case for raising the canal water charges apparently did not put forward a convincing argument. Even among the users of the tube well and canal, not all were happy with the raise in the canal water charges. This was because not only were the expected incremental returns to canal water zero (unless the number of watering increases) but the additional cost for tube well irrigation8 was also zero. So why incur additional cost for canal irrigation waters when marginal returns are asymptotic towards zero?

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As Shah (1993) points out, water prices charged by owners of ‘electric water extracting mechanisms’ (including tube wells) are much higher even in Gujarat’s water abundant areas and when compared to states like Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Tamil Nadu. Shah’s analysis suggests the possibility of lowering the tube well water rates as and when the number of watering from the canal improves. In fact, in Thalota, the tube well water rates fell when canal water rates were increased. This was because as the number of canal waterings increased (to four against the usual one or two) during the 1997–98 winter season, their dependence on tube well water decreased. As a result, the tube well command area declined by 50 per cent. There were also changes in the method of levying water charges by the tube well ‘companies’. For wheat crops, for example, tube well companies shifted the basis to the number of watering actually used by the farmers. Earlier, the companies used to charge 1,036 kg of wheat (at an average harvest price of Rs 6.25 per kg) per hectare of land per season, irrespective of the number of watering; and, on an average, wheat crops required six waterings in the north Gujarat region. While the rate per watering remained the same, the total expense for the farmer declined sharply. The total income for the tube well companies too declined. In fact, with the prospect of canal supplying the required number of watering increasing, it was expected that the tube well water charges would decline. However, farmers did not want this to happen. (For details on the performance of tube well ‘companies’ see Table 7.4.) Indeed, farmers were keen to evolve a reserve price for tube well waters to protect the companies. As a result, they decided to avail of at least two to three waterings from the tube well and use it in conjunction with canal waters.9 This was intended to reduce the loss of the tube well companies since the fixed costs (of the companies) have to be met in any case. In many parts of north Gujarat, where tube well depths can go up to 400 meters and investment per WEM [water extraction mechanism] up to Rs 5 lakhs, pressures to maintain high utilization rates and cover the fixed costs have resulted in various forms of price discrimination. These pressures have enormously increased after the introduction of progressive flat power charges in June 1987, which have rendered all the costs of tube well operation into overheads. The standard practice has been to charge a lower price (Rs 30–45 per hour for 75 hp [horsepower] motor) during kharif season when the water demand function is highly elastic; and twice as much or more for rabi and summer (Rs 60–75 per hour) (Shah 1993: 64). However, the elasticity of the water demand function is not only dependent on the monsoon but also the performance of the canal. Therefore in Thalota, though the unit price of tube well water is higher than that of canal, the water charges recovered by the companies were found to be lower than their operating costs in some cases. What happens if the tube well companies cannot cover the operational costs? The shareholder farmers contribute to make up the loss. The justification for this strange phenomenon of members contributing to the losses of a ‘company’ is that in other ‘normal’ years, they receive all of the profits the companies make in proportion to their share, and therefore the irrigators view a ‘bad’ year as a trough in business cycle.10

2,592 3,628 4,147 3,836 6,532 6,220 2,592 6,220

20.00 30.00 24.00

II. Actual Irrigated Area (ha) 1995–96 1996–97 1997–98

Actual Water Charges Paid/hectare (Rs) (1997–98)2 Cotton (5) Castor (7) Bajari (8) Mustard (4) Wheat (6) Lucern (12) Fennel/Isabgul/Others (5) Tobacco (12)

1981 33 52 420 650 50 2500 100 31 90 90

Bhavani

I. Year of Inception No. of Partners Horsepower of Electric Motor Depth of Tube Well Motor (meters) Depth of the Tube Well (meters) Potential Command Area (ha) Length of Underground Pipelines (meters) Total no. of Benefiting Farmers (1997–98) No. of Non-member Farmers (1997–98)1 % of Partners who are Members of WUA % of Tube Well Command Serviced by Canals

Details

2,333 3,266 3,732 3,836 6,532 5,599 2,333 5,599

20.00 28.00 36.50

1975 17 52 415 650 38 3000 93 15 72 30

Kameshwar

2,592 3,628 4,147 3,836 6,532 6,220 2,592 6,220

23.00 24.50 14.00

1974 23 45 425 650 25 3500 73 39 100 80

Mahakali

2,592 3,628 4,147 3,836 6,532 6,220 2,592 6,220

– – 7.00

1998 2 52 420 610 36 3500 – 6 100 20

Parbat

(Table 7.4 continued)

2,210 3,084 3,525 3,836 6,532 5,288 2,210 5,288

39.50 33.50 12.00

1981 29 52 420 650 38 2500 6 6 100 90

Balchand

Name of the Companies

Table 7.4: Performance of Select Tube well ‘Companies’ in Thalota, North Gujarat

21,000 – 21,000 – 553 553

– 26,000

NA

96,000 30,000 50,000 105,000 275,000

Kameshwar

21,000 – 21,000 – 840 840

– 22,500

NA

189,000 100,000 56,000 5,000 350,000

Mahakali

30,000 50,000 –20,000 1,316 789 –527

12,000 26,000

12,000

147,000 40,000 50,000 42,000 280,000

Balchand

Name of the Companies

NA NA – – – –

Self operated 11,000 26,000

274,000 125,000 260,000 27,000 686,000

Parbat

Source: Household Survey, 1996. The Household Survey was conducted as part of the larger study ‘PDR on PIM in Gujarat’ supported by the Ford Foundation, New Delhi. Notes: 1. Non-beneficiary farmers are those who are merely buyers of water. Partners are those who have purchased ‘shares’ of the tube well ‘company’. Members are those partners who have availed of tube well water. 2. Figures given in the parentheses indicate number of watering. Each watering takes 25.92 hours to irrigate one hectare of land. The data pertains to the agricultural year 1997–98.

72,000 65,000 7,000 1,300 1,440 140

9,000 26,000

Salary of Operators Rs (1997–98) Electricity Charges Paid Rs (1997–98)

IV. Total Revenue (1997–98) Total Expenditure (1997–98) Gross Surplus Expenditure/hectare Revenue/hectare Profit/loss per Hectare

30,000

81,000 30,000 40,000 60,000 211,000

Bhavani

Operation and Maintenance Cost Rs (1997–98)

III. Cumulative Capital Expenditure Since Inception on Well Pumpset Pipeline Others Other Capital Expenditure

Details

(Table 7.4 continued)

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Following this practice, neither the company nor its members are unduly concerned about what happens when the price of tube well water falls in any given year. Perhaps the concern will emerge if adequacy of canal irrigation supplies is evident over a prolonged period. What is more important is the fact that the sellers’ monopoly power (as a result of being efficient and dependable water suppliers) will decline with an increase in the performance of canal. This is a cause for concern, at least for the managers of the tube well companies. Given the complex web of identifying who the seller is, all farmers who have bought higher than an average number of shares in the tube well company also behave the way the (managing) seller behaves by contributing to the loss. Further, some of the sellers who did not have their lands near the pipeline were found to buy water from other sellers. In an extreme case, one of the sellers was also found to sell water to another seller who then supplied to his clients. As a result, even a seller is sometimes found to gain and lose at the same time when the prices rise. There is also a social angle to this phenomenon. In most cases, the partners and the large shareholders have strong familial or caste ties. In any case, the dominant reason for this behaviour is the fact that tube well water is a surer hedge against poor monsoon, while canal water is undependable. In fact, the Thalota WUA is evolving price responses that are similar to those observed in areas that have developed water markets. In Tranol (south Gujarat), for instance, there were problems of inadequate water availability to the tail portions of the minors and sub-minors. In all, there are 12 wells in the command area, of which five are located in the tail portions of the minors or sub-minors. All these wells are being used as conjunctive water sources to canals. There are some interesting variations with respect to the number of users of well water in the core command area and those using water from wells in the tail portions of the canal. About 35 farmers buy water for two watering from the seven well owners, paying Rs 20 per hour per watering to irrigate the crops after the canal water rotation ends, whereas, about 80 farmers in the tail portions use well water for about four watering at the rate of Rs 30 per hour per hectare. These farmers pay an average of around Rs 10 more per watering per hour than the prevailing canal water rates. However, there are seasonal and yearly variations in the number of watering given to crops from the wells and the water rates. These variations are directly related to the fluctuations in the water availability through the canal system. The year-to-year variations in water supply from the canals are, however, linked to the level of water available in the reservoir, and some of the Indian rivers are found to vary radically ‘[in] a ratio of ten to one between a good year and a bad year being not uncommon’ (Berkoff 1988). Variable water supplies evidently lead to varying performances of the users associations and also influence the demand pattern of the users and their preferences.

C ONCLUSION Water management is embedded in a wider social and economic environment in which the irrigators live, such as production relations and social and political networks, including tenancy relations, in which formal and informal water user institutions operate. This context

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sets both the constraints and opportunities in institutionalising water management decisions, particularly determination of price for water. This chapter analysed a classic case of groundwater supplementing surface water and highlighted the resultant dynamics of price determination. Admittedly, the government water rates are abysmally low, but to argue for a raise by quoting the tube well water rates was found to have major difficulties. There are two important points that have relevance for the policy makers. First, the improvement in the number of waterings per se was not found to increase its marginal utility; the timeliness of supply and sufficient availability of water together were found to be important. Second, while the inconsistent canal water supply makes the tube well water appear as a surer hedge, the tube well companies on their part have displayed enough flexibility in determining their water rates. Pricing, evidently, is the mechanism that can neutralise the differences due to quality between the two sources of irrigation. In the resultant price war, it is the more reliable water source that was found to command the patronage of the irrigators. What is important is the fact that for most members of the WUA, the logic of paying a higher rate than what the government charges was unclear. The lack of clarity partly stemmed from their realisation that the WUAs formed in isolated portions of a canal system cannot contribute to the improvement in the reliability of water supply. As Shah (1993) has pointed out, pricing of irrigation service is a major device to regulate the distribution of gross irrigation surplus between users and suppliers of water. Evidently, an appropriate pricing can evolve only when it is associated with regulatory effect, either on the users or on the use to which water has been put to. Clearly, there is a difference between the two sources in their ability to perform the regulatory function. The present water distribution style of canals has limited scope to be discriminatory to the extent that it is difficult to cut off water supplies, even to the defaulters. In this context the tube well ‘companies’ offered an important lesson as to how to discriminate the market and ensure control over water-use. Taking advantage of the pipelines, the seller was able to convey water to the needed field (blocking other outlets on the way), thereby ensuring economy over use. Perhaps, it is this ability to discriminate the market that provides the ‘company’ the power to recover water charges promptly; and canal irrigation could not do this so far. This aspect was also found to ensure equity in water distribution among the irrigators who belonged to different castes and social and economic classes. Upward revision of government water rates, therefore, is not merely a question of political will as is commonly believed. The interdependency among users in a basin and other (conjunctive) sources of irrigation certainly appear to become more pronounced in future. This implies that all water users within a scheme will become increasingly dependent on the local leaders and their effectiveness in defending an assured and reliable water supply at the basin level negotiations. This probably will emerge as a key factor in determining the water rates, be it for government-supplied canal water or water supplied through tube well ‘companies’. Obviously, water-use upstream and downstream of a scheme affects intra-scheme water-use and management. Meanwhile, the newly-created WUAs are trapped in the classical chicken-and-egg syndrome. While fixing water charges higher than what they pay to the government is crucial for their

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financial health, the WUAs are presently ill-equipped to influence the water delivery schedule. At least, in areas where the newly-formed WUAs are operating in formal water markets, only a reliable water supply can justify a hike in the water rates among its members. This obviously adds new dimensions of viability of WUAs while operating in the formal water market.

Notes 1. Since 1995, a PIM programme is being implemented in Gujarat that aims to transfer the management of irrigation below the outlet level to newly formed users’ organisations. In the first phase, 13 pilot projects have been identified in different regions of the state. In five of these pilot projects, NGOs are involved in planning and implementation of the programme. The role of the NGOs is to mobilise and equip the farmer members to manage the WUA and guide them during the various stages of functioning. The participating farmers not only operate and manage the WUA, but also make a fixed contribution towards the initial expenses of repair and rehabilitation of the system. The other responsibilities of the WUAs include allocation of water and collection of demand forms and water charges from the members. 2. The Thalota pilot project is a part of the Dharoi Right Bank Canal Project. Since 1979–80, the Dharoi project has been irrigating 45,550 hectares (ha) of land in the five talukas of Kheralu, Visnagar, Mehsana, Sidhpur and Vijapur in Mehsana district. The Thalota pilot project encompasses the entire command area of the Branch Canal Number 2 (D2T), which is a distributory of the right bank canal of Dharoi Dam on the river Sabarmati. A direct outlet from the D2T and its four sub-minors, DSM 1, DSM 2, DSM 3 and DSM 1/1 irrigate a total of 224 ha. The government during the years 1972–76 constructed the canal network in Thalota. The canal started functioning in 1979–80; however, water was available only for two years after which the canal fell in disuse. 3. The total command area of the Tranol Sub-Minor is 355 hectares but due to kuchcha watercourses, only 185 hectares are being irrigated. The sub-minor has 14 outlets with each outlet having a committee. A representative from each outlet-committee is a member of the 15-member executive committee. The fields of Kunjrav farmers are clustered together and thus can be irrigated from the same outlets. The main crops are tobacco (80 per cent), rice (10 per cent) and horticultural crops like bananas, lemons and chillies. 4. The pilot project covers the command area of Lakshmipura Minor, a minor of the distributory 13-L that branches out from the Gadh branch canal, which is a part of the Dantiwada Irrigation project. The minor is 2,347 meters long and has eight outlets. It aims to irrigate 245.68 hectares of land, about 75 per cent of which falls in Lakshmipura village and the remaining 25 per cent in the adjoining village of Vagdod. Lakshmipura residents own most fields lying in the head-reach area of the minor and fields located at the tail-end belong mostly to Vagdod farmers. 5. The upward revision of water charges took place subsequent to a PRA exercise undertaken by the NGO working on this project during the monsoon season of 1997. Subsequently, the water rates have been brought down and for the kharif season of 1998, the rates were barely 50 per cent higher than the government rates. 6. The joint ownership of tube well is locally referred to as ‘tube well companies’ in north Gujarat. These companies have varying number of partners and they contribute to the equity capital in different proportions. Water is transported through underground pipelines. Importantly, there is no difference in the price charged for water to all categories of users. The share-holding members, however, have preferential claim to water over other buyers of water in years of scarcity (for details, see Shah 1993).

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7. It was reported that historically the land ownership in the village had been fairly even. However, among the castes other than Patels, the family size had always been higher, which eventually led to fragmentation of lands. Also, marriages and other functions which are expensive led these community members to sell or pledge lands mostly to the Patels. Thus, presently, the land holding appears unequally distributed and with the advent of irrigation in the village, the income inequality has also widened. 8. The additional cost is zero because the tube well companies charge on the basis of crops, area cultivated and for a given season irrespective of the number of waterings. 9. It is interesting to note that none of the companies were found to have reserves or surpluses in their account. Each year, the net profits were distributed among the members and as a matter of principle the companies do not carry forward either profits or losses to the succeeding accounting year. 10. In cases where the tube well companies do not have large number of shareholders, the owners have evolved their own strategies of minimising the losses. Of the five tube wells in the canal command, three were leased out at the rate of Rs 18,000 (42 hp), Rs 20,000 (52 hp) and Rs 25,000 (62 hp). A combination of factors has led to the determination of the lease amount. They are the service area of the tube well, the types of crops grown in the tube well command, the distribution of land according to the tube well pipeline network and the distribution of farms in the tail portion of the canal command.

References Berkoff, D.J.W. (1988). ‘Irrigation Management in South India: The Approach of the National Water Management Project’, paper No. 88/2d, London: ODI/IIMI Irrigation Management Network, December. Caruthers, I. (1981). ‘Neglect of O&M in Irrigation–The Need for New Sources and Forms of Support’, Water Supply and Management, 5: 53–65. Choudhury, A; Muhammad and A. Mubarik (1989). ‘Economic Returns to Operational and Maintenance Expenditure in Different Components of the Irrigation System in Pakistan,’ paper No. 89/1d, London: ODI/IIMI Irrigation Management Network, June. Dhawan, B.D. (1990). Studies in Minor Irrigation with Special Reference to Ground Water. New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers. Maloney, C. and K.V. Raju (1994). Managing Irrigation Together: Practice and Policy in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Shah, T. (1993). Groundwater Markets and Irrigation Development: Political Economy and Practical Policy. Bombay: Oxford University Press.

8 Resource, Rules and Technology: Ethnography of Building a Water Users’ Association Esha Shah

I NTRODUCTION Development interventions in the last decade or so have projected community-based associations as the basic unit for natural resource governance. Building community-based civil society associations has hence been a central aim of these development interventions. Civil society is generally understood to embody a larger role of community-based collaborations as a substitute for flawed government programmes (Eberly 2000). That means that although civil society acquires it’s meaning only when juxtaposed with two other social entities—state and market (Chandhoke 2003)—the notion of community has an overriding influence on the notion of civil society. What is important here is to point out that implied in the term ‘civil society’ are activities and associations that are not only community-based, but are also voluntary and free. This chapter aims to capture the dynamics of the building of civil society. Building civil society refers to the situation when a community-based association is not voluntarily created by its members but is formed as an initiative from the government and funding agencies. The chapter is a case study of an irrigation association formed among farmers irrigating their land from a tank located in the Bijapur district in north Karnataka. The tank was constructed with the World Bank’s assistance in 1989 with a view, among other things, to explore different approaches to form Water Users Associations (WUAs). I will first review the debate that considers community as an arena either ‘for consensus’ or ‘of conflict’. I shall then argue that the debate on community overly focuses on social relations and gives scant space to the structuring influence of ecological and technological materiality in shaping the contours of community formation. This chapter is an attempt to capture the dynamics of building civil society—formation of community-based WUAs—through the means of understanding the interplay between the structuring influence of ecology and newly-introduced technology and farmers’ agencies in strategically transforming resources, rules and technology.

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C OMMUNITY : A RENA

FOR

C ONSENSUS

OR

C ONFLICT ?

Formation of users or stakeholders associations have come to dominate development policy in the current times. These associations are envisaged to perform a variety of development tasks ranging from education to health care; natural resource management is not an exception. These development efforts assume a pre-existing community upon which civil society associations are expected to be built. Development agencies are, thus, confronted with a pertinent question: what constitutes or defines a group, a collectivity or a community? Let us take a quick look at the most influential notions of community debated in social and political theory followed by a review of notions employed in development efforts towards building civil society. One can largely identify two modes or approaches in social and political theory to define the constitutive aspects of community formation. The first and more popular approach builds its theory by emphasising the ‘consensus’ or ‘shared’ aspects, whereas the second approach projects ‘conflict’ or ‘contestation’ as constitutive aspects of the shaping of a community. The early theories on community or collectivity were based upon consensual foundations. Emil Durkheim’s conscience collective or mechanical solidarity existed on the totality of shared beliefs, rules, morals and sentiments. Following Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, the community is regarded to have enduring social identity and solidarity. In general, the continuity of community is ensured by passing down of shared norms, customs and traditions from generation to generation.1 Another classical tradition in social theory dichotomises and contrasts community—as an arena for shared values, norms and traditions—from civil society. In the social theory, following Ferdinand Tönnies, community is contrasted with civil society; such a contrast is then liked with transition from tradition to modernity. Tönnies contrasted the real and organic (Gemeinschaft) form of living together in community based upon familiarity of relations, solidarity and belongingness from the mechanical (Gesellschaft) and superficial (the space of civil society or society) form of coming together based on the convergence of interests. Community in this construction is synonymous with traditional society based on the relations of trust that are replaced with relations of contracts with the advent of modernity.2 Yet another influential voice, considered as the theoretical godfather of civil society, Alexis de Tocqueville, described civil society as ‘civic associations’. These associations are voluntary and serve a larger social purpose by harmonising conflicting demands of individuals and common social good. For these thinkers, society is made of sub-units—Tocqueville’s ‘associations’ and Durkhiem’s ‘little aggregations’—which are building blocks of the larger social order. In fact, for these theorists, civil society is an ethical ideal that elevates common good over private self-interest.3 The conflict theory, on the other hand, emphasises clash of interests rather than the consensus of values. Following Karl Marx and Max Weber, conflict theory propounds that valueconsensus is an illusion perpetuated by ideology and power that form differences among individuals and groups. Communities are thus formed of various interest groups always ridden with conflicts.4

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It has been time and again pointed out that development policy for civil-society building— formation of community-based associations—gives overriding importance to consensus (Manor 1998). Upholding the reincarnated version of social capital, one of the important aims of development agencies is to support and create shared networks, norms and trusts among the members of a community to reduce poverty and to solve common problems. The second such concept that has inspired development planning is the Habermasian notion of communicative rationality. In his deliberative democracy model, Jürgen Habermas proposed that through arguments and counterarguments—deliberations—rational and reasoned consensus could be built among the opposing viewpoints. What needs to be done for building this consensus among interest groups is to institutionalise appropriate procedural means so that various opposing views can be expressed and the better argument can then come into play. A great deal of emphasis is now placed on development planning, on developing appropriate procedural means for the creation and functioning of users associations. For instance, several Indian federal states are in the process of developing legal framework for participatory irrigation management (PIM) originally initiated by multilateral funding agencies in many cases. At the core, PIM is meant to involve WUAs in taking over irrigation management at various levels from the government. Detailed procedures are being developed—such as criteria for group membership, roles and offices, choice of office bearers, conduct of meetings, record and account keeping—in order to legally institutionalise the formation and functioning of WUAs.5 Similar to the Habermasian notion of communicative rationality, users associations are expected to provide democratic space for the articulation of differences and resolution of opposing interests among various actors through deliberations and rule-making. All these in order to build consensus for the common good in the community. The development discourse on common-property resource-management, overridden with the concerns to craft sustainable institutions or to build civil society associations, has thus been heavily influenced by the consensus theories. What is inbuilt in the notion of communities formed and sustained due to consensus is also a belief that consensus ensures common good. There is an inherent value in arriving at consensus because it leads to the fulfilment of common interests for all (Kapoor 2002). Sustaining long-standing common property institutions has an inherent value because in their absence the common property resources would be unsustainably used up. Creating and sustaining community-based institutions is thus considered a prime aim for the development planning (and not democratisation) of resource utilisation.

B EYOND C ONSENSUS AND C ONFLICT : W HAT R OLE COULD E THNOGRAPHY P LAY ? It is the contention of this chapter that from the perspective of Third World politics, there is a major gap in both consensus and conflict theories, that is, insufficient attention given to materiality (ibid.). The analysis of the inner dynamics of the community—consensual or conflictual—is almost entirely focused upon relations among human beings. Either the

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institutionalisation of rule making and rule implementing are largely assigned the structuring influence on behaviour of participants, or it is determined by the politics of contestation. The structuring influence exerted by material conditions—ecological or technological—has largely been ignored in both the theorisations. Productive practices, organised across time and space, have also been ignored. In this regard, there is a need perhaps to draw attention to the tradition of ethnographies that have provided rich information on the physical, social and organisational aspects of resource management. In the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, several ethnographies came out that gave central focus to the interplay of social and material aspects of resource utilisation. The most famous of these studies pertain to the Balinese Subak (Geertz 1980), comparison of wet and dry cultivation in Morocco and Bali (Geertz 1972), Kulo of Nepal, Zanjera of Philippines (Coward 1980) and Pul Eliya of Sri Lanka (Leach 1971), and more. More recently, Mosse (1997) has shown how the ecology of water flow shapes political and social organisation. I have discussed elsewhere (Shah 2003) how technology structures social relations in tank irrigated areas. Thus, there has been enough ethnographic literature to show how ecological and technological aspects are inseparably intertwined with social and political organisation. This chapter hopes to extend the tradition of eco-techno-social ethnographies to critically and reflexively look at the implementation of development policy.

T HE T ANK This chapter presents a case study of a newly constructed irrigation tank located in the dry region of north Karnataka. The tank poses two paradoxes. After its construction, while the Minor Irrigation Department (MID) attempted to form a WUA in the tank area, the farmers refused to organise into an association by claiming that water stored in the tank belonged to the government and hence only the MID should manage and maintain the tank. The farmers’ assertion regarding the tank goes against the uncritically accepted assumption in development planning that members of the community are always eager to overthrow the state management of their resource. The second paradox pertains to the fact that although the tank is located in a water-scarce region, the water stored in the tank is under-utilised. I shall explain later in more detail how the second paradox partially explains the first one. The tank was constructed with assistance from the World Bank. The work was started in 1986 and completed in 1989, except for the canal work. Irrigation in the head-reach started in 1991 and in the tail-end in around 1994. The designed atchakat is 330 hectares (ha), but only 220 hectares was being irrigated at the time of the fieldwork in 2000 (see Figure 8.1). The bund is 1,062 m long and a maximum 10 m high. The right bank canal (RBC) is 4.32 km and the left bank banal (LBC) is 4.92 km long. Each canal is designed to irrigate 165 ha. The canals run on the opposite edges of the atchakat. The tank is constructed at the meeting point of two seasonally flowing streams that converge into one on the downstream side of the dam. The

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Figure 8.1: A Schematic Map of the Atchakat and Approximate Location

converged stream, known as halla in the local language, passing through the middle of the atchakat, is dry much of the year but flows during May to October. The average annual rainfall in the region is between 600–700 mm. Both the sluices are fitted with a shutter attached to a threaded rod and operated with a gearbox and a key spanner. The gross storage capacity of the tank is 1.7 million cubic metres (mcm), of which 1.5 mcm are live storage capacity. The tank was constructed as a part of the Karnataka Tank Irrigation Project with financial and technical assistance from the World Bank as a part of the scheme that eventually constructed 65 new tanks in Karnataka. The Staff Appraisal Report of the World Bank declared that, ‘the reason for constructing new tanks is to experiment with new planning and design criteria, the effect of which would be carefully monitored and evaluated. Lessons learned would subsequently be applied to the modernisation of existing tanks’ (World Bank 1981). Increasing farmers’ participation in the operation of tank irrigation systems was one of the objectives of the project. Exploration of different approaches to the formation of WUAs was declared

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as one of the important project components (World Bank 1981). The Staff Appraisal Report proposed the formation of a Tank Irrigation Committee (TIC) immediately after construction of a tank. This was sanctioned in consultation with the Irrigation Department ‘before finalising the design of the Tank Irrigation Project’ (ibid.). As regards the TIC’s role in water management, it was mentioned in the report that after the construction, at least twice a year before each irrigation season, local staff of the irrigation department would consult and agree with the committee on scheduling water delivery for the coming season (ibid.). The TIC was also envisaged to take part in the design and planning of a tank before its construction, in addition to the operation and management of the infrastructure and water delivery after construction, although the MID would retain the charge of physical structures. The report cautions that experiences with farmers’ organisations for irrigation, however, have generally not been encouraging in India or in most of Asia (ibid.). The Karnataka Tank Irrigation Project was among the first experiments that aimed at the formation of farmers’ irrigation associations. No channels were created, even on paper, for farmers to participate in the design process. The design of crucial tank aspects remained the domain of technical experts.

‘Of Course, This is Government’s Water!’ The social environment in this tank posed several surprises. In the first few days of my fieldwork, I was flooded with a long list of complaints, mutually-contradictory story lines about water distribution in the atchakat, about disputes among farmers and about disputes with the MID and its officials. It also became clear that there was an absence of imposing hierarchy in the irrigated area and also a locally recognisable authority in charge of tank management. The landholding pattern in the atchakat suggests a degree of horizontality in terms of the socio-economic profile of the farmers. While historically-privileged groups usually own lands in the head-reaches of tanks6, in this tank a substantial number of Lingayat farmers own land in the lower reaches of the canal and even in the tail-end. The RBC irrigates land belonging to 86 farmers out of which 33 are Lingayat and the rest belong to the Other Backward Classes (OBC) and lower castes. Out of 33 Lingayat landholders, only two farmers own land irrigated by the second outlet. Outlet numbers three and four do not irrigate Lingayat land. Outlet numbers five to nine irrigate lands belonging to 15 Lingayat landholders. The rest of the lands belonging to 16 Lingayat farmers are either irrigated by outlet number 10 or are located in the tail-end. The pattern is similar on the LBC side. The LBC runs 7 feet below ground level in the head-reach, a point discussed later in the chapter. Hence, part of the lands in the head-reach cannot take water from the canal. The tail-end benefits more from the LBC. Twelve Lingayat landholders, out of a total of 65 farmers on the LBC side, have their lands irrigated by either outlet numbers one or two. The size of landholdings is also not significantly skewed between higher and lower caste landholders. All farmers on the RBC side own less than 2 ha, except three Lingayat farmers who own between 3 ha and 4 ha. I must also clarify that the pattern of landholdings may not remain constant over time. At the time of the study, the tank was only a decade old. The landholding pattern in the atchakat remains the way it was before the

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construction of the tank. Once the benefits of having land in the head-reach are fully realised, it is very likely that even here the historically privileged groups may gradually take over the head-reach land. However, at this point of time, the landholding pattern and absence of hierarchical social arrangements to manage irrigation suggested that the landholders in the atchakat share a degree of socio-economic similarity although they might be from different caste backgrounds. This is certainly not to suggest that all farmers equally participate in irrigation matters or that all farmers are equal. There are some farmers in the atchakat who are more powerful than others. But this difference in power and status has not (yet) manifested itself in an overarching structure of authority, which institutionalises (usually discriminatory)7 rules of water distribution. It is a matter of speculation whether differences in power and status will result into hierarchical (and discriminatory) water management institutions or not once the tank is older. However, despite a degree of socio-economic horizontality among the irrigators, a democratically organised farmers’ collective has not emerged in the irrigated area in the last decade despite the MIDs efforts to create one. What forms the background of the first paradox is the absence of authority, either hierarchical or democratic. It is paradoxical that while the MID attempted to form a WUA, farmers refused to organise into an association despite a degree of socio-economic horizontality among them and instead declared that the water stored in the tank belonged to the government and hence the government should manage the water distribution. In explaining this paradox, one would also need to explain why the irrigated environment is marked by conflict and chaos. Farmers have presented elaborate stories about internal disputes, the destruction of physical structures, fights among farmers and disputes with MID officers.

Outlet Stories Almost all original outlets8 on the RBC have been destroyed and several new pipe or open outlets have replaced them. Each new outlet has been installed to bring water exclusively to one piece of land whereas the designed arrangement had been so that a few farmers would have shared water from one outlet via a common field channel. Farmers from all castes and economic backgrounds have participated in this process, although the method adopted for installing a new outlet has varied depending upon the status and power of the person, and correspondingly the degree to which the new outlet is concealed. The higher caste, influential farmer has simply destroyed the outlet and let the water flow into his land through an open channel (see Figure 8.2), while the small landholder has installed a pipe outlet, nicely concealed in the canal bed or canal wall. The former has not even bothered to install any mechanism to control the water flow. As long as the main sluice in the bund is open, water would continue to flow into the newly made field-channel. There were several contradictory accounts about ‘who has destroyed the outlets and why’. Many farmers told me that all the new outlets were made with MID permission. MID officials denied making new outlets, or giving permission for making new outlets or even modifying the existing ones. According to one farmer’s version of what happened, the MID asked the

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contractor to make the canal and all the outlets that were marked on the map. However, because some farmers did not agree to the proposed locations, the outlets were not made at the time of constructing the canals. The contractor installed them later by breaking the canal walls, but did not repair them. MID officials discard this story as bizarre. The last and most novel explanation was that women who regularly come to wash clothes and utensils, broke the canal walls (presumably only where outlets were existing) and even the outlets. The purpose here is not to determine what actually happened but to find out what generates this discrepancy between the actual design on paper and practice, between what is conceptualised and what is actualised. I shall argue that the design of water distribution structures is based upon the assumption that farmers would organise themselves into an organisation and would then collectively manage the water distribution. The design of water distribution structures thus presupposes the existence of farmers’ organisations. Controlling the size and number of outlets and restricting the capacity of field channels can reduce diversion of more water than the share allocated for the prescribed cropping pattern. The size of the outlet and field channel can be restricted corresponding to the size of

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the irrigated area in two ways. The first way is to provide a bigger pipe and field channel and reduce the number of days for which the field channel will run. The second way is to provide water for all seven days and restrict the outlet size for daily supply. In case of the latter option, field channels are designed to run at their full-discharge capacity every day. The full-discharge capacity in this scenario would be the summation of daily irrigation needs of all land to be irrigated by that field channel. Hence, no rotation in the command of one outlet is needed. This option would be more appropriate for paddy cultivation where water, as per the preferred practices of farmers, is applied more frequently. The former option, namely to provide a bigger sized outlet to supply water once in a few days, implies that the outlet is operated and the field channel is run only a few days a week to provide the irrigation needs for the whole week. In this case, again, no rotation is observed among the land irrigated from one outlet. The outlets in this tank area are designed for the capacity somewhere in between the two options discussed above because irrigation is not needed every day for dry crops. In fact, for wheat and white jowar, (sorghum) irrigation is effectively needed only once a week. In this tank area, each outlet is designed in such a way that rotation within the command area of the outlet is unavoidable. It requires collective management of an outlet, which farmers seem to be resisting.

Collective Action Many farmers, and even MID officials said that farmers settle scores by not cooperating in sharing the common irrigation resource. Farmers themselves explained the lack of cooperation by saying that in their tank the rule ‘jiski lathi usaki bhains’9 prevails. Even in the language of some farmers, the orderly, collective management of the water resource is being arbitrarily opposed. Let us examine a couple of cases in which the cooperation is resisted. (i) One farmer owning land on the downstream side of a field channel, through which he was supposed to receive water from the common outlet, complained that the upstream farmer stopped tank water to flow through the field channel passing through his land. This, he claimed, was because he refused to give the upstream farmer water from his bavi (shallow open well). The downstream farmer approached MID officials and when even they could not resolve the conflict, he was given permission to dig a separate channel to his field from the main canal. While talking to me, the tail-end farmer gave a number of contradictory explanations about how the upstream farmer stopped water flow through field channel ranging from ‘he broke the field channel’ to ‘he broke the diversion chamber’ and finally to ‘he blocked the diversion chamber’. We found that the diversion chamber and the field channel were both intact and that neither was blocked nor broken. The upstream farmer confirmed my hunch that the downstream farmer simply wanted a separate outlet channel for himself and had invented the whole story. But the MID official had a different story to tell. According to him, there was a conflict between both

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farmers over the issue of halla water. The upstream farmer wanted to lift halla water (which flowed one plot below the land of the downstream farmer) with a diesel pump and wanted the downstream farmer to give permission to pass the pipeline through his land, which the downstream farmer refused because he was worried about how it would affect his land. The upstream farmer then approached the MID to intervene. The MID also refused to give permission to lift water from the halla. I later found out that all farmers having land close to the halla have been lifting water from it, but MID officials denied this was happening. The MID official told me that farmers have to take permission to lift water from the halla and those who were lifting water have been doing so since the time before the tank was constructed, as no new permissions had been granted. This was a different story than what the MID officials told the upstream farmer when they refused to give him permission inspite of the upstream farmer producing a recommendation letter from the local Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA). The MID official explained to me that the permission could not be granted because the upstream farmer’s land was within a distance of 300 m from the tank embankment and any digging in this area could potentially endanger the structure. The MID official also told me that the downstream farmer could not in principle refuse to give permission to let the pipeline pass through his land as long as the pipeline was kept 3 feet below the surface. When I spoke to the upstream farmer he was not aware of the MID’s rule that no digging can be allowed within the distance of 300 m of the dam structure despite the fact that the dispute has been going on for two years. The MID official also said that it all depended upon the discretion of the officer in charge who interpreted the rules; and even if the actual distance was more than 300 m, the official could refuse to give the permission on the ground that the digging could be potentially dangerous to the embankment. (ii) Another farmer refused to allow a field channel that would have irrigated 80 acres of land on the downstream pass through his land. The farmer’s reason was that the channel would have passed through his land, but it would be 5 feet (1.6 m) below ground level. As a result, he could not take water from the channel and would also lose part of his land. He tried to negotiate with the MID that if he were allowed to lift the water by pump he would allow the field channel to pass through his land, which the MID refused. Consequently, the farmer refused to give permission to let the field channel pass through his land, depriving the downstream 80 acres of irrigation. In my opinion, an attempt to dismiss these conflicts as simply personal problems between disputing farmers would be seriously misleading. The environment of rule making in which irrigation infrastructure was designed and implemented had a major role to play in generating these conflicts. The attitude of MID officials is a major reason why such conflicts have not been resolved and, in fact, are getting worse. The upstream farmer could have easily been informed about the rule that no digging was allowed within a distance of 300 m from the dam. MID’s rule making, which does not seem to be very participatory in nature, is generating a fair deal

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of frustration amongst farmers. In another context, a farmer described the MID officials in derogatory terms and said, ‘they make rules and laws for others and they themselves never follow them’. Stories were afloat with fairly detailed speculation about how much money MID officials swindled during the time of the construction of the tank. Several examples of poor quality construction—canal leakages from the cross drainage structures, canal lining made with inferior stones, stones directly fixed on the soil instead of on a layer of jelly, heavy seepage from the earthen embankment, inferior quality of stone revetment on the embankment—were shown to me. Farmers also exchanged stories about how engineers fought among themselves when they could not amicably share the bounty given by the contractor. Even a couple of MID officials themselves, on one occasion said, ‘thank goodness, farmers just use harsh words and do not beat us up as it happens in (large) dam areas’. In my opinion, by circulating stories about money swindled by the MID officers and questioning their moral standing, farmers keep MID’s authority of rule making, interpreting and enforcing in perspective. However, what raises a major contradiction in farmers’ attitude towards the MID is that inspite of the fact that the MID officers are part of the problem, farmers still expect the MID to play a crucial role in problem solving. Ultimately, it is the MID which is the only recognisable authority in the irrigated area. When I asked the disputing downstream and upstream farmers about how the dispute on halla water between them could be resolved, they said that only the MID could resolve it, because only the MID has power to ‘make or break’. At the peak of their dispute, which even came to blows, the upstream and downstream farmers even went to the police station, but the police refused to register a case. Both of them refused to recognise the authority of the panchayat that did try to intervene. The upstream farmer’s argument was that if the halla water belonged to the government and if he could not access it through the downstream farmer’s land, then by the same token the downstream farmer could not have tank water passing through his land, as that too belonged to the government. The opinion that water stored in the tank belongs to the government was echoed in different ways and not only in the specific context of this dispute. During a casual conversation at a teashop with a group of farmers, I was asked to tell them something about other tanks I had visited. I described some of the tanks I had visited but told them in detail about a particular tank that I have discussed elsewhere (see Shah 2003). In this tank area, a farmers’ organisation had been managing water distribution for the last two decades. The organisation here not only came into existence entirely due to the initiative of farmers themselves but also had been successful in streamlining water distribution and management. When I described the association’s practices in detail among a group of farmers, some were impressed, some surprised, but most remained sceptical. The discussion drifted to why farmers in this tank area do not organise and manage water distribution on their own, make their own rules, settle their disputes and prevent interference of MID officers. A couple of them laughed saying, ‘if government withdraws from managing this tank, the tank would be empty in two days and all infrastructure would disappear’.

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These incidents hint at the nature of farmers’ expectations from state institutions. This ambivalent nature of farmers’ expectations from state institutions has been discussed later in the conclusion to this chapter. What is important here is that this game of part cooperation and part conflict between state agencies and farmers has to be understood in the context of farming practices followed by the farmers in a certain ecological and social context. MID’s efforts to organise farmers into an association to ensure collective management of water distribution have largely ignored how productive resources, such as land and water, are used in the first place. An overemphasis on creating and sustaining rule making and rule following more often than not ignores culturally specific forms of resource utilisation and farming practices. In the following section, I have examined the mismatch between the designed method of water distribution, which pre-supposes the existence of an irrigation association, and farmers’ agricultural practices. I have also examined the consequences of this mismatch for water utilisation practices, ultimately resulting in unused water in a tank located in a water-scarce region. To me, destroying outlet structures and not following water distribution rotation marks the rejection of the manner in which the resource utilisation is mediated through the MID’s policy as well as a rejection of technological designs. This pattern of destroying and/or radically modifying the irrigation infrastructure is not new in this region. In the famine years of 1898 and 1899, peasants of Bijapur filled up a newlyconstructed tank with sand and stones saying that it would breed mosquitoes (Indian Irrigation Commission 1901–02). The tank had no productive value for them. A second newly-constructed tank remained unused during the same period. Farmers’ lack of acceptance of newly-constructed tanks in the dry tracts of Bombay and Karnataka became an important issue of inquiry for the Irrigation Commission (ibid.). A special inquiry, after a lengthy interrogation of Anglo-Indian officers, revealed that the farmers did not consider black cotton soil fit for irrigation and feared that their lands might be damaged, and hence rejected tank irrigation. Although destroying a tank and destroying outlet structures to modify and alter them are not the same, the underlying thrust of non-acceptance of a certain form of irrigation method is the same. In the following pages, I show how ‘designed’ water management mismatches with culturally and materially-specific farming practices, which, as I will argue, have been primarily organised to avert risk and generate security by diversification. In the next section, I discuss how farmers use various sources of water and how they rotate different crops on different types of land. Stringently designed water rotation rules, which have been designed for two important purposes—to solicit farmer’s cooperation in collective management of the tank resource and to mitigate water scarcity that is endemic in the region—generate a serious discrepancy between the cropping pattern that the designs can support and the pattern that farmers have been following for long. The making and breaking of rules and farmers’ attitudes towards collective management have to be evaluated in the context of the productive practices followed by the farmers and the functional purpose for which irrigation is provided.

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Productive Base of Water Management Practices Land and Labour Land in this region appeared to be water-starved. Especially after walking kilometres through a parched, dry landscape where mercury shoots up to 45°C, I presumed that water input in any form for agriculture must be welcome. It is not so simple, as the following discussion shows. Farmers in the tank area use other sources of water for irrigation besides tank water. Shallow groundwater slowly seeping through the pervious geological formation is tapped through open, shallow wells. Such wells are known as bavi in the local language. Bavi water has been the main source of irrigation in this region for centuries, and reservoir or tank irrigation, historically, has not been as popular in this region as in other parts of Karnataka. The landowner has proprietary rights of water from the bavi on his land. Sharing bavi water with surrounding landowners is not unknown but the main method of bavi irrigation is individual land property oriented. The risk of cultivation in this water-parched dry region is significantly high. Failure of rain for several consecutive seasons is not infrequent and makes the threat of famine real. Memories of famines are an integral part of this region’s cultural and social landscape (Vasavi 1996). Farmers follow intricate methods of cultivating various types of lands located at different places, with a variety of soil characteristics, endowed with varied water-retention capacities and irrigation facilities as a means of risk aversion. For example, a farmer who has land in the middle-reach of the LBC may own as much as four different types of land with varied productive capacities within and outside the atchakat. Two types of dry/unirrigated land plots (called melatto in local language) are located outside the atchakat, probably several kilometres away from the village. Melatto land is of two (or more) types. The most inferior type is generally not invested with scarce labour to level it, and only rain-fed crops such as navane (millet) or groundnut are planted there during the rainy season. The productivity of this land may be as low as 1:2 seed to grain ratio even during times of good rain. The other type of melatto land with a slightly higher amount of black soil, if levelled, could have a higher water-retention capacity. Here, either rain-fed wheat or white jowar are planted with fewer seeds per row or in single rows during the rainy season. Some other farmers have a third type of melatto land with a bavi, which they may have partly levelled, and which is planted with wheat or white jowar in the rainy season with double-row planting or with double the number of seeds per row as compared to the inferior melatto land. The unlevelled land of the same piece is planted with a low-planting density of wheat, white jowar, navane or groundnut. The same farmer may have two different types of irrigated lands, one located in the atchakat and the other just outside the atchakat with a bavi. These two types of lands are usually planted with wheat or white jowar in the rainy season, with single or double row planting, and cotton in summer, depending upon the reliability of the water source (either a tank or a bavi). In addition to managing all these different types of land, he may even occasionally be sharecropping some other farmer’s land. Sharecropping in this region has a reverse-economic connotation than in paddy-growing areas. Generally, economically stronger farmers take weaker farmers’ lands for sharecropping.

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Those who cannot afford to invest enough labour and capital in their lands because of the absence of a male member in the family, or illness, or some other social or economic problem, give their land out for sharecropping. The sharecropper, in return, gives them half the produce. Land in this region is relatively abundant. Labour and water are scarce resources. Labour is the most important and reliable productive force; it needs to be invested in the most effective and productive way to avert the risk of grain scarcity. The time and labour of farmers in this region are invested in dispersed geographical locations, with varied intensities during different seasons, including the irrigation season. Furthermore, tank irrigation is not a question of life and death for farmers in the atchakat in the same way it is for a paddy-growing farmer of a paddy-irrigating tank. Tank irrigation certainly is an important resource and can assure higher output if reliably available, but even without tank irrigation the crop can survive 40–60 per cent of its planting intensity, and those with a bavi can even reap more. On the contrary, without irrigation, paddy farmers would have nothing to plant. Farmers in this tank atchakat do not wait for the tank to receive enough water before sowing their crops. Both white jowar and wheat are unfailingly sown before a particular date called jowar tithi (a specific date as per the local agricultural calendar). In no case is the sowing delayed beyond this date. Those farmers who do not plant their crops on this date forego cultivation of white jowar that year. The tank generally has received some water by this date; however, it usually receives water up to full tank level only after the sowing is complete. Farmers’ decisions about cropping patterns, especially the choice of the crop and cropping intensity, are, therefore, independent of the timing of water availability in the tank, although the output of the produce will be finally affected by it. Agricultural practices in this region have gone through transformation and so have farmers’ attitudes. However, certain elements of socially and culturally organised farming practices aimed at averting risk still remain unchanged. They continue to remain in the backdrop of productively organised agriculture upon which transformation or change may manifest. One such risk-averting strategy is to save and invest labour in the most effective way. Another such strategy is to diversify agriculture to lands with diverse water retention capacities and fertility. Farmers manage several types of lands on which different types of crops, including those cultivated entirely for the market, are rotated and irrigated with diverse sources of water. A similar pattern of farming is followed even in the tank atchakat.

Water Farmers consider tank water to be cold compared to bavi water. They believe that if white jowar and wheat are irrigated entirely with tank water, the yield will be less than if irrigated intermittently at least four times with bavi water. Only those farmers who have a bavi grow cotton in the summer, even if the tank has enough water. Onion is irrigated only with bavi water and fruit orchards, such as lemon, are not irrigated with tank water at all, otherwise the fruit may fall prematurely. During the time of my fieldwork in February 2000, farmers were

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quite worried about the incidents of pest attack on wheat and white jowar. They felt that pest attacks had dramatically increased in recent years. When I visited the tank again in December 2000, farmers were in a panic because wheat and white jowar were massively attacked by pests during flowering time. There was a craze to buy and sprinkle pesticides. The farmers I spoke to estimated that at least half the crop had been lost, if not more. It was believed that the overuse of tank water had increased susceptibility to pests along with the cool climate during the flowering time. Farmers in this region routinely included climatic factors such as cloud cover, lower or higher than normal temperature, morning dew and the general level of humidity in the air in their analysis of crop yield and pest control. Cloud cover, they believe, during flowering time increases susceptibility to pests and reduces yield. Morning dew and higher humidity than normal reduce need for irrigation. Wheat and white jowar are strictly not irrigated if the weather is cloudy during the flowering time. Dry climate and enough sunlight are needed during the flowering time for a good yield of white jowar and wheat. On a similar line, farmers also believe that because there is always flowing water in the canals, the microclimate is cooler in the atchakat than outside of the atchakat, which reduces yield. For example, a farmer explained to me that he has two pieces of land in the atchakat. He got six to seven bags of white jowar per acre from the land located in the LBC tail-end, whereas he received seven to eight bags per acre on the land irrigated with the RBC. The land on the RBC side was planted with double the number of seeds per row than the land on the LBC side. According to the farmer, the produce on the RBC side was half the produce because planting density on the RBC side was double that of the LBC side. He explained that the microclimate on the RBC side was too cool during the flowering time, which considerably reduced the yield. His land in the LBC tail-end benefited from both assured irrigation and a dry climate during the flowering time and hence had a good yield. Cotton especially is irrigated at least four to five times with bavi water in order to avoid pest infestation. Another farmer got 25 bags of cotton from 0.8 ha of land on the RBC side, which he irrigated with bavi water and fertilised with green manure. He got only 40 bags (when he had expected 100 bags) from 2 ha of land on the LBC side, which he irrigated only with tank water. According to him, he would have received a yield comparable to that of the LBC side if he had applied 20 litres of pesticides. Farmers here use at least three sources of water—tank, bavi and halla—to support intricately orchestrated cropping patterns in their carefully divided pieces of land in the atchakat. Out of 320 ha of atchakat, 260 ha use either bavi or halla water in addition to tank water and only 60 ha exclusively depend upon tank water. Many farmers routinely bring water from the bavi located outside the atchakat to atchakat land (see Figure 8.3). An approximate break up of the number of farmers using different water sources is tabulated in Table 8.1. Not only are different types of crops rotated on different types of land, but different water sources are used for different crops. A family of four brothers have 4.4 ha of irrigated land in the tail-end of RBC. They rotate different crops in different parts of their land. One part is sown with white jowar and wheat in September or October, before jowar tithi, irrespective of whether the tank has received enough water or not. Both wheat and white jowar survive on rain until mid-November when the tank sluice is generally opened for irrigation. In case the

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Table 8.1: Number of Landholders Using Different Sources of Water Total Number of Landholders 86 on RBC side 65 on LBC side

Only Canal

Canal + Bavi

Canal + Bavi + Halla

Canal + Halla

26 20

56 30

1 13

3 2

tank has not received enough water by then, only part of the crop survives on rain and bavi water. In any case, at least 40 per cent of the crop can be reaped. After harvesting jowar and wheat, this piece of land is kept fallow until March, and during mahanavami (a local festival) in mid-March cotton is sown here and harvested in September or October. Cotton is irrigated with bavi water and supplemented with tank water. In another piece of land sunflower is sown after the cotton seeds have sprouted—15 days after sowing of the cotton—and harvested threeand-a-half months later. This piece of land is then kept fallow until September for wheat and white jowar. The source of irrigation is not that crucial for sunflower but it is usually irrigated

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with tank water. Another small piece of land is sown with millet in August or September and onion during June to October. The millet is entirely rainfed while the onion is entirely irrigated with bavi water. After harvesting cotton, onion is transplanted to a part of this land in December and irrigated with only bavi water. All these different types of crops have varied irrigation needs depending upon the type of soil, its levelling, rain and other microclimatic factors already mentioned. Generally, white jowar and wheat need irrigation at least once a week and during the entire crop period they are irrigated with bavi water at least four to five times to avoid pest attacks. Cotton needs water once a week during March, April and May and later once in 15 days when the rain starts; it is irrigated with bavi water and intermittently with tank water depending upon pest problems. Onion needs irrigation 15 times and is irrigated only with bavi water, but some farmers irrigate it with tank water two months after transplanting in case of shortage of bavi water. Sunflower needs water once a week for the first two months and tank water is used as long as it is available. This discussion shows that farmers rotate different pieces of their land with varied fertility, irrigation and labour needs for both types of crops, grown either entirely for subsistence or for the market.

Rejection of Water Rotation Rules What is presented here is a simple and comprehensible version of how farmers rotate different crops according to varied irrigation needs. For the sake of simplicity, how farmers rotate different types and amount of land for different crops is not taken into consideration although it strongly influences irrigation demand. Nevertheless, one gets an idea that adjusting the amount and timing of water demand with the availability is not as straightforward as the advocated rotation model may suggest. This discussion clearly shows that the careful investment of labour and select rotation of different types of crops on different types of land are the key elements in organising diverse types of agricultural land within and outside the atchakat. Diverse forms of labour investment leave farmers with a much lower degree of leverage to follow a stringently time-bound irrigation schedule. The irrigation schedule does not capture the nuances of their cropping pattern. In my interpretation, the making of separate field channels for each piece of land is actually a rejection of the rotation model adopted in the project, which, as per the design, implies an inflexible rotation schedule. The farmers’ dependence on tank water is not complete. In fact, their organisation of the productive environment is not entirely dependent on any one environmental factor, least of all tank water. Let us examine the proposed rotation schedule in more detail. Both the RBC and the LBC have 10 outlets and each outlet irrigates 10–15 ha of land owned by four to five farmers. The water distribution schedule, as per the design on paper, was planned to a minute detail: What time each piece of land would receive water during a particular irrigation day during the rabi or kharif season. As per the design, outlets were supposed to be operated continuously from morning till evening. Each outlet would have received water for two hours a day during which time water should be rotated among the lands irrigated by that

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outlet. At the time of fieldwork, most farmers had levelled only a part of their irrigable land, and did not irrigate all their levelled land during one season. The amount of land each farmer actually irrigates changes every season depending upon the land s/he has levelled and other factors such as her/his financial and labour investment capacities. The farmers are thus contesting the choice of the water distribution and rotation method. The farmers, at least those in the head-reach, rejected the rotation model, called the warabandi model, as engineers had explained to them. They referred to the warabandi system as a ‘close’ system10, meaning that the outlets are provided with lockable gates, rotation is observed among all the outlets and among land irrigated from one outlet. Farmers in the head-reach opposed outlet gates when the outlets were being fixed on the RBC and asked for, what they called, an ‘open’ system, meaning a system with piped outlets without gates. This would have allowed them to irrigate their land at any time they wished. Tail-end farmers, on the other hand, especially those who grew cotton in summer, preferred gated outlets expecting that it would result in less wasteful water-use in the head-reach. The MID imposed a condition that unless all farmers agree to follow the warabandi rotation schedule—rotation among all the outlets and also among the land irrigated from one outlet—and form a WUA, they would not provide gated outlets. What difference would gated and un-gated outlets make? Some head-reach farmers argue that if there are a limited number of outlets it does not matter if there are gates or not, as a rotation schedule has to be followed in principle among the land irrigated by one outlet; hence the rotation schedule should be the focus of dispute rather than the gates. But the summer cropgrowing tail-end farmers hope that gated outlets that can be locked and unlocked will reduce wastage of water. Tail-end farmers are more worried about wastage than higher withdrawal of water in the head and middle reaches; they complain that upstream farmers would not bother to close the outlet after they finished their irrigation. Head-reach farmers, on the other hand, fear that the lockable outlets will severely curtail their freedom to irrigate their lands as per their timings and as per their choice of crops. In my opinion, the amount of water withdrawn from the canals is hardly an issue here. Unlike paddy, semi-dry crops do not respond to a higher quantity of water; in fact, excess irrigation can even damage them. Freedom to irrigate as per their timing and as per their crop choice is, therefore, the key issue. The conflict thus seemed to be between a system that could provide enough flexibility in terms of irrigation timings and a system that could provide security of water availability in the tail-end. However, the cropping pattern in the tail-end is not radically different from the one followed in the head-reach. The availability of bavi water, the size of landholding and the general economic condition of the farmer, and not the availability of tank water alone, decides whether s/he would grow a summer crop or not. A small farmer with 1 ha of land in the mid-reach without bavi water never grows onions, sunflower or cotton in the summer, even if his neighbours do so and even if the tank has enough water. The planting intensity of wheat and white jowar and yield in the tail-end are also not affected by tank water availability or timing.

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Also, when the tank has excess water (explained below), lack of water is hardly an issue. The lack of water in the tank has a significant impact only on summer cropping. Only those who have a bavi grow cotton, but they also cultivate cotton only if the tank has at least 3–4 feet of water at the beginning of March. In this way, both the availability of bavi and tank water decides the possibility of summer cropping. Especially when the tank has excess water after the white jowar and wheat are harvested, the availability of tank water does not have a decisive impact on summer cropping either in the head-reach or in the tail-end.

Excess Water Signs that the tank had excess water were evident in the month of February when white jowar and wheat were a few days away from being harvested. Just before the harvest, when irrigation had stopped, water at full canal capacity was being discharged into the halla, and remained unused. Farmers, whose lands were located outside the atchakat, complained that while their lands suffered serious water scarcity, almost 3 feet of water from the tank was discharged unutilised. The reason was fishery. In the month of June every year, the contractor throws seeds in the tank. The fish have to be harvested before the month of April when the first rain starts in this region. It is not easy to harvest unless the water level is reduced to 3 feet. Hence, canals full of water were flowing into the halla. Two reasons can account for the non-utilisation of tank water. First, as already explained, farmers use other sources of water to support a diverse cropping pattern and use tank water only to irrigate wheat and white jowar. Farmers, particularly on the RBC side, prefer bavi to tank water for certain crops such as cotton and onion. A few rounds of irrigation with bavi water are considered necessary even for white jowar and wheat to prevent pest problems. Farmers without bavi do not cultivate a summer crop at all (even if the tank has water). Second, some parts of the head-reach on the LBC side are not able to use tank water because the LBC runs below ground level. A further explanation for this is given below. The local geology plays a key role here.11 On the western side of the halla, the RBC side, there is a geological formation of layered, pervious stone extending for 3 km that can yield good water in a bavi. On the eastern side of the halla, the LBC side, the same type of geological formation is available only for 1 km. The RBC side has 54 bavis whereas the LBC side has only 25, although both canals are designed to irrigate the same amount of land. Moreover, the RBC side has better quality black-cotton soil, whereas the soil on the LBC side is alkaline and sandy, mixed with small stones. Finally, the bavi water on the LBC side is more alkaline than on the RBC side. The RBC side is, therefore, better endowed than the LBC side hydro-ecologically. This has generated a difference in the cropping pattern between the LBC side and the RBC side. Very few farmers grow cotton on the LBC side. Those who grow cotton need more tank water in order to leach out the salt accumulated in the soil as a result of irrigation with alkaline bavi water. Hence, ideally, the tank should have been designed in such a way that the atchakat on the LBC side benefits more than the RBC side, if equity and also optimum use of water had been the considerations. But on the contrary, the sluice connected with the RBC is deeper

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here than on the LBC side. It provides water for a longer duration than the one on the LBC side, although both canals as per the design irrigate the same area. There are ways in which the discrepant distribution of resources between the LBC and the RBC has been reinforced. For the first 2 km the LBC runs almost 7 feet below ground. It comes to ground level with 3 feet depth for 0.5 km and then again runs below ground before emerging at the ground level half-way through. Both the abovementioned, locally-specific parameters have influenced the tank water utilisation pattern and resulted in excess water in the tank.

C ONCLUSION The previous discussion throws several issues pertaining to civil society formation. • First of all, farmers’ expectations from the state institutions seem ambivalent. Notwithstanding the MID officers’ high-headedness farmers continue to have latent expectations from impersonal state institutions to create rules and to create structures that can potentially prevent arbitrariness and ensure justice. Simultaneously, on the other hand, they are equally active in destroying and modifying irrigation infrastructure by means of which certain rules for water sharing are imposed. This contradiction points out that the role of state institutions cannot be evaluated in black and white. It is neither only a benevolent benefactor nor just a monstrous adversary. It is perhaps part of both the problem and the solution. Those who consider development as a discourse that subjugates and disciplines people often tend to romanticise localism and community. ‘Local’ is considered as the arena for resistance against the hegemonic dominance of the state. Rule making is the means by which the state imposes its dominance. Hence, what is resisted in the local arena are externally made and imposed rules. What this case study shows is that in reality the politics around resource management could be a mixedgame between the state and the local, partly conflictual and partly cooperative. None of the players—the state or the local—emerges powerful clearly, either to dominate or to resist. Inspite of the conflicts generated by the procedural rule-making of the state and its role in generating conflicts, farmers still seem to be supporting the structuring role of such rule making. • It is also a contention of this chapter that the development policy is overly focused on building institutions, organisations, associations and forming procedural formalities for rule making and rule implementing. Verbal means of communication are given sole importance in forming these associations and organisations. The structuring influence exerted by ecological and technological aspects is almost entirely neglected in the policy designs that are heavily influenced by the models of deliberative democracy based on communicative rationality. This case study shows that farmers’ attitudes towards collective management of water distribution infrastructure is heavily influenced by the

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way technology is designed and the way productive resources of land, labour and water are employed in farming activities. Technology non-verbally codes the way resource is shared, distributed and utilised. No amount of institutional arrangements based on stringent rule making and rule following, negotiated through verbal communication, could alleviate or transform the way technology structures and shapes the modalities of resource sharing. Both consensus and conflict find their articulation on the bedrock of ecological and technological materiality. • This case study also shows how everyday reality of resource sharing shapes certain practices, norms, values and traditions that are not only culturally and socially embedded but also informally followed. These practices and traditions are based as much upon shared and common realities of resource utilisation, as upon sites on which, as Chatterjee (1998) argues, the politics of democratisation is articulated. That means that not the formality of associations and organisations but informality of culturally and socially accepted practices provide the space for consensus to build and/or for conflicts and contestations to be expressed. Ultimately, social change may not be brought about through formalisation of associations but through negotiations that take place in informal and legally undefined spaces. • The previous point leads to another important issue pertaining to the formation of civil-society organisations. The farmers’ resistance to get organised into an association, which reportedly does not seem to be so unique in the case of this tank, raises important questions. What will follow when the association formation is not voluntary and free— the fundamental characteristic of civil society formation—but induced or imposed by an external agency? To what extent can externally orchestrated and planned development method really be made organically indigenous? Is incompatibility between the planned and the actual just a gap between the theory and the practice? In development planning, this gap between theory and practice is expected to be bridged by farmers’ participation in an organised form in the planning and implementation process. The farmers refusing to organise into an association generates a serious caveat in this planning process. It also refers to the points discussed above, to the role of informality in generating practices and traditions. The notion of participation expected to take place only through formal, associational channels thus needs a serious reconsideration.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

See Rhoads (1991) for a larger discussion on consensus in social system. For further discussion on community and civil society see Kaviraj (2001). See for larger discussion on civil society debate Eberly (2000) and Kaviraj and Khilnani (2001). See Rhoads (1991) for a detailed discussion on conflict in social systems. Various papers published in Hooja et al. (2002) discuss PIM and its users in water management in detail. Others have also critically discussed these aspects of users associations as new forms of social engineering (see Manor 1998; Mosse 1999). 6. This is discussed in detail in Shah (2003).

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7. As discussed in case of other tanks. See Shah (2003). 8. An outlet is an opening in the canal from where water is taken to fields. 9. This is a proverb in Hindi that literally translates as, ‘the buffalo belongs to the man with a stick’. It can be interpreted to mean, ‘the brute force of power decides the course of events’. 10. Farmers used the words ‘close’ and ‘open’ in English to describe two different types of systems, as they perceived them. 11. A local expert, known as water diviner, explained this to us.

References Chandhoke, N. (2003). Conceits of Civil Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1998). ‘Community in the East’, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(6): 277–82. Coward, E.W. (ed.) (1980). Irrigation and Agricultural Development in Asia: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press. Eberly, D. (2000). ‘The Meaning, Origins, and Applications of Civil Society’, in D. Eberly (ed.), The Essential Civil Society Reader: The Classic Essays. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Geertz, C. (1972). ‘The Wet and the Dry: Traditional Irrigation in Bali and Morocco’, Human Ecology, 1(1): 23–39. ——— (1980). ‘Organisation of the Balinese Subak’, in E.W. Coward (ed.), Irrigation and Agricultural Development in Asia: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press. Hooja, R., G. Pangare and K.V. Raju (eds) (2002). Users in Water Management. New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Indian Irrigation Commission (1901–02). Minutes of Evidence: Bombay Presidency. Bombay. Kapoor, I. (2002). ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? The Relevance of the Habermas-Mouffe Debate for Third World Politics’, Alternatives, 27: 459–87. Kaviraj, S. (2001). ‘In Search of Civil Society’, in S. Kaviraj and S. Khilnani (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities. New Delhi: Foundation Books. Kaviraj, S. and S. Khilnani (eds) (2001). Civil Society: History and Possibilities. New Delhi: Foundation Books. Leach, E.R. (1971). Pul Eliya, Village in Ceylon: A Study of Land Tenure and Kinship. Cambridge: The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Manor, J. (1998). The Political Economy of Democratic Decentralization. Washington D.C: The World Bank. Mosse, D. (1997). ‘Ecological Zones and the Culture of Collective Action: The History and Social Organization of a Tank Irrigation System in Tamil Nadu’, South Indian Studies, 3(January–June): 1–88. ——— (1999). ‘Colonial and Contemporary Ideologies of Community Management: The Case of Tank Irrigation Development in South India’, Modern Asian Studies, 33(2): 303–38. Rhoads, J. (1991). Critical Issues in Social Theory. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Shah, E. (2003). Social Designs: Tank Irrigation Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka, South India. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Vasavi, A.R. (1996). ‘The “Millet Drought”: Oral Narratives and the Cultural Grounding of Famine-relief in Bijapur’, South Indian Studies, 2(July–December): 205–233. World Bank. (1981). Karnataka Tank Irrigation Project. Washington D.C: World Bank.

9 Crafting Institutions for Collective Action in Canal Irrigation: Can We Break the Deadlocks? Vishal Narain

I NTRODUCTION This chapter argues that there is a need to revisit the paradigm of participatory irrigation management (PIM) in India. The experience with the establishment of Water Users Associations (WUAs) in several states over the last two decades suggests that WUA establishment is not necessarily the answer to the ills of the irrigation sector. Instead, attention is needed on the potential for reform through WUA establishment; this requires explicit attention to the design of canal irrigation systems. For WUA establishment to be a meaningful reform strategy, it needs to be supported by efforts at reorienting the irrigation bureaucracy and reform at the main system level. Besides, an assessment of the participatory nature of irrigation management requires an understanding of social and power relationships that shape accountability relationships and influence the extent of participation amongst civil society in WUA governance and decision making processes. The chapter argues that further research on WUAs and PIM need to locate them in the broader context of decentralisation in a number of agrarian resource sectors, as well as pay explicit attention to notions of rights and entitlements. These issues will need critical attention in the debates on PIM in India in the years to come. This chapter is divided into five sections including this brief introductory section. Section two discusses the concept, context and rationale for participatory irrigation management. It describes the major constituencies for PIM India. Section three briefly reviews the major lessons learnt in India so far, in the context of PIM. Section four makes a case for research on Water Users Associations (WUAs) in the context of parallel decentralisation for a number of activities that are often closely related, or those that overlap. Research on PIM needs to explicitly address the implications of design, social and power relationships, and rights and entitlements in irrigation. The final section (section five) suggests a new approach towards PIM; it argues that PIM should be debated and discussed in the larger agrarian context and local social and

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power relationships. This approach will help in setting up more realistic goals for the PIM and its impact on water-sector reforms.

T HE C ONCEPT

OF

P ARTICIPATORY I RRIGATION M ANAGEMENT

In most developing countries, the state has typically made huge investments in large-scale canal irrigation; it has also played a predominant role in managing and operating these systems. In recent years, however, there has been a trend towards state disengagement from the irrigation sector with a greater role envisaged for non-state actors, particularly farmers. This trend has been referred to as Irrigation Management Transfer, Irrigation Management Turnover or Participatory Irrigation Management (Turral 1995; Brewer et al. 1999; Economic Development Institute [EDI] 1998). Conceptually, these terms could be seen as indicating different levels of farmer involvement in state-managed irrigation systems (Meinzen-Dick 1996). Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) refers to programmes that shift responsibility and authority from the state to non-governmental bodies; thus, it implies a rolling back of the boundaries of the state. Participatory Irrigation Management refers to programmes that seek to increase farmers’ direct involvement in system management, either as a complement or substitute for the state role. It ‘refers to the involvement of irrigation users in all aspects of irrigation management, and at all levels’ (EDI 1998). In practise, however, these terms are often used interchangeably. Activities classified as PIM or IMT normally take the form of the establishment of farmers’ groups called Water Users Associations, water user groups, or farmers’ organisations for irrigation. These WUAs are then encouraged to take over functions pertaining to operations and maintenance of irrigation systems at different levels. The emphasis on PIM can be traced back to the realisation that the performance of irrigation systems had been less than satisfactory because the farmers were not involved in the management. With huge investments in the irrigation sector in most developing countries, it was felt that irrigation (mis)management was a problem of social engineering, rather than that of technical engineering. There was an assumption that irrigation systems were well-designed technically, and required essentially an organisational structure involving farmers to make them work. As put forward by Wiener (1976): Engineering is not the fundamental problem underlying irrigation development in the LDCs (less developed countries). Engineering principles are known and can be adapted, but the major problem, however, is to discover ways to utilise farmers more effectively in operations and maintenance and development programmes which will create rural transformation. Rural transformation essentially requires changes in farmers’ behaviour, motivations, and expectations, which is hardly possible until institutions exist to provide them with improved production possibilities and incentives.

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A similar sentiment was echoed by Lowdermilk (1986): ‘Without active participation of farmers, irrigation systems can never be efficient or cost effective’. A justification was also built on grounds of reorienting the bureaucracy. ‘Farmers need a countervailing power and a voice to assure that their needs are met by those who should be more accountable to them’ (ibid.) This emphasis on ‘crafting institutions’, that originated in the 1970s, has dominated the discourse on PIM right through the turn of the century. From farmers’ participation in the 1980s, a shift took place to emphasising self-governance in the 1990s. The literature of the 1980s came mainly from sociologists and anthropologists who emphasised farmers’ participation. In the 1990s the main contributors were political scientists and the new institutional economists who emphasised the evolution of appropriate structures for governance at all levels. In the Indian context, from participation in the early 1980s, the dominant themes became organisation in the later 1980s and finally, turnover and self-governance in the 1990s (Maloney and Raju 1994). With the wave of economic reforms sweeping through in the 1990s, the major ideas were privatisation, decentralisation, and private management.1 At the turn of the century, PIM came to be considered as the most essential irrigation related paradigm for the 21st century (Hooja and Joshi 2000). IndianPIM, the Indian Network on Participatory Irrigation Management, gave a call for the speedy universalisation of PIM in India, as if it were a ‘one size fits all’ answer. PIM has come to be seen as some sort of ‘mantra’ for curing the ills of the irrigation sector.

The Constituencies for Participatory Irrigation Management The factors that have led to trends towards PIM are now well understood. They have been led by growing pressures on state finances, pressures from multilateral and bilateral donors, local action on part of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and a belief in the potential of community-based forms of natural resource management. In the Indian context, the exact mix of circumstances and compulsions that have prompted PIM initiatives have varied from state to state. However, broadly, these reforms have been driven by pressure from funders and donors, an urge to reduce the financial burden on state governments and through some interest and lobbying on the part of NGOs. There have been three major constituencies in favour of PIM: academics, NGOs and multilateral organisations. These, through pressure or persuasion, have created a fourth constituency, namely governments. These four actors have been the drivers of recent trends in India and elsewhere, even as the relative significance of each has varied.

The Academic Constituency Among academic circles, there have been two schools of thought that have been instrumental in advocating for the building of farmers’ organisations. The first was the Development Sociology group at Cornell University, whose scholars, such as Norman Uphoff (1986) emphasised farmer participation as a way out of the poor irrigation management performance trap. The second

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school emphasising crafting institutions has comprised rational choice theorists Ostrom (1990, 1992) and Tang (1991, 1992) at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University. The fact that communities are capable of crafting their own rules for resource appropriation has been used as evidence to demonstrate the potential of community-based natural resource management. Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues have used terms and concepts developed in the rational choice body of work to explain the emergence and survival of local institutions for collective action in irrigation. Concepts such as rent-seeking, free-riding, opportunistic behaviour, rules-in-use and transaction costs are used to explain the persistence and superiority of farmer-managed collective institutions over bureaucratically managed ones.2 This view about the survival of collective institutions has influenced thinking in favour of ‘crafting’ collective institutions. This approach, however, is somewhat simplistic since it assumes that having a set of rules-in-use in essence implies that there is conformity, and this alone is enough to allow a collective institution to flourish. Further, most of the analysis has been based on indigenous farmer-managed irrigation systems; the replicability of this analysis to government-managed irrigation systems, however, has been questioned (Hunt 1989). In the Indian context, this has found expression in states such as Maharashtra, where the existence of the phad system3 has been advocated as an argument in favour of scaling this trend up in large-scale canal irrigation systems.

The Policy Constituency Among policy circles, there has been an emphasis on a ‘territorial perspective’, emphasising control over and management of natural resources by those whose lives depend on them, and who, by virtue of their proximity to these resources, are considered to be in the best position to do so (Korten 1984). Meinzen-Dick (1996) describes this process as a convergence of a number of policy trends, namely, decentralisation, privatisation, participation and democratisation. Decentralisation attempts to improve the management of natural and fiscal resources by moving both decision making authority and payment responsibility to lower levels of government. Privatisation refers to the transfer of ownership of resources from the public sector to groups or individuals. Participation and democratisation seek the involvement of citizens affected by programmes, for social goals of empowering local people and goals of improving programme performance. The emphasis on community has also stemmed from a disillusionment with two alternative approaches to resource allocation and management, the state and the market (Agrawal and Gibson 1999). With the spread of democratic political structures and the emphasis on participation, unrepresentative development and conservation projects have come to be seen as unattractive and impractical. The failure of bureaucratic, centralised approaches to natural resource management has compelled governments to experiment with decentralised, ‘participatory’ approaches.

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More specifically, in the case of canal irrigation, it has been argued that when government agencies assume irrigation management functions that farmers could otherwise handle themselves, it results in higher financial and social costs (Groenfeldt 2000). It is argued that irrigation users have stronger incentives to manage water productively than a government bureaucracy does. When management is decentralised to users, they can respond more quickly to problems or changes in the system. Irrigation Management Transfer has, thus, come to be seen as a way of relieving governments of financial burdens and improving productivity and sustainability of irrigation systems (Kolavalli and Brewer 1999; Kloezen 2002). In India, this has had a clear, visible effect in terms of a strong lobby for IMT among policy circles. IndianPIM, the Indian Network on Participatory Irrigation Management, has sought steadily to advance the practice of PIM across irrigation systems in the country. The assumption that introducing PIM could cure all ills in the irrigation sector seems to have been implicit here. It has now become fashionable for members of the State Irrigation Department to wax eloquent about the merits of Participatory Irrigation Management at annual PIM conferences. This gives the impression of a ‘feel-good-factor’ about PIM.

The NGO Constituency Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at different levels have helped to amplify the role and auspices of local, indigenous and community groups (Shepherd 1998). In India, this role has been played by NGOs such as Viksat and Development Support Centre in Gujarat, Samaj Parivartan Kendra and Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM) in Maharashtra and, more lately, Sahayog in Karnataka. The critique of NGO involvement in this sector in India is that it has been highly localised and unable to produce reform beyond a very local scale (Shashidharan 2000). NGOs have lobbied for PIM, without mobilising sufficient support for the same among the farmers (Mollinga 1998). In some cases, they have been able to influence policy formulation and change, as in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka. However, they have been constrained in their ability to produce reform on a scale larger than a very local one. In Maharashtra, this was often because of the absence of support from the government (Narain 2003). In Karnataka, Sahayog has played a positive role in garnering support among the farmers in building a constituency for change. In Gujarat, there has been a questioning of the role of NGOs in the PIM process. Should NGOs essentially carry out pilot projects, or should they seek to inform policy change?

The Multilateral Constituency While academics and NGOs have glorified community-based management, donors and multilateral agencies have responded by diverting huge sums of money to support communitybased conversion (Agrawal and Gibson 1999). In India, organisations such as the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and the Ford Foundation have played an important role. The World Bank

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has mandated for the creation of WUAs in its Water Resources Consolidation Projects (WRCP). The JBIC has urged for WUA formation in Orissa. Multilateral and bilateral organisations have also played a role in propagating models of IMT. In the 1980s, this was the ‘Philippines model’, popularised by the Ford Foundation that found an echo in efforts in Gujarat and Maharashtra (Mollinga 2001). More recently, this has been the ‘Mexico Model’, popularised by the World Bank.4 This model has found reflection in the so-called ‘big-bang approach’ adopted in Andhra Pradesh. Unfortunately, however, as noted earlier, there has been an assumption of a one-size-fitsall blueprint approach: an implicit assumption that PIM is a solution regardless of local social and technological conditions. There is a tacit assumption that models can be lifted from one setting and planted in another, regardless of the difference in context. State governments have responded by showing efforts at PIM with little clarity on what policy goals they need to accomplish.

P IM IN I NDIA –W HAT ARE THE L ESSONS FOR G OVERNANCE IN THE W ATER S ECTOR ? In India, a number of states are at different levels of policy formulation and development for formation of WUAs. Andhra Pradesh legislated on farmer participation in 1997, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in 2000. Orissa drafted its own Act in 2002, after a review of acts in several other states. Several states have amended existing legislation, while others simply provide for registration of WUAs under existing Acts. These Acts, while they seem neatly crafted, are very ambitious. There is an implicit assumption that social engineering can be carried out through legal engineering, by designing laws that put in place such organisational structures. More than anything else, the passing of these Acts and the drafting of these legislative provisions seems to serve as testimony that state governments are keen on PIM, and, more often than not, this enables them to garner moral and financial support from bilateral and multilateral funders and donors. What seems lacking largely, and has been somewhat missed, is a stronger reflection of what the formation of WUAs should achieve. The modus operandi of irrigation reform itself has come to be seen as the formation of WUAs, with little clarity on how these would bring about irrigation reform. As in the state of Haryana, there has been very little reform through WUA establishment and little change in water management and distribution practices (Narain 2003). While in some other countries, such as Mexico, the establishment of WUAs was part of a broader agenda of neo-liberal reforms in the wake of the past dissatisfaction with the overengagement of the state in several sectors, the integration of the irrigation-reform process with overall efforts at structural transformation has not happened in India. The WUA establishment has been an ad hoc, haphazard activity, isolated from mainstream efforts at agrarian change, social transformation and development.

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In this section, I will argue that the present disenchantment with PIM is the result of four governance deadlocks or ‘impasses’ that need to be broken. These are: • • • •

the impasse of changing control relations; the impasse of resistance; the impasse of scale; and the impasse of participation and power.

The Impasse of Changing Control Relations There seems to have been an impasse or a governance deadlock in so far as the impacts of PIM on changing control relations between the users and the bureaucracy is concerned. In Karnataka, the approach led to very limited functions being devolved to users (Mollinga 2001). In Haryana, the process of WUA formation resulted in no significant change in control relations between the users and the bureaucracy (Narain 2003). In Maharashtra, where the IMT model did result in a change in control relations, it was for the very same reasons opposed by segments of the bureaucracy (ibid.). While the idea behind PIM should be to build new partnerships and empower, this has not happened. Real power has continued to vest outside the WUAs, technically in the main system and institutionally with the Irrigation Department, while WUAs simply perform functions handed over to them by segments of the state bureaucracy. They have continued to be dependent on and accountable to the bureaucracy and perform the functions assigned to them, with no change in control relationships. This would run counter to the professed goals of decentralisation and devolution of power. Andhra Pradesh’s big-bang approach seems to have lost ground given that after the first term of the WUAs, their function was taken over by the State Departments. The representation of WUA no longer has their functioning power. Doraiswamy et al. (2003) note several weaknesses of the reform programme in Andhra Pradesh. They observe that elections to the WUAs have not been conducted with drought identified as the only reason. They also point to a general jeopardisation of the functioning of WUAs. This gives rise to an important question about the spirit of reform. Here, policy makers need to address themselves to the wider issue of whether WUAs are being created simply as arms of the bureaucracy, or are they a mechanism for securing a fundamental change in control relations (Narain 2000, 2003). Are we building WUAs primarily as a means of accomplishing irrigation agency objectives, or are we also seeking to devolve technological and organisational control to user groups?

The Impasse of Resistance Related to the above point is the next factor: the impasse of resistance. This impasse results because even as the four constituencies identified in section two of this chapter have maintained an interest in PIM, the two other segments—and the ones most closely affected by it—namely,

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farmers, and the irrigation bureaucracy have shown little interest or support to the notion in most states. In some cases, in fact, there has been resistance. An important critique of the process of PIM in India has been that the process of WUA formation has been a slow and haphazard one, driven largely by the availability of external financial resources for state restructuring programmes (Ballabh 2002). Powerful groups and sections of the irrigation bureaucracy have tended to maintain the status quo, as evidenced in the case of Maharashtra (Narain 2003). In some states, such as Haryana, WUAs have remained little more than arms of the bureaucracy (ibid.). They suffer from a number of problems, such as reliance on government funds, a confusing policy environment and a half-hearted commitment of the state government. Neither the farmers nor the irrigation bureaucracy seems to be particularly keen on the idea, for the basic reason that WUA formation under the present warabandi5 system means little to changing water management and distribution practices. Farmers have been the recipients of policy reform and have not been involved in their formulation (Mollinga 1998; Doraiswamy et al. 2003). This is particularly true in states like Gujarat. This state has been known for its rich variety of institutional forms: the fact that they did not come up in the canal irrigation sector throws up a big question mark on whether farmers wanted them in the first place (Narain 2003).

The Impasse of Scale The scale of PIM has been very limited geographically (ibid. 2000). In states where there have been efforts at WUA establishment, it covers a very small segment of the irrigated command area. In Maharashtra and Gujarat, the first states in India to have a critical mass of effort in organising management turnover, while NGOs have made a significant contribution to organising management turnover and effecting policy change, they have been unable to act beyond a certain, limited scale (Shashidharan 2000; Narain 2003). At the other end of the spectrum, Andhra Pradesh’s big-bang approach to reform is said to have made very little difference to water distribution and management practices (Jairath 1999). In the last decade, substantial attention was devoted to the question of whether the approach should be bottom-up or top-down. Evidence now seems to suggest that the important debate about WUA formation is not so much about bottom-up versus top-down, big-bang or pilot, as it is about what we want farmers to do through the process of WUA formation. There is clearly a need to come out of the bottom-up versus top-down debate. That debate is, in the longer run, immaterial. Instead, policy makers contemplating the WUA establishment need to address themselves to this fundamental question: what is it that can be changed through WUA formation? What do we want to change by forming WUAs? This requires explicit attention being paid to the design of canal irrigation systems. For instance, the warabandi system of irrigation has a different potential for reform than does the shejpali6 system (Narain 2003). The second issue in the impasse of scale concerns the geographical level at which WUA formation is carried out. For a WUA formation that is carried out at the lower levels of the system to be effective, it needs to be matched by more effective management of the main system. This requires a reorientation of the irrigation bureaucracy at higher levels of system operation,

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rather than passing the buck for mismanagement on farmers below the outlet. The point that Wade and Chambers (1980) raised about managing the blind spot in canal irrigation is as relevant today as it was a few decades ago. In Haryana’s warabandi system, for instance, forming WUAs below the outlet, as has been the case, is meaningless, given that control and management problems are located above the outlet. Reform in the warabandi system requires a system where over-appropriation of water at higher system levels can be checked. This requires also greater attention to whether routine maintenance functions such as de-silting and deweeding along the canal can be checked and carried out. Forming WUAs there below the outlet in that case simply amounts to evading responsibility for main-system management.

The Impasse of Participation and Power The final impasse that we have been unable to break relates to a subject that has hitherto received scant attention. It has been assumed that WUA formation itself is ‘participatory’ in nature. This approach assumes a simplistic notion of community, as a homogeneous whole, with the collective representation of users’ interests. This is far from the truth. WUA formation often leads to a strengthening of existing patterns of power relationships as WUA governance and decision making processes often tend to be dominated by the village elite. This leads to an alienation of WUA members from governance and decision making processes. Instead of widening the net of participation in decision making, WUA formation could continue to limit that scope. This governance deadlock can be broken only if measures at developing WUAs are matched by measures for accountability in these institutions of local governance. Otherwise, PIM will remain a misnomer for irrigation-management reform. Unravelling the patterns of community-based natural resource management requires an unpacking of the concept of community; to recognise community not as a homogeneous whole, but as comprising a number of actors tied, and at the same time, segregated, by power relationships (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Kumar 2002). An appreciation of the effect of the formation of community-based organisations on social and power relationships is essential in order to understand the extent of participation among different groups, as well as to understand the creation and working of accountability relationships in local governance structures. Power relationships in local governance shape the exercise of accountability relationships. This trend will need all the more attention given the recent trend towards decentralisation in several agrarian resource sectors.

U NDERSTANDING P ARTICIPATORY I RRIGATION M ANAGEMENT IN AN A GRARIAN C ONTEXT OF I NSTITUTIONAL P LURALITY For a more accurate understanding of the social effects of PIM, research needs to focus on studying WUAs in the wider context of agrarian relationships. The current efforts at forming WUAs need to be seen in the light of wider policy trends in a large number of agrarian resource

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sectors that have a bearing on agrarian structure. Particularly, there is a need to focus on WUAs as seen in the broader context of local governance, in which the interface of these associations with other structures of local governance needs to be at the centrestage. As noted above, a number of states are at different levels of policy formulation and implementation for establishing WUAs in large-scale irrigation. At the same time, following the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution of India, efforts are being made to strengthen the village panchayats-units of local self-government at the village level. The Act entrusts management of the sources of drinking water to the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs). In a parallel move, India has launched the Swajaldhara scheme, which seeks to expand the coverage of villages with safe-drinking water and sanitation and entrusts the management of water to village water and sanitation committees. Thus, there are, in principle, three different organisations with stakes in water management at the village level.

Implications for Agrarian Structure The plethora of organisations at the village level has an important bearing on the agrarian structure, in particular, for social and power relationships and for the exercise of accountability. It is possible that the same people, comprising the village elite, occupy key positions in the governance bodies of all the organisations, the WUAs, the water and sanitation committees, forest protection committees (FPCs) and the village panchayats. In that case, decentralisation would simply strengthen existing power structures, possibly to the effect of excluding a number of other users. Under these circumstances, an important objective of decentralisation—namely, that of widening the net of participation in decision making—stands not accomplished. This means that efforts at decentralisation produce results that are counterproductive. Too much decentralisation in many agrarian sectors at the same time defeats its own purpose.

Accountability in Local Governance The effect of decentralisation on social and power relationships is important from a perspective of examining the exercise of accountability in local governance. Narain (2003) found that the location of WUA leaders in village networks that allocate resources and inputs enables them to evade accountability to WUA members. With parallel efforts at decentralisation in many agrarian resource sectors, there is a possibility that decentralisation creates new centres of control with the exclusion of a large segment of users from decision making processes. There is, on the other hand, a possibility that there are changes in wider constitutional accountability that will force new arrangements and allow more cross-checking and obligatory rights which, for instance, will force people to pay their fees.7

Unit of Decentralisation The 73rd Amendment to the Constitution of India (1992) that entrusts a greater role for village panchayats in local-water management throws up a series of interesting issues vis-à-vis the interface of the PRIs with WUAs in canal irrigation. The first issue relates to the appropriate

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unit of decentralisation. An important issue engaging the attention of scholars and academics is whether decentralisation should be carried out at the level of a political boundary such as a panchayat, or at the level of a hydraulic boundary such as a minor watercourse or a watershed. Administrative and hydraulic boundaries do not coincide (Narain 2000). The other issue relates to the social scope of participation that decentralisation at each of these levels entails. It has been found in Haryana, for instance, that the possibility of the WUAs’ functions being transferred to the panchayat was fraught by important considerations of power and perceptions of dominance and stratification (ibid. 2003). The jaats, the agriculturists, that were strongest numerically, socially and politically, revealed a strong resistance to the WUA functions being handed over to the panchayats. This was because, agriculture, and hence, irrigation was seen as the domain of the agriculturists; however, the panchayat is an elected body with representation from different segments of the population. Reserving irrigationmanagement functions with the WUA was seen as a means of limiting power sharing with other segments of the population.

Interface with Other Forms of Social Organisation The interface of WUAs with other forms of social organisation extends beyond the interface with formal organisational structures. WUAs also come into interface with pre-existing forms of social organisation such as the bhaichaara-based organisation in Haryana (ibid.). The presence of other forms of social organisation for water management influences, to a large extent, the difference that WUA formation makes to water management and distribution practices. When there already are in place systems of social organisation for the performance of water management and distribution functions, the formation of WUAs only builds a redundant organisational structure. Thus, the interface of WUAs with other forms of organisations is important from a stand-point of understanding the difference that WUA formation could make to water management and distribution practices.

Natural Resource Conflicts The other implication of institutional plurality is in terms of conflict resolution. The creation of different organisations for water management also creates a potential for conflict over the same source of water, or over diversion of water for different purposes from the same source. A research question for further inquiry is whether the creation of a large number of organisations for water management at the local level gives rise also to a widening of choice with regard to the forums available for conflict resolution, or does the creation of these organisations breed greater contestation and ambiguity among them?

Legal Pluralism The final implication of organisational plurality is the implication of being a member of several resource management organisations at the same time. Individuals who are members

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of WUAs are simultaneously members of other resource management bodies. Thus, they are confronted with a number of normative systems, rules and regulations. This breeds a situation of legal pluralism where individual resource users find themselves simultaneously facing different systems of rules, regulations and bye-laws. Under these circumstances, how do individuals choose among different systems of rules and codes of conduct that influence their behaviour? These five issues mentioned above deserve critical attention in the research on WUAs in India in the years to come and in the broader context of current trends in decentralisation in a number of agrarian resource sectors.

IN

C ONCUSION : B REAKING THE I MPASSE P ARTICIPATORY I RRIGATION M ANAGEMENT

Having reviewed the learnings from PIM in India, how can we break the governance impasses, that we identified in section three of this chapter? There is clearly a need for research on WUAs in the wider context of agrarian structure, particularly locating that research in debates on local governance. This requires a clear break-through and a breaking away from the conventional approach to studying WUAs; WUAs are seen in isolation from the social, technological and political context of which they are a part. The literature on WUAs takes a very piece-meal approach, emphasising isolated factors, rather than the context of local governance.8 There is a tendency to single out factors that influence the success of WUAs, such as rule making and number of members. This approach needs to be replaced by an approach that emphasises the following issues. The first is the implications of design for WUA establishment. Design characteristics define the extent to which water management and distribution practices can change through WUA formation.9 Implications of the design of canal irrigation systems should provide an entry point for further debates on PIM in India. The second issue is for state governments to clearly examine what they wish to secure through WUA formation, apart from harnessing on the feel good factor with donors and funders. This requires defining policy goals of WUA establishments more clearly. The third issue is to embed WUAs over existing forms of social organisation and examine their interface with other local governance structures. Finally, attention needs to be focused on the effects of PIM on a redefinition of water rights and entitlements. Do efforts at participatory irrigation management impact on governance by leading to a redefinition of water rights and entitlements, or do they simply maintain the status quo? Essentially, we need to break away from conventional debates on PIM relating to such dichotomies as top-down vs. bottom-up, big-bang vs. pilot, NGOs vs. Command Area Development Authority (CADA) and small WUAs vs. large WUAs. WUAs need to be seen against the backdrop

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of a larger picture of canal irrigation management reform and a larger picture still of agrarian structure and relationships. This then should lay down the boundaries of further thinking on PIM in India.

Notes 1. In India, two workshops were organised by the Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad; the first was in July 1987, titled ‘People’s Participation in Irrigation Management’. Conceptual advances were made in the second workshop in January 1992, titled ‘Farmers Management in Indian Irrigation Systems’. The word ‘Participation’ was dropped and the word ‘Management’ was substituted (Maloney and Raju 1994: 295). 2. See also Narain (2004). 3. The phad system is a system of farmer-managed irrigation that has historically existed in parts of western Maharashtra. It is a system in which farmers collectively tap water by building local embankments and share water mutually amongst themselves. 4. For more on the Mexican model and its implementation in Mexico itself, see Kloezen (2002). 5. Warabandi irrigation system is prevalent in Northwest Indian and Pakistan canal irrigations. It is an arrangement that each cultivator in canal command in assigned a turn, represented by the specific period of time. The time share becomes a property right legitimised by the state through the creation of a formal and legal roster for the every delivery channel. 6. Shejpali irrigation system is partially a demand based system in which the irrigation department allocates water in consideration of a farmer’s request according to the land and crop. Unlike the warabandi system, a farmer has the option to take water or not, and he has to file an application indicating the area, crop and number of watering turns required beforehand. 7. I thank Professor Linden Vincent for raising this point in one of my interactions with her. 8. A review is provided in Narain (2004). 9. See Narain (2003). See also Kloezen and Mollinga (1992) and Mollinga (1998).

References Agrawal, A and C.C. Gibson (1999). ‘Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation’, World Development, 27(4): 629–49. Ballabh, V. (2002). ‘Emerging Water Crisis and Political Economy of Irrigation Reforms in India’, paper prepared for workshop on Asian Irrigation in Transition: Responding to Challenges Ahead, 22–23 April, Bangkok, Thailand: Asian Institute of Technology. Brewer, J., S. Kolavalli, A.H. Kalro, G. Naik, S. Ramnarayan, K.V. Raju and R. Sakthivadivel (1999). Irrigation Management Transfer in India: Policies, Processes and Performance. New Delhi & Calcutta: Oxford & IBH Publishing Company. Doraiswamy, R., P.P. Mollinga and A. Rajagopal (2003). ‘Farmers Organisation and Water Policy in South India’, proceedings of the Workshop at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, 1–2 February. Economic Development Institute (1998). Handbook on Participatory Irrigation Management compiled by David Groenfeldt. Washington D.C: Economic Development Institute of the World Bank, April.

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Groenfeldt, D. (2000). ‘Introduction: A Global Consensus on Participatory Irrigation Management’, in D. Groenfeldt and M. Svendsen (eds), Case Studies in Participatory Irrigation Management. Washington D.C: The World Bank. Hooja, R and L.K. Joshi (2000). ‘Introduction’, in L.K. Joshi and R. Hooja (eds), Participatory Irrigation Management Paradigm for the 21st century. Jaipur & New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Hunt, R.C. (1989). ‘Appropriate Social Organization? Water User Associations in Bureaucratic Canal Irrigation Systems’, Human Organization, 48(1): 79–90. Jairath, J. (1999). ‘Participatory Irrigation Management: Experiments in Andhra Pradesh’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34(40): 2834–37. Kloezen, W. (2002). ‘Accounting for Water. Institutional Viability and Impacts of Market-Oriented Irrigation Interventions in Central Mexico’, Ph.D. thesis, Wageningen: Wageningen University. Kloezen, W. and P.P. Mollinga (1992). ‘Opening Closed Gates: Recognising the Social Nature of Irrigation Artefacts’, in G. Diemer and J. Slabbers (eds), Irrigators and Engineers. Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers. Kolavalli, S and J.D. Brewer (1999). ‘Facilitating User Participation in Irrigation Management’, Irrigation and Drainage Systems, 13(3): 249–73. Korten, D.C. (1984). ‘Strategic Organisation for People-centred Development’, Public Administration, 44(4): 341–52. Korten, F. F. and R.Y. Siy Jr. (eds) (1989). Transforming a Bureaucracy. The Experience of the Philippine National Irrigation Administration. Connecticut: Kumarian Press. Kumar S. (2002). ‘Does Participation in Common Pool Resource Management Help the Poor? A Social Cost-Benefit Analysis of Joint Forest Management in Jharkhand, India’, World Development, 30(5): 763–82. Lowdermilk, M. (1986). ‘Improved Irrigation Management: Why Involve Farmers?’, in K.C. Nobe and R.K. Sampath (eds), Irrigation Management in Developing Countries. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Maloney, C and K.V. Raju. (1994). ‘Principles of Farmers’ Organisation for Water Management: From Participation to Management’, in C. Maloney and K.V. Raju (eds), Managing Irrigation Together, Practice and Policy in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Meinzen-Dick, R. (1996). ‘Policy Trends in Farmer Participation’, workshop on Institutional Transformation in Indian Irrigation. An NCAER-IFPRI Collaborative Project. 6 November. New Delhi: National Council of Applied Economic Research. Meinzen-Dick, R and M. Mendoza. (1996). ‘Alternative Water Allocation Mechanisms: Indian and international Experiences’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31(13): A 25–30. Mollinga, P.P. (1998). ‘On the Waterfront. Water Distribution, Technology and Agrarian Change in a South Indian Canal Irrigation System’, Ph.D thesis, Wageningen: Wageningen Agricultural University. ——— (2001). ‘Power in Motion: A Critical Assessment of Canal Irrigation Reform, With a Focus on India’, working paper/monograph Series No. 1, New Delhi: Indian Network on Participatory Irrigation Management. Narain, V. (2000). ‘India’s Water Crisis: The Challenges of Governance’, Water Policy, 2(6): 433–44. ——— (2003). Institutions, Technology and Water Control: Water Users Associations and Irrigation Management Reform In Two Large-Scale Systems In India. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. ——— (2004). ‘Brackets and Black Boxes. Research on Water Users Associations’, Water Policy, 6(3): 185–96. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1992). Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies.

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Shashidharan, E.M. (2000). ‘Civil Society Organizations and Irrigation Management in Gujarat, India’, in P.P. Mollinga (ed.), Water for Food and Rural Development. Approaches and Initiatives in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Shepherd, A. (1998). Sustainable Rural Development. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM) (1997). Draft Report Action Research Programme Taken for Scaling up Participatory Irrigation Management and Conjunctive Use of Water in Maharashtra. Pune: SOPPECOM Tang, S.Y. (1991). ‘Institutional Arrangements and the Management of Common-Pool Resources’, Public Administration Review, 51(1): 42–51. ——— (1992). Institutions and Collective Action: Self-Governance in Irrigation. San Francisco, C.A: Institute of Contemporary Studies. Turral, H. (1995). ‘Devolution of Management in Public Irrigation Systems: Cost Shedding, Empowerment and Performance. A Review’. Working Paper No. 80, London: Overseas Development Institute. Uphoff, N. (1986). ‘Improving International Irrigation Management with Farmer Participation. Getting the Process Right’, Studies in Water Policy and Management, No. 11. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Wade, R. and R. Chambers (1980). ‘Managing the Main System: Canal Irrigation’s Blind Spot’, Economic and Political Weekly, 15(39): A-107–12. Wiener, A. (1976). ‘The World Food Situation and Irrigation Programmes’, ICID Bulletin No. 34, pp. 21–25.

10 Inter-state Water Disputes and the Governance Challenge Hemant Kumar Padhiari and Vishwa Ballabh

I NTRODUCTION In India, inter-state water disputes are fast emerging as a serious national problem. Although, India is not among the world’s most severely water stressed countries, there are significant areas of scarcity with one third of its 570,000 villages declared as being water deficient. This is due to the uneven distribution of water resources both spatially and temporally. The Himalayan rivers are snow fed and perennial while the peninsular rivers are seasonal and dependent on the monsoons. The north and east are water rich while the west and south are water deficient. There are arid, drought-prone regions in the west and south (Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu) and in the east there are areas which periodically experience devastating floods (Bihar, West Bengal, Assam). The distribution of rainfall is also highly uneven with 100 mm in western Rajasthan to over 11,000 mm at Cherrapunji in Meghalaya. Further, variability of rainfall from season to season is also very high. The combined effect of such factors is uneven water availability from basin to basin. Added to this is the problem of inadequate and inequitable allocation of water, increase in population, industrialisation, urbanisation and growing pollution of the water sources. This has resulted in increased pressure on this valuable resource, where the demand for water is higher than the supply, causing inter-sectoral and inter-regional conflicts. The problem of inter-state river water disputes is more acute in India because over 85 per cent of Indian territory lies within major and medium inter-state river systems. India has 14 major rivers, which are all inter-state rivers and 44 medium rivers, of which nine are inter-state rivers having catchments or watersheds in two or more states.1 And the issue of water rights has become complicated and fractious because of the simple fact that surface water and groundwater flow without regard to political boundaries. This has made the politicisation of inter-state river water inevitable. Often, water disputes arise amongst the basin states with regard to the use, distribution or control of the waters in respect of many inter-state rivers or river valleys; or in the interpretation of the terms of any agreement relating to the use, distribution or control of such waters or in the implementation of any such agreement; or in the levy of any water rate

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in contravention of various prohibitions. In most of these cases, it is not the lack of water that leads to conflict, but the inadequate way the resource is governed and managed that is the cause of the conflict. Hence, proper mechanisms should be in place to deal with the problem which is becoming a threat to the integrity and unity of India. Against this background, this chapter analyses the current flare-up in the Ravi-Beas water dispute and tries to examine the challenges to sharing water peacefully by exploring the factors responsible for inter-state water disputes and thereby outlining some of the major challenges to governance for resolving such disputes. The chapter is organised into six sections including this introductory section. The second section gives the overview of inter-state water disputes in India. The third section provides a detailed chronological order of the Ravi-Beas dispute. The fourth section discusses the issues involved in the dispute. The fifth section discusses the governance challenge. The chapter concludes with the sixth section.

O VERVIEW

OF

I NTER - STATE W ATER C ONFLICTS

IN

I NDIA

The inter-state character of most of the Indian rivers has given rise to a number of disputes among basin states with regard to the sharing of waters of such rivers and their development. These disputes may pertain to the sharing of the quantum of water among the basin states; or benefits and cost of an irrigation project; or it may even pertain to the preservation of the quality of the respective water resources to enable the concerned states to make use of these resources in their natural stable form. Sometimes disputes have arisen even regarding priority in respect of various uses of water, in the background of the conflicting claims of the contesting states in favour of one use or the other. Also, there are problems of identification of the basis for determining the share of the concerned basin state (Chauhan 1992). These problems pose difficulties and play a significant role at the time of distribution of the concerned water during the settlement phase. Inspite of all the difficulties, some of the disputes have been settled through agreement between the states involved, but some still remain to be settled and a few of them have been pending for a number of years. This is because sometimes water law problems and disputes unfold such insurmountable complexities that inspite of the best intentions of the contesting parties to resolve them early, they defy solutions and get dragged on for decades. But it will be wrong to gather the impression from the various current disputes that there has not been much inter-state cooperation in the matter of river development. In fact, the position is that the number of cases in which the states have cooperated and reached an agreement are far more than the cases which have remained unsettled ( Jain et al. 1971). The various agreements made between the states for river developments indicate a clear desire among the states to cooperate in and develop river valley schemes for the economic development of the nation as a whole. Not only have the states resolved their differences with regard to the sharing of waters of inter-state rivers and other connected matters in an amicable manner through agreements, they have also agreed to collaborate and cooperate in jointly developing the various inter-state rivers. An overview of some of the inter-state water conflicts is given in Table 10.1.

Andhra Pradesh, • Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa •

Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra

Godavari

Krishna

•

•

•

•

•

Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh

Narmada

States Involved

Punjab, Haryana, • Rajasthan, Delhi •

Ravi-Beas

Basin/River/Dam

Mode of Settlement

Sharing and utilisation of the untapped surplus river water among the states after the reorganisation of states Telugu Ganga project and the Almatti dam

Sharing and utilisation of the untapped surplus river water among the states after the reorganisation of states Submergence of territories due to Pochampad, Inchampalli, Swarna and Suddavagu irrigation projects

Current Status

Award given, dispute settled but fresh dispute of Almatti dam Review of the Tribunal award in May 2000.

Final award given and the dispute settled

Award given and dispute settled

Award given but not yet notified in the official gazette and the stalemate continues

• Initially through negotiation mediated by the central government but • final resolution through adjudication by tribunal (1969–1976)

Mutual negotiations and bilateral and tripartite agreements ratified by the Tribunal (1969–1980)

Sharing of waters after Adjudication by Tribunal reorganisation of states (1969–1979) Construction of Navagam dam, Punasa dam and Bargi project Height of Sardar Sarovar Project

Adjudication through Sharing of surplus river water Tribunal (constituted in after reorganisation of state 1986-report given in 1987) Punjab’s insistence on the application of doctrine of ‘absolute territorial sovereignty’ in distribution of inter-state rivers

Cause of Dispute

Table 10.1: Inter-state Water Conflicts in India

Kerela, Tamil Nadu

Gujarat, Rajasthan

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar

Tamil Nadu and Karnataka

Mulla Periyar Dam

Mahi

Musakhand dam

Palar

Sharing and utilisation of the untapped surplus river water among the states after the reorganisation of states

Suspicion regarding the use of waters for purposes other than that agreed upon in the previous agreement

Sharing of the cost and benefit of the project

Sharing of the cost of the multipurpose project as well as apportionment of power and irrigation benefits

Safety of the dam and submergence of reserve forest land and wildlife sanctuary

•

Cauvery development authority has been set up. The final award of the tribunal is awaited

Agreement based on joint investigation

Agreement through mediation of Union Ministry of Irrigation and Power

Agreement through mediation of Union Ministry of Irrigation and Power

Establishment of experts Expert committee report committee as per directions submitted to Supreme of Supreme Court Court—next hearing of the case by Supreme Court on Nov. 2000

Bilateral negotiations and mediation of centre and later adjudication by tribunal (1986–interim award 1991)

Source: Compiled from Chauhan (1992) and Website of Water Resource Ministry, Government of India, New Delhi.

Karnataka, Kerela, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry

Cauvery

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From the data in Table 10.1, we find that inter-state water disputes originate when the boundaries of the state are redrawn, leading to an institutional vacuum to manage water disputes; or when any party tries to utilise the waters by construction of large dams or diversion projects without taking the interest of other parties into consideration. It is argued here that the resolution of inter-state water disputes depends not only on the deficiencies in the legal process, like delays in the tribunals and vagueness in the legal doctrine applicable, but also on other issues such as relations between the concerned states, local problems faced by the states, level of development achieved by the states and also the power equation between the centre and the states. The inter-state water conflict and resolution framework is given in Figure 10.1. The argument is supported through the case study on the Ravi-Beas rivers water dispute. The formation of a new state and construction of a large dam expresses interest in capturing a larger share of water on intensification of agriculture, industrialisation, etc., which ultimately results in capturing more water than their due share, leading to the conflicts among the riparian states. The emergence of conflicts leads to constitution of the tribunal to resolve the dispute. Some tribunals have been able to identify solutions, others have failed, and disputes continue for a variety of reasons. Figure 10.1: Inter-state Water Conflict and Resolution Framework

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R AVI -B EAS W ATER D ISPUTE Ravi and Beas rivers belong to the Indus system. This system comprises the Indus and its three tributaries—Kabul, Jhelum, Chenab—to the west and Ravi, Beas and Sutlej to the east. The partition of India on 15 August 1947 created two new sovereign states, namely, India and Pakistan, and the new international boundary also bisected the entire Indus Basin, which was hitherto one nation. The upper reaches of the main Indus River and its eastern tributaries came to lie in India while the lower reaches found their place in Pakistan. A vast part of the network of existing canals fell within the territory of Pakistan but the installations which supplied water to these canals were situated in India. Thus, the development and utilisation of the water resources in one country appeared to hamper the corresponding development and utilisation of the same in the other. While the negotiations for the settlement of the Indus dispute was in progress, development activities in India started simultaneously in anticipation of a treaty with Pakistan on sharing of Indus waters as proposed by the World Bank in 1954. The state governments of Punjab, Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU), Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan were required to prepare a development programme for utilisation of the water of the eastern rivers that were to become exclusively available to India. Whereas the waters of the river Sutlej had already been planned to be utilised in the states of Punjab, PEPSU and Rajasthan through the Bhakra Nangal project; the surplus waters of the Ravi and Beas, excluding pre-Partition use, had to be planned for utilisation by the states of Punjab, PEPSU, Jammu and Kashmir, and Rajasthan. On 29 January 1955, an agreement was entered by the concerned states regarding the distribution of water from the Ravi and Beas, estimated at 15.85 million acre feet (MAF) over and above the actual pre-Partition use of 3.13 MAF. There under, this 15.85 MAF was allocated amongst the state of Punjab (5.9 MAF), PEPSU (1.3 MAF), Rajasthan (8.0 MAF) and Jammu and Kashmir (0.65 MAF). In 1960, the Indus Waters Treaty was signed between India and Pakistan under which the waters of the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej were reserved for exclusive use by India after the transition period. With the merger of PEPSU with Punjab in 1956, the share of composite Punjab rose to 7.20 MAF (GOI 1987). After the bifurcation of the state of Punjab into two separate states, Punjab and Haryana, in November 1966 under the States Reorganisation Act 1966, a fresh dispute arose between the newly-formed states as to their respective shares in the 7.20 MAF water allocated to composite Punjab. Haryana claimed 4.8 MAF out of a total of 7.2 MAF on the principle of equitable distribution, whereas Punjab staked its claim to the entire quantity of 7.20 MAF on three counts, namely, (i) Haryana was not a riparian state, in that neither of the two rivers flow through it nor does any part thereof fall within the valley or basin of the two rivers; (ii) the headworks of the canal for the distribution of river waters were all situated in reorganised Punjab; and (iii) Punjab planned an irrigation intensity of 200 per cent to utilise the said waters. On 19 September 1968, a decision was taken at a meeting called by the Government of India (GOI) on sharing the waters of Ravi-Beas on an ad hoc basis, which allowed 35 per cent for Haryana and 65 per cent for Punjab, pending finalisation of the dispute (ibid.: 30).

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As the dispute could not be resolved within the stipulated time by agreement between the two party states, Haryana approached the GOI for a decision under Section 78 of the Punjab Reorganisation Act 1966. This provides for the apportioning of rights and liabilities of the existing state of Punjab among the successor states in relation to the Bhakhra-Nangal project and the Beas project by an agreement entered into by the states after consultation with the Centre. Pursuant to the demand made by Haryana, a high level committee of independent experts were appointed by the Central Government in 1970. The GOI on 24 March 1976, after taking into consideration the various reports received, allocated 3.5 MAF to each of the two states and the remaining 0.2 MAF to Delhi. In order to make full use of the water allocated to Haryana under this statutory decision, a proposal for the construction of the Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) Canal was mooted. Punjab was dissatisfied and filed a suit in the Supreme Court challenging the validity of Section 78 of the 1966 Reorganisation Act. Haryana also filed a suit for implementing the Centre’s notification of 24 March 1976 (GOI 1987: 30). While the suit was still pending the states concerned reached an agreement on 31 December 1981. It was when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister and Darbara Singh as the Chief Minister in Punjab. Then Haryana was also under Congress rule, headed by Bhajan Lal. As per that agree-ment, the flow series was changed from 1921–45 to 1921–602, resulting in an increase of the availability of the Ravi-Beas waters from 15.85 MAF to 17.17 MAF. The two states withdrew the suit from the Supreme Court. Accordingly, the amount of distributed water was: Punjab (4.22 MAF), Jammu and Kashmir (0.65 MAF), Haryana (3.5 MAF), Rajasthan (8.6 MAF) and Delhi (0.2 MAF). It was further stipulated in the agreement that Punjab would complete the SYL canal within a period of two years, that is, by 31 December 1983. Lastly, it was agreed that until such time as Rajasthan was in a position to utilise its full share from the surplus Ravi-Beas waters, the unutilised share of Rajasthan may be used by Punjab (ibid). Even after this agreement was signed by all the concerned states the controversy continued to persist and the questioning of sharing of the water resource continued to be politically alive in Punjab. After the signing of the agreement, the Government of Punjab released a white paper on 23 April 1982 hailing the agreement which had resulted in an additional 1.32 MAF of water to Punjab over the allocation made by the GOI, while the allocation of the state of Haryana remained unchanged. Soon thereafter, certain political changes took place in Punjab, which ultimately led to the Punjab Legislative Assembly passing a resolution on 5 November 1985 repudiating the said agreement of 31 December 1981 and declaring the white paper as redundant and irrelevant. Intense negotiations thereafter resulted in the signing of the Punjab settlement on 24 July 1985 at New Delhi between the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and late Harchand Singh Longowal, President of the Shiromani Akali Dal. Paragraph nine of this accord has three subparts. The first part assures water to the farmers of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, which would be not less than what was their respective share as on 1 July 1985. The second part suggests setting up of a tribunal, which would adjudicate the claim of the sharing of water by Punjab and Haryana. It was decided that that Tribunal will give its decision within six months, which would be binding on both the states. The third part suggests the continuation of the construction of the SYL canal. The construction of the canal shall be completed by

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15 August 1986 (GOI 1987: 30). The Central Government constituted the tribunal of the eminent juries, that is, Justice Eradi, Justice Ahmadi and Justice Balakrishna Menon.

Tribunal Judgement After looking into the various legal and constitutional aspects of the claims made by the contending parties and the validity of their claims and counter claims, the Eradi Commission submitted its report in January 1987. The Eradi (Ravi-Beas) Tribunal Report was forwarded in May 1987 to the concerned state governments. The Tribunal made an attempt for an equitable apportionment of river water. The quantum of Ravi-Beas water used, as on 1 July 1985, by Punjab was 3.1 MAF, by Rajasthan (4.98 MAF) and by Haryana (1.62 MAF). The shares of Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir remained unchanged. The Tribunal took notice of two important aspects while making its award. First, Haryana was not utilising the full quantum of water allocated to it under the 1976 and 1981 agreements. Second, Haryana was receiving 3.68 MAF of Yamuna water, which was likely to go up by another 0.5 MAF, whereas Punjab had no other source except the Ravi-Beas water. Ultimately the Tribunal decided to be fair and reasonable and equitable. To allocate the surplus available, water allocation was made on the basis of the 1921–60 flow series. It allocated 5.0 MAF to Punjab and Haryana got 3.83 MAF. The share of Rajasthan and Delhi remained unaffected (ibid). After the submission of the Tribunal report there was no change in the confrontationist stand by Punjab and Haryana over the sharing of the Ravi-Beas water. Punjab was unhappy. It charged that the Tribunal in determining the share had gone beyond the terms of reference and committed ‘errors of jurisdiction’. The course of the SYL canal became a matter of dispute between the two states. The farmers of Punjab felt that the 49 km stretch of the canal on the Sivaliks might cause water logging of their land due to seepage from the canal. A committee with R.S. Gill and Gurbachan Singh as its members was set up to look into the SYL canal problem. After careful examination they concluded that the SYL canal course was best and rejected Punjab farmers’ plea for realignment. Since then, quite often the political parties, that is, the Alkalis and the Government of Punjab have linked the SYL canal with the transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab and some districts of Punjab to Haryana in lieu of Chandigarh. So much so that in January 1990 Mahant Sewa Das Singh, in a letter to the then Prime Minister of India, conveyed that to find a lasting solution to Punjab’s problem, the government should look into the problem of the Ravi-Beas water sharing urgently (Khan 2001). Punjab filed a review application before the Ravi-Beas Tribunal on 9 August 1987 against the award given by it under Section 5(3) of the Inter-State Water Disputes (ISWD) Act 1956. Meanwhile, in 1999, Haryana filed a suit in the Supreme Court seeking construction of the SYL canal. Though the Court had asked the Centre to intervene between the two states, it did not help. And the judgment that was kept pending was pronounced directing Punjab to complete the SYL canal within one year. In 2002, taking exception to the non-completion of the SYL canal by the Punjab Government, the Supreme Court directed that it should be completed within a year from to augment the water supply to Haryana and Delhi. In case the Punjab Government failed to accomplish the

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task within the stipulated period, the Centre should get the work done through its own agency. Acting swiftly on the Supreme Court judgement to complete the SYL canal within one year, the Punjab Government filed a review petition as also a petition challenging both Section 78 of the Punjab Reorganisation Act, Section 14-A of the Inter-State Water Disputes Act and also the award of the Ravi-Beas Tribunal. After the Punjab Government failed to comply with the apex court order of 15 January 2002 directing it to complete the remaining portion of the canal in its territory within a year, the former petitioned for a review of the court order. The Supreme Court dismissed Punjab’s petition seeking review of the 15 January 2002 order and on 4 June 2004 directed the Centre to get the canal completed through a central agency. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, in compliance of the 4 June 2004 Supreme Court judgement, set up a committee with representatives of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan on board, and tasked the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) on 2 July 2004 to take over the canal work from Punjab within two weeks. But before the CPWD’s scheduled start of canal work, the Punjab Assembly passed a Bill on 12 July 2004, abrogating all water accords with neighbouring states by the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004. The Centre moved the apex court seeking fresh instruction in the wake of the Punjab Act which stalled work by CPWD. After intensive deliberations in the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs, the UPA government, on 21 July, sought the Supreme Court’s opinion on the contentious and complex issue through a Presidential reference. On 22 July 2004, the President referred Punjab’s controversial Termination of Agreements Act to the Supreme Court. The decision of the Supreme Court is pending.

C ASE A NALYSIS : C HALLENGES OF I NTER - STATE W ATER D ISPUTE R ESOLUTION Riparian Doctrine Punjab’s argument on application of the riparian principle in sharing of the river waters is untenable since the application of the ‘riparian doctrine’ would in practice amount to denial of the right to divert streams beyond riparian lands ( Jain et al. 1971). Both in the field of ‘international water law disputes’ or ‘inter-state water law disputes’, this theory or the so-called doctrine of ‘riparian rights’ has never been accepted as basis for or found application in the settlement of such disputes, inspite of its causal reference here and there. This principle has also never been accepted in any form whatsoever, even in the pre-Partition period in India (Chauhan 1992). The various tribunals constituted in India so far have also rejected the use of the doctrine of ‘riparian rights’ for the settlement of inter-state disputes. Both the Krishna and Godavari Water Dispute Tribunals made similar observations that ‘the doctrine of riparian rights governs the right of private parties, but does not offer a satisfactory basis for settling inter-state water

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disputes’ (GOI 1973, 1979). The Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal also held, among other things, that the diversion of water of an inter-state river outside the river basin is legal (GOI 1973). The Eradi (Ravi and Beas waters) Tribunal, in its award given in 1987 also rejected the so-called doctrine of riparian rights when it found the claims of Punjab to the propriety rights over the water of Ravi and Beas as unsustainable on the basis of its position as a ‘riparian’ and to the exclusion of Haryana by treating it as ‘non-riparian’ (Chauhan 1992). The Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal made somewhat ambiguous observations in its report in 1978 when it remarked that Rajasthan being a non-riparian state was not entitled as a matter of law to any share in the water of the inter-state river Narmada and that the rights of Rajasthan must, therefore, be based on the agreement of Chief Ministers dated 12 July 1974 (GOI 1978: 128). Further, it is submitted by the Tribunal that an ‘agreement’ is as good a source of law as ‘custom’, legislation (in statutory form)’, ‘precedent’ or ‘award’, and so on. Thus, by actually allotting water to Rajasthan out of the Narmada waters the Tribunal conceded the rights of Rajasthan to these waters, and in such a situation the observation that ‘Rajasthan being a non-riparian state is not entitled as a matter of law to any share in the waters of the inter-state river Narmada’ becomes only obitur-dicta or a ‘causal reference’ (Chauhan 1992).

Deficiencies in the Legal Process Delay in Tribunals Article 262 of the Indian Constitution provides for parliamentary legislation for adjudication of inter-state water disputes. In pursuance of these provisions the Parliament enacted the InterState Water Disputes (ISWD) Act of 1956. According to this Act, the states of the Indian Union have been given the right to request the Centre to set up a tribunal to adjudicate between states involved in the case of river-water disputes. This can be done only after all attempts at an amicable settlement through negotiations have failed. But the manner in which the tribunals have adjudicated the awards leaves a lot to be desired. Further, some tribunals have given interim orders, while others have failed to give a final order even after a decade (for example, the Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery river-water disputes). The main problem with respect to tribunals is inordinate delay at every stage. Even the inability of the states to have a dispute referred to a tribunal unless the Union Government is satisfied that no negotiated settlement is possible, causes delay (Iyer 1999, 2002). Generally, delay occurs at three stages, (i) in setting up the tribunal; (ii) in the announcement of the award; and (iii) in implementation of the award. In the Ravi-Beas case, political difficulties in implementing the award led to further reference being made to the tribunal and 12 years after the award was given, the matter is still before the tribunal. In the case of Cauvery, dispute adjudication has been running a troubled course. After the request by the Tamil Nadu government in 1986, it took over four years and a direction by the Supreme Court for the tribunal to be set up by the Central Government. However, states have sometimes refused to accept the decisions of tribunals. Although, the ISWD Act says that the award is final and binding and provides no appeal even to the Supreme Court, there is no effective sanction available against the contingency of non-implementation

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of a tribunal’s award by one of the party states. Therefore, arbitration is not entered, often making it redundant. An inter-state water disputes tribunal can only give an award; it has no role in its implementation. After giving its award it will cease to exist, it has no powers of enforcement even when it is in existence (Iyer 2002). Significantly, the courts have also been ignored on occasion. For example, the Supreme Court’s order to complete the SYL canal was ignored by Punjab. Finally, the Centre has sometimes intervened directly as well, but in the most intractable cases, such as the sharing of the Ravi-Beas waters among Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan and Punjab; central intervention, too, has been unsuccessful. In the last few decades, it has been apparent that only the formation of tribunals and their suggestions are not sufficient to cope with the problem of river-water sharing. The awards of different tribunals are not backed by enforcing mechanisms. However, with the amendments to the Inter-State Water Disputes Act passed by the Parliament in 2002, most of the deficiencies of the legal process have been taken care of. The amended Act prescribes a one-year time period for the establishment for the tribunal by the Central Government on request from the state government. It allows a period of three years for the tribunal to give an award, which could be extended, if found necessary, by a further period not exceeding two years by the Central Government. It also gives the tribunal one year to give a further report if a reference is made to it as provided for in the ISWD Act, and this one year being further extendable if necessary, with no limit specified for such extension. A further amendment states that the decisions of the tribunal shall have the same force as an order or decree of the Supreme Court (Iyer 2003). Inspite of these changes, there are still some shortcomings in the act as pointed out by Iyer (2003), which include, among others, (a) no time limit being prescribed for the publication of the tribunal’s decision in the gazette by the Central Government; (b) the provision that disputes already settled by the tribunals before the amendment act shall not be reopened; and (c) the decision of the tribunal is final and there is no provision for further appeal against the decision.

Doctrine of ‘Equitable Appropriation’ The doctrine of ‘equitable apportionment’, which is based on the Helsinki Rules 1966, has emerged as a guiding principle in the field of settlement of inter-state water disputes. According to the Helsinki Rules: ‘Each basin state is entitled, within its territory, to a reasonable and equitable share in the beneficial uses of waters of an international drainage basin’ (Jain 1971: 163). Words like ‘equitable share’ and ‘beneficial uses’ have not been defined as these may have different meanings for different parties at different points of time. Thus, the principle of ‘equitable apportionment’ is vague and cannot be defined with precision. Its meaning cannot be written into a code that can be applied to all situations and at all times (GOI 1973). At the practical level, while applying the theory of ‘equitable apportionment’, it becomes necessary to determine the respective share of each contending party. This is not only difficult but also the most complicated problem. Each basin or river system has its own peculiar features and universally applicable principles in this regard may be impossible to predict. Working out an

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equitable share of each basin state requires an analysis of complex technical and economic data and the judicious balancing of conflicting claims of, and uses of the river by different riparian states. This principle of apportionment also takes into consideration the extent of existing use of water by the contending basin, co-riparian states or concerned units and protects the existing use as opposed to the contemplated future use ( Jain et al. 1971; Chauhan 1992). This complicates the problem as different uses of the river by different states are not simultaneous. Depending upon the needs and the economic development of a state these uses may take place at different points of time. Thus, how far can an existing use by a riparian state be disturbed for providing a beneficial equitable use in contemplation of another riparian state is not an easy matter to decide.

Political Economy of Conflict Resolution Here, we argue that local agrarian problems and interests affect the performance of the water sector, and that relations between Centre-states and states-states impact inter-state water dispute resolutions. There is a strong link between the way water is managed by each contending state and the level of water scarcity at the basin level. The poor management of water at the local level has an impact on quantity and quality of water available at the basin level and increases competition for this scarce resource among the states. Thus, with increased intra- and intersectoral competition over scarce water, we may anticipate conflicts to remain part of the interstate water culture, and therefore we have to change our way of managing local-water resources to minimise conflicts. Prudent water management at the local level can ensure sufficiency of supply and quality to the different users that make demands upon a river basin.

Relations between the States Cordial relations between the contending states have an impact on the resolution of inter-state water disputes. If the relationship is marked by acrimony, it becomes difficult to come to a negotiated settlement. Unresolved issues of the past like the boundary dispute with Haryana after the reorganisation of the states on linguistic basis and the non-inclusion of Chandigarh in Punjab have created a lot of animosity among the people of the two states and this gets manifested in water disputes. This is because the state with which it has boundary disputes is also the same state with which it has to share water. So, the general tendency is to divert the anger of being given a raw deal during the reorganisation of states to water conflicts, which makes it more difficult to come to an amicable solution.

Power Relations between Centre and States The power relations between the Centre and the states have also an influence over the peaceful resolution of inter-state water disputes. The nature of relationship between the Centre and state governments has significantly changed from that of the 1950s when the ISWD Act came into force. In the 1950s, the Indian political space was essentially uni-polar with the Indian National Congress having an unassailable position as the lead party in the union government as well as

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in many states. Since 1989, it became necessary for coalitions to be formed to command a majority in the lower house of the Parliament and thus form the union government. Most of the water disputes were solved during the time the parties at the Centre and the states were the same. The 1981, the Ravi-Beas agreement was reached when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and Darbara Singh and Bhajan Lal, both Congress chief ministers, were in power in Punjab and Haryana respectively. By the mid-1980s, this position began to change with the emergence of regional parties in most of the states in India. These regional parties have their own agenda, which often gives primacy to the interests of the state and ignores the national interest. Since they depend on their states for power, there is a huge incentive for them to sometimes flare up conflicts which have a wide appeal. The strength of the Central Government vis-à-vis the states also impacts the dispute resolution. When the Central Government is strong—that is, a single party having sufficient majority in Parliament—it can take a firm stand in the dispute and sometimes even coerce the contesting states to come to an agreement. When the Central Government is weak—that is, a coalition with a small majority—it may have self-interest in keeping river water disputes alive as it has to depend on one or more of the coalition partners for the survival of the government. It may try to favour one party over the other to gain its support.

Level of Development Again, if we see the different water disputes, we find that the most vociferous states in these conflicts are those states that are economically and agriculturally developed. These states have made full use of their natural resources to reach this level of development. But there is a price to be paid for every good thing achieved. So development has not come free of cost; it has its own side-effects which are visible in the destruction and degeneration of natural resources. To further proceed in the path of development, states need to secure vital natural resources. But most of the states have exploited their natural resources to an extent wherein it is difficult for the natural resources to regenerate. Thus, looking at the different water disputes in India we find that the most developed among them are the ones involved in one or another water dispute. And whenever the dispute involves two or more developed states, the solution to the dispute is very difficult to achieve. For example, the Cauvery dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and the Ravi-Beas dispute between Punjab and Haryana are still festering even after years of negotiations and legal wrangling, and a solution to either dispute is yet to come by. Another reason for conflict among states is the competitive rivalry among developed states that makes them clash with neighbouring states which are equally developed. The economy of Punjab, which was once vibrant, is on the decline. The performance of total economy is also found to be deteriorating and below the national average. The growth rates of Net State Domestic Product (NSDP) from agriculture, total NSDP and the per capita income in Punjab in the 1990s have been lower than those for the country as a whole (Chand 1999). The state, which was always ahead of its neighbour Haryana (carved out of Punjab itself in 1966) in agricultural growth, lost to it by the late 1980s. The annual compound growth rates of average value of output and of yield for the period 1980–83 to 1992–95 at 1990–93 constant prices

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for Punjab were only 3.87 per cent and 2.85 per cent respectively, compared to 4.74 per cent and 4.13 per cent respectively for Haryana (Bhalla 1999). When the conflict is between a developed state and an underdeveloped state there is not much acrimony. In fact, this leads to a better understanding of the other party’s needs and the solutions to the problem are achieved without much bitter feelings. Also, the reason could be that in underdeveloped states the natural resource in question has not been fully tapped due to slower industrial and agricultural development, and the resource remains unused, i.e., it is not critical. This helps in coming to an understanding for solving the conflict. But when the conflict is between two developed states that are both economically and agriculturally developed, the natural resource for which both are competing becomes critical for both the parties and also the egos of both the states clash, and achieving an amicable and smooth settlement becomes difficult.

Local Problems Most of the water disputes at the state level are manifestations of local-level problems that may relate to land rights, individual/group conflicts and mismanagement of water at the local level. Conflicts at the local level may also include petty conflicts between individual farmers regarding land, water, social status or any other personal reason. Although water may be one of the reasons for the conflict, the intensity of conflict varies for different reasons. For example, in a particular location, land conflict may be of prime importance rather than water issues. Conflicts are also common at community scales between users and sectors involving access to water of adequate quantity and quality. For example, inequities in water availability within water courses between head-, middle- and tail-ends are more acute than imbalances of water supply at the state and canal scales. Even when water supplies are not severely limited, allocation of water among different users and uses (agriculture and urban residents, for example) can be highly contested. Degraded water quality, which can pose a serious threat to health and aggravate scarcity, is also a source of potentially violent disputes. Usually, there are many local conflicts (other than water) that get manifested as water conflicts. Due to salience of water issues between states and the consequent availability of information on them, local conflicts usually receive less attention. But while conflicts often remain local, they can also impact stability at the national and regional levels. Even if disputes over water-related issues do not typically cause violent conflict, they often lead to inter-state tensions. The entanglement of inter-state water disputes with more general centre-state conflicts and political issues compounds problems. In this regard, the Ravi-Beas water dispute could be ascribed to the larger agrarian crisis that the two conflicting states face. The Green Revolution had increased the production of food grains. But of late there has been a decline in production levels. Intensive cropping of the paddywheat cycle with canal and groundwater has caused widespread water logging and salinity in these two states. The quality of soil has also degraded due to increased use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. In some parts of Punjab, the water table rose by 4–5 m during 1984 to 1994 and led to problems of salinity and water logging, however, the water table in central Punjab is going down at the rate of 0.23 m per annum due to excessive pumping of groundwater for irrigation. If this decline continues for the next 15 years, about 2 lakh centrifugal pumps will

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need to be replaced by submersible pumps, which at current prices will cost Rs 2,000 crore or about Rs 5,000/hectare (ha) of net sown area (Chand 1999). Widespread deficiency of micronutrients has appeared in the soil and there is an increase in weed infestation, pest and disease outbreak. There is a relative fall in the income levels of the people. The economic condition of a vast majority of farmers in Punjab has deteriorated. Family income of about 47 per cent of the farmers from crops plus dairy is lower than the income at lowest pay scale for unskilled workers in the state and about 20 per cent of the farming population is below the poverty-line income (ibid.). This has acted as a dampener among the people of the two states to go to the next level of development. The rising discontent among the farming community due to their failure to get aspired farm income and problems like declining water-tables in some parts, water logging in other parts, and soil degradation and environment pollution, have reached such proportions as to force the state government to make serious efforts to address these problems. The state government is unable to do much because of the financial crisis facing the state due to the mismanagement of the finances by the successive governments (Gill 2000). Therefore, there is a general frustration with the physical realities of life. Underlying the desperation, particularly in Punjab, is a larger crisis that confronts the farming community; one that has nothing to do with the canal debate. As Punjab University academic H.S. Shergill pointed out (Swami 2004): ‘the falling water table and environmental degradation are no doubt, serious problems, but are certainly not the central issues’. The core of Punjab’s agrarian crisis is the stagnation of farm incomes for the past many years (Chand 1999) and farmers’ fears of imminent fall in their incomes if the world-trade agenda is implemented thoughtlessly. This problem is sought to be remedied by agricultural diversification by getting out of the rice-wheat cycle and growing vegetables, fruits, dairy, and so on. Although, the net returns from growing vegetables would be higher than competing crops, it would require increased use of pesticides and the labour requirement would rise. Further, the returns from vegetable cultivations are risky due to market fluctuations. This makes the farmers unwilling to switch to other crops as rice–wheat are low-risk and high-profitability crops and the returns are higher due to the strong and assured government price support and superior yields of wheat and rice compared to the competing crops (ibid.). In several scholarly papers, Shergill noted that efforts to push farmers out of the wheat-rice cycle imposed punitive costs on them and exposed them to dangerous price fluctuations seen in new high-value crops (Swami 2004). In both states, however, emotive mass mobilisation on river water issues has been a way for politicians to deflect attention away from the very real agrarian crises they face and the need for serious constructive reform. From the above discussion we see that though the legal aspect is important in the settlement of inter-state disputes, it is not the only factor for bringing about the settlement of such disputes. Other issues, unrelated to water, play an important role in long-drawn conflicts. These issues are usually entangled in politics, making their settlement difficult. In fact, most of the intractable water disputes are due to the hardening of stances by the political parties of the states concerned. The problem is heightened by the power game indulged by political leaders of the concerned states. Politicians in Indian states often use this sensitive issue as a platform for attaining political mileage by whipping up peoples emotions and instigating

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them to take a more vocal and rigid stance on the issue. This causes the dispute to linger on for years without any solution. Thus, it can be said that water disputes are essentially political in nature and resolving them would require political solutions. The ultimate responsibility for either the amicable settlement of conflicts through negotiations or for the intensification of conflicts by the adoption of uncompromising stances rests with the political leadership of the states involved in the disputes. Thus, achieving the resolution of long drawn inter-state water disputes would require mobilisation of political will and a change in the behaviour of all the actors involved in the settlement of the dispute.

G OVERNANCE C HALLENGE Most of the time, inter-state water disputes are accentuated by the lack of adequate water institutions, inadequate administrative capacity, lack of transparency, ambiguous jurisdictions, overlapping functions, fragmented institutional structures and lack of necessary infrastructure. This situation represents a crisis of governance which, if left unchecked, could make it unmanageable and thus hinder the economic development of the people. Improving governance for effective resolution of inter-state water disputes would thus require changing institutions and redefining the roles of different players in society. The present mismanagement of water resources and the inability of the states to settle disputes in a reasonable time frame provide an opportunity for civil society to stake its claim for a place in the dispute resolution process. The present situation is aided by the new governance paradigm where the state is increasingly loosing its pre-eminence as a provider of service and its place is taken by plurality of actors (Rhodes 1997). Today, development is not only the concern of the state alone but of the entire society (Pierre 2000). This calls for a wider participation among the civil society in the dispute resolution mechanism. Civil society had its rights to manage small water resources and resolve conflicts. However, with the construction of large dams by the state and the creation of the technical-oriented irrigation bureaucracy, the ‘right of the people’ was converted to ‘right of the state’ to settle disputes. It became the duty of the states to arrange and provide for the water services, almost free of charge. This has brought about the separation of civil society from the water management process. States have a predominant role in the resolution of inter-state disputes. The legitimacy of the state to represent the interest of the people in inter-state dispute resolution is gained through the democratic process of elections, which enables the state to legally represent its people and sign agreements. The irrigation acts of various states vest the control of water management in the state government and the ultimate authority regarding use of waters rest with the government. This is often misused by politicians who indulge in rent-seeking activities and monopolise the role of representing the interest of the people. This provides incentive for the political leaders to keep the conflict alive and raise tempers for their own political gain by creating scenarios of loss of livelihood, food security and, in turn, the essential foundation

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of a society and the identity of the people themselves. The involvement of civil society in dispute-resolution process would make them aware of these challenges. Given the complexities of conflict, managing inter-state disputes entails ensuring that disparate voices are heard and engaged in decisions over common waters; this is because water governance encompasses many interlinked social players and must be responsive to the needs of the people and to the long term sustainability of the natural resource. This cannot be done by the government alone; the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society is also crucial in encouraging cooperation. There have been a number of nongovernment initiatives including citizen dialogues in 1992 and, during 2003–04, the ‘Cauvery family’ approach to establish dialogue between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu farmers from the Cauvery districts in both states (see for details Janakarajan 2006). Thus, effective governance of water resources will require the combined commitment of governments and various groups in civil society, particularly at local/community levels, as well as the private sector. Ways must be found to include all stakeholders—including local governments, utilities, agricultural interests, environmental groups, professional associations, research organisations, religious groups, and industry—that represent the broad diversity of interest in any given society and create a forum to identify and articulate the needs of stakeholders for water management and dispute resolution. Today, it is increasingly being realised that although the states set the overall policies and laws for resolution of inter-state disputes, they need to involve all users of water in the process of developing appropriate policies and regulations for successful implementation. To enable the stakeholders to participate effectively would require establishing an enabling environment not only for the creation of the right policy frameworks but for ensuring there is adequate capacity and accountability within regulatory and management institutions to correctly implement these policies. The creation of accountable but dynamic relationships between the different players and stakeholders is required. This asks for new forms of polycentric or distributed governance, with effectiveness sought in complementarity rather than in authority. Above all, governments need to ensure the participation of all stakeholders—including both public and private sectors—in the process of creating new and modifying existing legislation. Importantly, governments have a significant role in developing cooperation at all levels among those sharing water basins. For effective negotiations to be achieved among the different stakeholders, building capacity for integrated water management and conflict prevention is critical. Developing the human, technical and administrative capacity to generate and analyse data, to develop sustainable management plans and to implement these plans is necessary to enable water institutions to fulfil their management tasks and to prevent water-related disputes over the long term. The capacity of parties to negotiate contested water issues must be strengthened. Capacity building in conflict-management techniques (such as mediation and facilitation), as well as in stakeholder participation, would help mitigate conflicts and prevent disputes from emerging during decision making. Disparities in capacity and knowledge have often led to mistrust between riparian states, hindering cooperative action. Strengthening the negotiating skills of states can, therefore, help prevent conflict, as can strengthening their capacity to generate and authorise relevant data.

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C ONCLUSION Inter-state water disputes are very complex in character, and inspite of sincere efforts by all concerned some disputes evade solution and remain festering for a long time. It is not only the deficiencies in the legal process (vagueness regarding the legal doctrine applicable, overall delay in completion of the adjudication process) that prevents the ultimate settlement of the dispute, but also certain other issues (unrelated to water) that lead to acrimonious relations among the contending states get entangled in water disputes and make it much more difficult to achieve a lasting solution. Thus, even if a final agreement is reached there is no guarantee that the conflict will not surface again. This is due to the cyclical nature of inter-state water conflicts. There may be changes in the river basin over a period of time, which may make a previous agreement inequitable and may require looking at the dispute afresh. The presence of a permanent monitoring body would be essential to look into the matter of implementation of the agreements as well as monitoring the changes by constantly collecting data, which would be useful in settling future conflicts over water. Also, the involvement of civil society should be encouraged in the dispute resolution process to act as a counter-weight against the rent-seeking politicians, who would like the dispute to linger on for years and derive political mileage out of it.

Notes 1. A ‘major’ river is a river with a catchment area of 20,000 sq km or more and a ‘medium’ river is one with a catchment area of between 200 and 20,000 sq km (Valsalan 1997). 2. The flow series period suggests the period that is taken to calculate the availability of water in the rivers. In this case when the period for calculating the flow was extended from 1921–45 to 1921–60 the availability of water increased due to better rainfall during the said period which was available for distribution. The flow series period is an important technical factor in deciding the distribution of water between states, as one has to go by past rainfall and water availability data in deciding the water to be distributed. This is tricky as climate may change and the rainfall may not be as it used to be in the past and hence there is lesser water availability or vice versa and this conflict among parties.

References Bhalla, S. (1999). ‘Liberalisation, Rural Labour Markets and the Mobilisation of Farm Workers: The Haryana Story in an All India Context’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 26(2–3): 25–71, as quoted in Sukhpal Singh (2000), ‘Crisis in Punjab Agriculture’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(23): 1889–92. Chand, R. (1999). ‘Emerging Crisis in Punjab Agriculture’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34(13): A2–10. Chauhan, B.R. (1992). Settlement of International and Inter-State Water Disputes in India. Bombay: N.M. Tripathi Private Limited Gill, S.S. (2000). ‘Punjab Fiscal Crisis, and Non-Governance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(20–21): 1798–1800.

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Governement of India (GOI) (1973). Report of the Krishna Water Dispute Tribunal, with Decision. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Ministry of Energy and Irrigation. ——— (1978). Report of the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal. Vol. 1. New Delhi:.Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation. ——— (1979). Report of the Godavari Water Dispute Tribunal. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation. ——— (1987). Report of the Ravi and Beas Waters Tribunal. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. Iyer, R.R. (1999). ‘Inter-State River Water Disputes: Some Suggestions’, Mainstream, 5, 7–10 June, 37(24). ——— (2002). ‘Interstate Water Disputes Act 1956 Difficulties and Solutions’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(28): 2907–10. ——— (2003). Water: Perspectives, Issues and Concerns. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Jain, S.N., A. Jacob and S.C. Jain (1971). Inter-State Water Disputes in India. Bombay: N.M. Tripathi. Janakarajan, S. (2006). ‘Approaching IWRM through Multi-stakeholders’ Dialogue: Some Experiences from South India’, in P. Mollinga, A. Dixit and K. Athukorala (eds), Integrated Water Resources Management: Global Theory, Emerging Practices and Local Needs. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Khan, B. (2001). ‘A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of the Inter-State River Water Disputes in India: A Review’, Indian Journal of Public Administration, 47(2): 197–207. Moller, B. (2003). ‘Water Security and Conflict: An Overview of Linkages’, available at http://www.ihis. aau.dk/~bm/Water%20and%20Conflict-conceptual.doc_12 October 2004. Pierre, J. (2000). Debating Governance-Authencity, Steering and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Rhodes, R.A.W. (1997). Understanding Governance-Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability. Buckingham: Open University Press. Swami, P. (2004). ‘A Canal Crisis’, Frontline, 13 August, pp. 25–29. Valsalan, V.M. (1997). Inter-State Water Disputes in India: A New Approach. New Delhi: Central Board of Irrigation and Power.

Section III Groundwater Governance

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11 Groundwater Governance in Eastern India Vishwa Ballabh, Kameshwar Choudhary, Sushil Pandey and Sudhakar Mishra

I NTRODUCTION This chapter is based on the study of six villages, two each in east Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. The selection of districts and villages are based on the relative progressiveness of the district in terms of agricultural production and productivity. From each district two villages were chosen: one to represent high performance of agricultural production and productivity and another for its relatively poor performance. The villages from the districts of Maharajganj in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Purnia in Bihar and Bardhaman in West Bengal were selected to represent high productivity zones of these areas, and the other three villages from the districts, namely Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Muzaffarpur of Bihar and 24 Parganas (South) of West Bengal, to represent relatively backward areas of these states (Ballabh et al. 2002). The main objective of this chapter is to look into groundwater development in the region and the role played by state, civil society and markets. This chapter also analyses the emergence of water markets and the distribution of benefits in terms of who loses and who gains through groundwater development on the one hand and evolution of the water markets on the other. In the context of governance, which recognises the plurality of the actors and how the legitimate authorities are exercised in the application of governmental power, and in the management of public affairs, this chapter goes on to explain the role played by various actors such as the government revenue department, private dealers, moneylenders and bankers in the development of the groundwater in reviving the agrarian dynamism in eastern India. It also brings out the policy implications for the governance of groundwater in eastern India. The chapter is organised into six sections, including this introductory segment. The second section deals with patterns of groundwater development in the six villages selected for the study. The third section explains who owns and controls groundwater in these villages. In the fourth section, factors responsible for differential patterns of groundwater development are explained. The nature of water markets, buyers and sellers and likely gainers and losers are described in the fifth section. The sixth section brings out a summary and conclusion and identifies policies and strategies for the governance of groundwater in the eastern region, which is characterised by unconfined abundance of groundwater resources.

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G ROUNDWATER D EVELOPMENT P ATTERN The data in Table 11.1 provides the extent of groundwater development and other relevant information for the development of groundwater in the six villages selected for the study. The proportionate area irrigated through groundwater varies from a minimum of 46 per cent in Hatberia village of West Bengal to a maximum of 96 per cent in Asonpur of West Bengal. In fact, in all the villages except Hatberia, more than 70 per cent of the net cultivated area is irrigated through groundwater either from private pump sets, tube wells or through purchased water. Thus, the groundwater is well developed in all the villages except Hatberia village of 24 Parganas (South) district in West Bengal. One of the factors that helped widespread use of groundwater in irrigation is the development of the water market. In fact, the area irrigated through purchased water is more than that which is irrigated by their own pumps and tube wells in all the villages except Fariani village of Purnia district in Bihar. Other factors which have helped in the spread of irrigation through use of groundwater development are (i) number of bore wells, and (ii) use of plastic pipes for transporting water to distantly-located fragments. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar villages, the number of bore wells is more than pump sets (see Table 11.1) and farmers move their pump sets from one location to another. As a result, the scale of operation goes up. Similarly, in Bihar villages, use of plastic pipes to carry water for a distantly-located parcel was also commonly observed, particularly in Machhahi village where the degree of fragmentation is highest and size of fragments is very small. Investment in pump sets and tube wells in these villages has increased rapidly after 1985 leading to rapid development of groundwater resources during the period (see Table 11.2). This was also the period when eastern Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal experienced rapid growth in food-grain production, much of which was contributed by the productivity growth. Overall, however, the density of bore wells and pump sets varies vastly. The number of pump sets per hectare (ha) of cultivated land is least in Hatberia (0.04) and most in Fariani (0.44). Similarly, the density of bore wells varies from zero in Hatberia1 to a maximum in Fariani (0.77). It should be noted that a free-boring scheme in Uttar Pradesh was initiated in 1984–85, which contributed immensely to the development of groundwater. Elsewhere we have shown that the density of pump sets have a strong correlation with productivity in the region (Ballabh et al. 2002). Thus, development of groundwater in the region can contribute immensely to the overall growth and development, and, therefore, there is need to evolve strategies that lead to uniform development of groundwater covering all sections of the society. The next section deals with who owns and controls groundwater in the region and its implications for equity and sustainability of the water resource development.

O WNERSHIP

AND

C ONTROL

OF

G ROUNDWATER

The water beneath the land belongs to the owners of land. This is the general belief in India. However, access to this water depends on one’s ability to invest in water extraction devices— pump sets, bore wells, tube wells, and the like. The access and control of groundwater resources

194.24 2.11 2.44 133 1.46 51 3.81 69.67 84.56 79.40 35–45

Total cultivated area (in ha) No. of fragments/holding No. of fragments per/ha No. of borings in the village Average land size per boring Total no. of pump sets/tube wells Average land size per pump set/tube well Area irrigated by own pump set/tube well Area irrigated through buying Per cent of area irrigated Range of water charges (Rs/hr)

317.47 1.34 2.69 80 3.96 63∗ 5.03 40.64 180.81 69.75 10–40

Azamgarh Khemaupur 168.72 5.30 19.51 80 2.11 43 3.92 47.99 109.06 93.03 50–60@

Muzaffarpur Machhahi

Bihar

107.37 1.59 3.93 83 1.29 47 2.28 58.24 28.48 80.76 32–40#

Purnia Fariyani

Source: Ballabh et al. 2002. Notes: ∗ Largely electricity operated tube wells. ∗∗ Electricity operated submersible tube wells. @ Rs 5 per hour + diesel for hiring pump sets to draw water from own bore well. # Rs 15 per hour if diesel is purchased by the user (for one hour one litre diesel is required.

Maharajganj Rampur (U)

Particulars

Uttar Pradesh

182.99 5.97 10.35 32 5.72 32∗∗ 5.72 48.27 137.72 96.17 20

Bardhaman Asonpur

50.05 1.24 8.17 0 0 2 25.02 0 23.4 47.75 35–55

24 Parganas(S) Hatberia

West Bengal

Table 11.1: Groundwater Development in Selected Villages (Village-wise)

2 3 0 0

2 7 1 1 0 0

Bihar (i) Fariani (ii) Machhahi

West Bengal (i) Asonpur (ii) Hatberia

2. Pump sets Uttar Pradesh (i) Rampur (U) (ii) Khemaupur

Bihar (i) Fariani (ii) Machhahi

West Bengal (i) Asonpur∗ (ii) Hatberia 0 0

1 2

2 3

0 0

3 2

3 5

1971–75

0 0

2 4

3 9

0 0

5 8

11 9

1976–80

0 1

3 3

10 6

0 0

7 8

27 7

1981-85

Source: Ballabh et al. 2002. Note: ∗ All the pump sets are submersibles and run on electricity.

6 11

Upto 1970

1. Bore wells Uttar Pradesh (i) Rampur (U) (ii) Khemaupur

Name of Village

6 1

15 14

11 16

6 0

26 26

20 16

1986–90

15 0

10 5

16 13

15 0

19 12

42 16

1991–95

11 0

15 14

7 9

11 0

21 21

24 16

1996 and after

Table 11.2: Installation of Bore Wells and Pump Sets in Different Periods

32 2

47 43

51 63

32 0

83 80

133 80

Total

0.17 0.04

0.44 0.25

0.26 0.16

0.17 0.00

0.77 0.47

0.68 0.25

Density

(by numbers)

Groundwater Governance in Eastern India

199

have been a matter of debate and contestation. It has been argued that small and marginal farmers have relatively less access to groundwater resources (Shah and Ballabh 1995; Bardhan 1989; Dubash 2002). Others have argued that groundwater is relatively more accessible to small and marginal farmers than the other sources of irrigation (Shah 1993). Even if they do have access, they may need to pay a higher per-unit cost for the resource. It is also argued that control over groundwater resources offers scope for linkages between land and water contracts in a manner that could strengthen the position of large landowners (Dubash 2002). The fact that land distribution in east India is skewed is not surprising and the six villages under study were no exception to it. However, skewness in distribution of land varied vastly across the six villages. But what is surprising is that the skewness in distribution of land is less in Bihar and West Bengal villages than in the two villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh. In Uttar Pradesh, the upper caste households constituting 11 per cent in Rampur and 27 per cent in Khemaupur have ownership of 26.4 per cent and 60.7 per cent of village land, respectively. On the other extreme, the Schedule Caste (SC) and Schedule Tribe (ST) population is 39 per cent and 47 per cent, but they own only 11.9 per cent and 18.1 per cent of village land, respectively. If we include the landless households of these groups, their position further deteriorates in terms of landholding. The investment in pump sets and bore wells, however, has been made by every caste group and it is not confined to the upper castes only (see Table 11.3). In fact, middle peasantry and the backward and other caste households have proportionately made more investment in groundwater resources than the upper caste households in all except one village, namely, Khemaupur in the Azamgarh district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. In terms of the size of landholding, households having land of between 1 hectare (ha) and above own more pump sets and bore wells than those owning less than 1 ha of land. Thus, both in terms of caste as well as size categories of land, the ownership of pump sets and bore wells is relatively more equitably distributed compared to the land distribution across farm size and caste categories. In Uttar Pradesh villages, a significant number of SC households having less than 0.5 ha land own pump sets and bore wells. Thus, it could be concluded that the asset to extract groundwater resources are relatively better distributed across caste and class categories. Based on the evidence gathered from these six villages from eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, it may be asserted that strategies devised in Uttar Pradesh have worked more in favour of the socially disadvantaged class than the other two states as far as groundwater development is concerned.

F ACTORS R ESPONSIBLE FOR G ROUNDWATER D EVELOPMENT The development of groundwater in eastern regions, particularly eastern Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, has been attributed to two contrasting factors. In the case of eastern Uttar Pradesh, it has been argued that the Free Boring Scheme and Credit-Subsidy Programme intermediated by the dealers of pump sets have contributed significantly to the development of groundwater (Shah 2001).

Middle Large Farmers (> 3 ha) Middle Farmers (1 to 3 ha) Small Farmers (0.5 to 1 ha)

Upper Large Farmers (> 3 ha) Middle Farmers (1 to 3 ha) Small Farmers (0.5 to 1 ha) Marginal Farmers (< 0.5 ha) Landless Sub Total (%)

Cast/Size of Landholding

12 7

10

0 0 12 23.5

0 0 32 24.1

30

0

1

8

9

19

21

3

Set

Pump

12

Bore Well

Maharajganj Rampur (U)

6

3

8

1 0 38 47.5

2

16

19

Bore Well

4

3

7

1 0 31 49.2

2

14

14

Set

Pump

Azamgarh Khemaupur

Uttar Pradesh

34

25

4

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

Bore Well

18

18

2

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

Set

Pump

Muzaffarpur Machhahi

20

32

12

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

16

16

7

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

Set

Pump

Purnia Fariyani Bore Well

Bihar

7

14

0

0 0 9 28.1

0

8

1

Bore Well

7

14

0

0 0 9 28.1

0

8

1

Set

Pump

Bardhaman Asonpur

0

0

0

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

Bore Well

0

0

0

0

2

0

0 0 0 0.0

Set

Pump

24 Parganas(S) Hatberia

West Bengal

Table 11.3: Distribution of Bore Wells and Pump Sets by Caste and by Size of Landholding

0 3 4 0 7 13.7

1

6

21 0 28 21.1

133

Total

Source: Primary Data, Ballabh et al. 2002.

51

0

5 0 32 62.7

0

12 0 73 54.9

Lower Large Farmers (> 3 ha) Middle Farmers (1 to 3 ha) Small Farmers (0.5 to 1 ha) Marginal Farmers (< 0.5 ha) Landless Sub Total (%)

Marginal Farmers (< 0.5 ha) Landless Sub Total (%)

80

13 0 25 31.3

7

4

1

0 0 17 21.3

63

8 0 18 28.6

6

3

1

0 0 14 22.2

80

1 0 3 3.8

2

0

0

14 0 77 96.3

43

1 0 1 2.2

0

0

0

4 0 42 97.8

83

2 0 3 3.6

0

1

0

16 0 80 96.4

47

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

8 0 47 100.0

32

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

2 0 23 71.9

32

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

2 0 23 71.9

0

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

0 0 0 0.0

2

0 0 0 0.0

0

0

0

0 0 2 100.0

202

Vishwa Ballabh et al.

Further, availability of institutional credit, subsidies and free-boring schemes has led to the emergence of a variety of private entrepreneurs and informal institutions that contribute to the development of groundwater. The dealers of pump sets and tube wells have found an opportunity to enhance their sales and profit using the credit and subsidy schemes. This was, however, possible through procedural modifications which included among other things, (i) allowing private rigging contractors to do boring; (ii) allowing farmers to choose the brand of their choice; (iii) procedural changes in disbursement of credit; and (iv) allowing bankers to pay directly to the dealers of pump sets (Shah 2001). Thus, all the transaction costs of negotiation with agriculture and minor irrigation (MI) departments and banks were borne by pump set dealers. Often, these transaction costs are indeed very high and almost consume the entire subsidy provided to the farmers (Ballabh et al. 2002). In contrast, in West Bengal the revitalisation of the panchayat institutions and implementation of development programmes through these institutions, which ensured massive people’s participation at the grassroots level, are considered to be the prime driving force for the development of groundwater resources in the state (Pandey et al. 2002). The extent of investment in pump sets generated through the credit-subsidy scheme across six villages, however, varies widely. It is about 50 per cent in Rampur village (Maharajganj district) and only 14 per cent in village Khemaupur (Azamgarh district) of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Self-finance and credit from non-institutional sources have also contributed significantly to the development of groundwater. All tube wells in Asonpur were financed through own resources or borrowing from informal credit markets. In the two villages of Bihar, Machhahi and Fariani, institutional credit played a relatively less significant role in the development of groundwater (see Table 11.4). Thus, in majority of the cases, farmers have invested their own funds or mobilised resources through the informal credit market. The extent and magnitude of credit generated through non-institutional sources is not known, but given evidence from these villages, the size of such investment is indeed very large. The government-supported boring scheme has also contributed to the groundwater development in Rampur and Khemaupur villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh than in the villages of Bihar and West Bengal. However, according to many farmers in the eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar villages, more than the free-boring scheme, the evolution of cost-effective technology for bore wells has contributed to groundwater development. According to their narratives, to begin with, in the 1960s, bore wells were constructed by using material made of steel and copper, which has changed to plastic pipes since the 1980’s. In nominal terms, the cost of constructing a bore well in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar continues to be around Rs 2,000 per bore well since the 1960s (in real terms the cost has declined to one-tenth of the original cost). Thus, cheap boring equipments have made rapid proliferation of groundwater structures possible. Hence, in real terms the cost has significantly declined. The role of credit and subsidy through commercial banks seems to have a much lower influence on investment in pump sets in Bihar and West Bengal villages. The extent of financial support provided to the commercial banks, cooperatives and regional rural banks varied substantially across the three states. It is observed that refinancing for MI by National Bank in Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has been consistently very high in Uttar Pradesh

– 25 14 14 15 78 7 49 51

20 104 9 25 26

%

133 51 89 50 50

(no.)

54 9

18 42 20

80 63 71 60 45

(no.)

86 14

22 53 25

– 18 15 11

%

Khemaupur

38 5

2 70 8

80 43 80 43 41

(no.)

88 12

3 88 9

– 13 7 7

%

Machhahi

46 1

7 71 5

83 47 60 44 41

98 2

8 86 6

– 23 17 16

%

Fariyani (no.)

Bihar

32 0

0 32 0

32 32 30 30 30

100 0

0 100 0

– 9 9 9

%

2 0

0 0 0

0 2 0 2 0

(no.)

100 0

0 0 0

– 0 1 0

%

Hatberia

West Bengal Asonpur (no.)

Source: Ballabh et al. 2002. 1 Notes: Percentage of owners to the total no. of households in the village. 2 Percentagess shown against the numbers are per cent to the total number of bore wells/pump sets.

Total no. of bore wells Total no. of pump sets No. of farmers owning bore wells1 No. of farmers owning pump sets1 No. of farmers owning both1 Sources of investment for bore wells2 (i) Govt-supported free boring scheme (ii) Self-finance & non-institutional credit (iii) Bank loan Sources of investment for pump sets2 (i) Self-finance & non-institutional credit (ii) Bank loan

Rampur (U)

Uttar Pradesh

Table 11.4: Sources of Investment for Bore Wells and Pump Sets in Selected Villages

204

Vishwa Ballabh et al.

compared with West Bengal and Bihar. The cumulative refinance (per hectare of the net sown area) in 2000–01 for Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Bihar comes to Rs 941, Rs 188 and Rs 134, respectively. So, the refinance for Uttar Pradesh is five times that of West Bengal and seven times that of Bihar during the period 1987–2001. Bihar is the most neglected state, showing very low or even nil refinance between 1998–2001. Over the years the component of refinance2 to minor irrigation (particularly for the development of groundwater) and the total refinance is also declining in all three states (see Table 11.5).3 The lack of institutional credit support prevents the development of positive-dealer dynamics and win-win situations for bankers, dealers and farmers in Bihar and West Bengal. This has led to different trajectories in the development of primary pump set markets when it moves from manufactures, to dealers, wholesalers retailers and finally to the farmers. In eastern Uttar Pradesh, the dealers, through their paid employees, directly negotiate with farmers; in Bihar, there are layers of agents between pump set dealers and farmers. In West Bengal, the local panchayat mediates between farmers and bankers. The relationship between farmers and dealers is limited to buyers and sellers and dealers generally do not do promotional work. Thus, it was found that the relationship between farmers’ and dealers was much more direct and also relatively more competitive in Uttar Pradesh than in Bihar or West Bengal (see Table 11.6). Furthermore, in Bihar, the dealers themselves advance credit to the farmers. These dealers appoint agents on a commission basis for recovery of loans, which further increases the transaction cost of credit. Many self-financed pump sets in Bihar villages are basically purchased through credit from the informal credit market provided by the dealers. While, informally, many farmers talked about it, when it came to the financing of their own pump set they denied these aspects; but our impression is that it is quite substantial. In contrast, dealers in Uttar Pradesh do promotional work but do not have to worry about recovery because more than 50 per cent of the pump sets are financed through the bank and the advancing bank has to bear the burden of recovery. The Revenue Department of the state government has developed a simple and banker-friendly procedure for recovery of the loan. The transaction cost of institutional credit is further enhanced due to the cumbersome process of recovery in Bihar and West Bengal. In Bihar, the banks have to pay the district revenue department an advance fee equal to 10 per cent4 of the recoverable loan amount in case of default by the borrower. This makes banks hesitant to approach the district revenue department for the fear of loss of not only the original loan amount but also the commission paid to the government. In Uttar Pradesh, the district revenue department is allowed to collect 10 per cent from the borrower only on the recovered amount, after the recovery. In West Bengal, the procedure to access credit and subsidy has to be routed through the gram panchayat. The panchayat plays a significant role in the assessment of the creditworthiness of the borrower and feasibility of the scheme. Often, these decisions are based on political considerations and affiliations. Some farmers from the two sample villages in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal stated that they did not approach the bank and block development officials because they were sure that the panchayat would not recommend their applications. In fact, all the farmers in

11695

15391

1998–99

1999–2000

34.11

10.58

19.90

17.09

21.43

28.21

32.63

31.10

24.33

31.37

31.88

56(941)

88(893)

67(805)

66(737)

78(671)

89(593)

85(504)

63(419)

75(356)

71(281)

67(210)

57(143)

45(86)

41(41)∗∗

Per ha of Net Sown Area (Rs)

3

58

0

711

1120

610

421

243

123

44

501

24

1385

4816

0.02

0.33

0

4.45

7.96

7.37

5.12

2.99

1.52

0.49

6.18

0.33

19.45

46.66

MI Refinance∗ Per cent of MI Refinance Total Refinance (Lakh Rs) (%)

Bihar

0(134)

1(134)

0(133)

10(133)

15(123)

8(108)

6(100)

3(94)

2(91)

1(89)

6(88)

0(82)

18(82)

Per ha of Net Sown Area (Rs) 64(64)∗∗

474

379

382

403

535

665

502

651

808

1120

1026

1254

854

1139

1.89

1.96

2.41

2.86

4.31

5.73

4.58

6.50

7.63

11.87

12.48

16.52

15.99

17.99

Per cent of MI Refinance Total Refinance (Lakh Rs) (%)

West Bengal MI Refinance∗

9(188)

7(179)

7(172)

7(165)

10(158)

12(148)

9(136)

12(127)

15(115)

20(100)

19(80)

24(61)

16(37)

Per ha of Net Sown Area (Rs) 21(21)∗

Source: Data provided by NABARD office, Mumbai. See Ballabh et al. 2002. Notes: ∗ Percentages show the proportion of refinance to MI sector (of the refinance of the state). ∗∗ Figures in bracket show the cumulative amount of refinance per hectare of net sown area since 1987–88 rounded off to the nearest integer.

9794

11624

1997–98

2000–01

15499

14640

1994–95

13642

10866

1993–94

1995–96

12930

1992–93

1996–97

11580

12170

1991–92

9866

1990–91

38.17

7664

1988–89

1989–90

36.10

35.12

7130

1987–88

Year

Per cent of MI Refinance Total Refinance (Lakh Rs) (%)

Uttar Pradesh MI Refinance∗

Table 11.5: Refinance for Minor Irrigation by NABARD to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal (1987–2001)

206

Vishwa Ballabh et al. Table 11.6: Role of Commission Agents in UP, Bihar and West Bengal—A Comparative View

Particulars 1. Distributors in the district (no.) 2. Dealers (retailer-cumwholeseller) 3. No. of middlemen and commission agents∗∗ 4. Distance travelled for purchase of pump sets and boring 5. Nature of competition

Uttar Pradesh

Bihar

West Bengal

(Maharajganj)

(Muzaffarpur)

(Bardhaman)

15–20

5–6

7–10

80–100∗

15–20

35–40

1–2

5–6

–

5–10 km

35–40 km

10–15

Intense and competitive

Less competitive, large no. of commission agents and monopoly by a few dealers and distributors

Not existing

Source: Primary Data, 2001–02. See Ballabh et al. 2002. Notes: ∗ Almost every small town in the district has 15–16 dealers. ∗∗ Number of middlemen and commission agents between dealers and farmers.

village Asonpur in Bardhaman district mobilise funds from their own sources and through informal credit markets and not a single farmer has approached banks for loans and subsidies. Thus, a new set of transaction costs has emerged in the case of West Bengal for the access of institutional credit, which in turn affects the development of groundwater through denial or restricted disbursement of institutional credit. From the foregoing discussion, it is evident that states, banks and private entrepreneurs all have played a crucial role in the development of groundwater in three eastern states of India. However, their role has varied across states and within states among villages. The state has provided support in terms of subsidies and also ensured institutional credit which has led to the emergence of pump set dealer-dominated promotional activities. The prime motive of these dealers was profit through the sales of pump sets. In order to increase their profit, they absorbed transaction costs associated with negotiations with the revenue, block and banks for releasing credit and subsidies. Because such opportunity did not exist in Bihar and West Bengal, their role in promotion of groundwater development has been relatively lower. In order to boost groundwater development, the state governments need to streamline credit and subsidy programmes in Bihar and West Bengal and other states in eastern India for boosting agricultural development.

Groundwater Governance in Eastern India

W ATER M ARKET

AND

207

E QUITY

The development of groundwater has also led to the emergence of markets for groundwater resources. The eastern region is no exception to this general phenomenon. In recent years, the issue of equity has received specific attention in sale and purchase of groundwater (water market) in irrigation. One set of opinions holds that socio-economic factors play a very little role in the groundwater market. Another stream of thought conversely argues that there is inequity prevailing in the water market. On the one hand, the water market is regarded as a very important institutional factor, which has promoted agricultural production and equity in the agrarian sector. Shah and Raju (1987) have described various benefits of the groundwater market accruing to the large segment of the farming community. They state: ‘Water markets have the potential to become powerful instruments for efficient and equitable groundwater development. It is also remarkable that the water markets render every member of market better off than those of without market. Risk-free income flows to buyers (small farmers) from better farming on one hand and private tube well owners from selling surplus capacity on the other. Besides, the landless labourers get improved demands for labour and improved wages’ (cited from Prasad 1993: 210). Shah and Ballabh (1997: A189) conducted a study of six villages of the Muzaffarpur district in north Bihar. The study relates to the growth of pump irrigation markets, which they regard as ‘a robust and dominant irrigation institution dwarfing many other institutional impulses and serving virtually as the sole powerhouse energising north Bihar’s new-found agrarian dynamism’ (ibid.). They observed that ‘irrigation was available to almost anyone who asked for it, regardless of caste and class barriers’ (ibid.). In terms of reliability and availability of water on demand, the quality of irrigation service was good and ‘social and kinship factors played a very minor role in mediating water transactions’ (ibid.). But a strong element of monopoly pricing was evinced. The water rate varied between Rs 20–30/hour from a 5 HP pump exceeding the incremental pumping cost by a factor of 2.5 to 3 times and average total cost by a factor of 1.25 to 1.8 times. It is stated that increasing monopoly rents in water prices could have a negative distributional impact. It could lead to a progressive transfer of irrigation surplus from water buyers to pump owners. It could also lead to a loss of output and incomes because water buyers, faced with high water prices, may use less water than required. However, it was found that ‘the marginal product of irrigation was so much larger than the price of pump irrigation that buyers were unmindful of the high price they were paying. No wonder, then, that the high water price was, as yet, a non-issue for north Bihar’s water buyers’ (Shah and Ballabh 1997). Further, it was observed that in regard to the proportion of area irrigated, cropping intensity, yields, and so on, the water buyers systematically out-performed pump owners. ‘Overall, the study challenges the prevailing notion of north Bihar’s stagnant agriculture strapped by feudal production relations. The agrarian scene in the region seems in the throes of a massive transformation’ (ibid.). A similar opinion was expressed by Niranjan Pant that the emergence of groundwater

208

Vishwa Ballabh et al.

markets facilitated improved access to water even for small holders for whom investment in groundwater is economically not viable (Ballabh and Pandey 1999: A-13). But some other studies noticed a significant role of social economic factors hindering the growth of agriculture in eastern India. In the study of a village (mainly having private tube wells) in Muzaffarpur district in Bihar (Prasad 1993: 214, 215), it was found that 68 per cent of the farmers had not felt the impact of groundwater markets on agricultural production. An important reason, according to this study, of the under utilisation of the groundwater was its lack of accessibility for the poor farmers—their inability to purchase water. It is stated: ‘though groundwater market has been spreading over in the village, poor farmers are not able to take advantage of the existence of such market due to their resourcelessness’ (ibid.). Moreover, the structure of the groundwater market was not competitive due to large variations in the water charges and the prevalence of various sorts of discrimination, especially in the supply of water to the small and marginal farmers. ‘The marginal and small farmers have been far away from the benefits of the development of groundwater market and thus, its performance lacks equity effects’ (ibid.). Another set of studies reveals the inequities prevailing in the water market. It shows that the private tube well owners sell water at higher rates (Rs 20/hr) to the majority of lower caste buyers; but at lower (Rs 12–18/hr) rates to the same caste (19 per cent) and higher caste buyers (10 per cent), and to family related households. So, there exists caste-based inequity in the water market. A lot of variation was found in terms of the payment schedule for water services also. It was found that of those who made full payment of water purchased, most (83 per cent) belonged to the lower castes and very few to the same castes (12 per cent) and higher castes (5 per cent). Moreover, the balance unpaid was largely in the case of family related households (61 per cent) and also the same castes (19 per cent) and higher castes (15 per cent), but very little in case of the lower castes (5 per cent). The evidence from six villages in the three states does not support large inequities in groundwater sale and purchase. It was observed during the field visit that the number of buyers and sellers is not mutually exclusive. A water seller could also be a buyer depending upon the location of his field and the nearest bore well/tube well. Broadly, three types of terms and conditions for water trading were found in these villages: (i) on cash basis, (ii) on kind basis and (iii) on area basis. Cash and kind were charged hourly water sales whereas the charge was on an area basis for an entire season. Each type had a wide variation in water trading conditioned by informal social relations and convention within the village. Each village had a particular water rate (we may call it ruling water price) either on hourly basis or on area basis. On these ruling prices, sometimes, sellers offered a discount and gave more time for the payment to buyers belonging to the same caste and kinship. Thus, in Bihar the water rates (per hour) charged are as low as Rs 5 to Rs 15, provided the buyer gets diesel for hired pump sets to draw water from his own bore well and/or as a swapping arrangement between a pump set/bore well owner. In Asonpur village (Bardhaman district in West Bengal) a contract rate of Rs 700/bigha (0.132 ha) is offered to the buyers for the irrigation of boro (summer) paddy by the submersible pump set owners. In Hatberia village (South 24 Paraganas), the buying of water is very limited due to high water charges, which restricts rabi cropping. In Uttar Pradesh and

Groundwater Governance in Eastern India

209

Bihar, water charges are settled usually at the end of a cropping season partly through the crop yield and the balance by cash. The data in Tables 11.7 and 11.8 show that the distribution of pure water buyers are those who depend solely on purchased groundwater. They do not own pump sets and hence are not involved in water selling by size of landholding and caste categories. Although a large number of water buyers belong to small and marginal categories, the area irrigated through purchased water was more on the large farm categories in all but one village—Machhahi in the Muzaffarpur district. It should be noted that there was only one farmer in this village having land more than 3 ha. Again, in terms of caste, the number of buyers in upper and middle caste households is higher than the lower caste categories. On the whole, water markets in these villages do not seem to be oppressive for a particular caste or size category of farm households. Since small and medium farmers and lower caste households are also sellers, they can claim a sizeable proportion of irrigation surplus generated through higher water prices, as a group water market would be in their favour if they are net sellers. To some extent, empirical evidences from the study villages support it. A similar analysis of water sellers revealed that the sellers are not dominated by particular land size categories or castes (Ballabh et al. 2002); if anything, the number of sellers from small and marginal farm household categories was higher than the middle and large farm households in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar villages. Some of the small and marginal farm households are sellers of water in one place and buyers in another place. Thus, water selling has helped these small and marginal farmers to improve the economic viability of their investment in pump sets. In the case of West Bengal, it was the middle category farmers having 1–3 ha who were selling more water. Because of higher costs involved in the development of groundwater through submersible pump sets and tube wells, a different picture and contractual terms and conditions emerged in the water market of West Bengal. Two types of contractual arrangements are common—(i) fixed rent per unit of land, Rs 700/bigha (0.132 ha); and (ii) lease in land on fixed rent by the owners of submersible pumps and tube wells. The difference between these two arrangements is that, in the former, all the risk is borne by the water purchaser, whereas, in the later, the risk is borne by the water sellers. Although risk of failure for boro rice is relatively small, the person entering into a contract with the owners of the submersible pump set has to pay the entire contracted amount. Half of the amount is to be paid in the beginning of the season. The payment is not associated with the success and failure of the crop and all the risk of crop failure is borne by the owner of the land. Elsewhere within the district, it was found that the owners of submersible pump sets lease in land from the neighbouring farmers and pay them a fixed amount of grain (unhusked rice). This system is not prevalent in Asonpur village of Bardhaman district because landowners fear loss of their land under the Tenancy Act. An analysis of sellers by caste categories revealed that water sellers in Rampur and Khemaupur villages of Uttar Pradesh were evenly distributed among upper, middle and lower castes; in Machhahi and Fariani villages of Bihar and Asonpur village of West Bengal, it was dominated by the middle caste groups. Overall, thus comparing the pure buyers and sellers of the groundwater, it appears that the middle caste group of the farming community have benefited more from the

Particulars

Land owned (ha)

No.

Land owned (ha) 84.5

184

17.6

136

11.9

Land owned (ha) No.

20

37.5

Land owned (ha) No.

24

17.7

4

No.

Source: Primary data, Ballabh et al. 2002.

Total

Marginal farmers (< 0.5 ha)

Small farmers (0.5 to 1 ha)

Medium Farmers (1 to 3 ha)

Land owned (ha)

Large Farmers (> 3 ha) No.

Caste

Maharajganj Rampur (U)

180.81

307

37.99

188

42.86

64

72.54

48

27.44

7

Azamgarh Khemaupur

Eastern Uttar Pradesh

109.06

495

64.81

436

33

51

11.23

8

0

0

Muzaffarpur Machhahi

Bihar

28.48

70

7.84

50

7.6

11

13.68

9

0

0

Purnia Fariyani

137.72

268

39.02

160

47.94

72

50.75

36

0

0

Bardhaman Asonpur

24.44

75

14.89

60

8.52

14

1.04

1

0

0

24 Parganas (S) Hatberia

West Bengal

Table 11.7: Pure Buyers of Groundwater by Size of Landholding Categories (No. of Households)

No.

Land owned (ha)

No.

Land owned (ha)

Source: Primary data, Ballabh et al. 2002.

Total

Lower Caste

Land owned (ha)

84.56

184

5.39

56

63.18

107

Land owned (ha)

No.

15.99

No.

Upper caste

Middle caste

21

Particulars

Caste

Maharajganj Rampur (U)

180.81

307

37.44

149

50.05

84

93.32

74

Azamgarh Khemaupur

Eastern Uttar Pradesh

109.06

495

2.58

43

99.14

392

7.33

60

Muzaffarpur Machhahi

Bihar

28.48

70

0.67

6

27.81

64

0

0

Purnia Fariyani

Table 11.8: Pure Buyers of Groundwater by Caste

137.72

268

1.12

2

69.53

146

67.06

120

24.44

75

0

0

17.88

52

6.57

23

24 Parganas (S) Hatberia

West Bengal Bardhaman Asonpur

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water market and sale of water than the large or small farmers. Thus, it could be concluded that the water market does not reinforce an in-egalitarian distribution of resources. If the evidence gathered from the six villages are any indication, it could be said that the water market leads to a more egalitarian distribution of gains from groundwater development in the eastern states.

C ONCLUSION Groundwater development has induced agricultural growth in east India. But the development of groundwater is not uniform in the region. It varies across states and also between different regions within a state. This reflects that there is scope for further groundwater development in the region. Institutional credit has not played as much of a role as it is generally believed. NABARD refinance has always been the highest in Uttar Pradesh. The flow of credit has led to the emergence of several intermediate institutions and development of localised markets for pump sets, which has helped in faster development of groundwater resources. Evidence from the six villages suggests that small farms and lower caste households are not at a disadvantage as a group due to monopolistic water prices. To the extent water prices matter, a very important step from the cost and operation angles would be to go in a big way for installing electric operated tube wells and ensuring adequate power supply for rapid agricultural development in the region. Government support provided in Uttar Pradesh under the free-boring and subsidy-credit scheme to the small and marginal farmers has enabled them to have the ownership of boring and pump sets. This has helped them irrigate their own land as well as sell water to other farmers. So it has, in one way, promoted social equity in the agrarian sector. In addition to their own resources, they have quite effectively utilised the institutional support provided to them for the development of groundwater and raising agricultural production. The semi-feudal constraints on production have been considerably weakened over the years. The development of new institutions, including the groundwater market, is playing a positive role in expanding irrigation and raising production. However, the role of the new institutions requires to be deeply examined. Further, the constraints emerging due to the fragmentation of landholdings, that is, lack of land consolidation, have been considerably overcome through the development of the water market and technological factors. In the 1980s and 1990s, groundwater development and institutional finance have been the highest in Uttar Pradesh, but the fastest agricultural growth has taken place in West Bengal. Institutional mechanisms that have facilitated groundwater development are not the same across the three states. Whereas private dealers and agents have been the key factor in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the panchayat, despite certain limitations, has played an important role in West Bengal. In fact, the role of these two institutions is not essentially contradictory. They may have the potential to play a complementary role for further groundwater development and agricultural growth. The absence of institutional credit has not only prevented investment in

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213

groundwater development but also the emergence of competitive market for pump sets and hence the distributive impact as well. However, Bihar has consistently lagged far behind the other two states in terms of groundwater development and agricultural growth. It needs special measures for promoting the development of groundwater and agricultural growth. There is a wide scope for increasing groundwater development, particularly in Bihar and West Bengal and perhaps even in other states in the region. Many scholars have shown concern about falling prices of rice in West Bengal due to which its cultivation is becoming unprofitable. Evidence from Bangladesh also suggests that the fall in boro rice prices in the early 1990s was directly related to the fall in the number of shallow tube wells installed. In much of east India, groundwater is used to grow rabi crops of either wheat in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar or boro rice in West Bengal. These two crops come within the purview of procurement of the Government of India, which announces a yearly minimum price for both of these crops. But the public procurement system is very lax in all the eastern states. In much of east India, farmers are still forced to sell off their produce in distress right after harvest. Farmers from this region have a comparative advantage in growing rice, but benefits of minimum support price (MSP) largely goes to north-western commercial producers of rice (Pandey et al. 2002). The removal of subsidies to rice producers in north-west India and lowering of the procurement prices will increase the profitability of rice production in east India. Further, as stated above, this will further induce private capital formation in east India through investment in groundwater development. There are empirical evidences that suggest that terms of trade and long term institutional credit have a significant impact on private capital formations in agriculture. Hence, redesigning credit subsidy for pump irrigation on the line of Uttar Pradesh so as to make the pump set market more competitive and buyer friendly would go a long way in the development of agriculture in the region. Thus, if the agricultural production is to be boosted in east India through groundwater development, the state government, local institutions like panchayats and institutional credit all have to work in tandem. In its eastern part, the state of Uttar Pradesh has found this right combination.

Notes 1. In this village, a pump set is used to lift water from small ponds. 2. Refinancing means NABARD provides credit to the commercial and land development banks for advancing loans to agriculture sectors at the bank rate which is much lower than those charged to farmers. Thus, the bankers make a sizeable profit on the refinance provided to commercial banks for advancing loans to agriculture which is a priority sector. 3. The actual credit disbursement to the minor irrigation sector, however, does not solely depend on the amount of refinance provided by NABARD and banks could also supplement it through their own resources. It is only when resource availability with a bank is tight that the bank resorts to refinancing. It is quite common belief in the financial sector that the actual disbursement of credit to agriculture sector is to the time of three to four times the refinance provided by NABARD. 4. If a borrower defaults in eastern Uttar Pradesh and banks request the revenue department for recovery, the revenue department charges 10 per cent additional amount as a cost of recovery from the borrower on the amount recovered. In contrast, in Bihar the bank has to pay 10 per cent on recoverable amount, whether or not the revenue department has recovered it.

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References Ballabh, V. and S. Pandey (1999). ‘Transitions in Rice Production Systems in Eastern India: Evidence from Two Villages in Uttar Pradesh’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34(13): A11–16. Ballabh, V., K. Choudhary, S. Pandey and S. Mishra (2002). ‘Groundwater Development and Agriculture Production: A Comparative Study of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal’, project report (unpublished). Anand: Institute of Rural Management. Bardhan, P. (1989). ‘Interlinked Rural Economic Arrangements’, in P. Bardhan (ed.), The Economic Theory of Agrarian Institutions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dubash, N.K. (2002). Tubewell Capitalism, Groundwater Development and Agrarian Change in Gujarat. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pandey S., B.C. Barah and L. Velasco (2002). ‘Patterns of Rice Productivity Growth in Eastern India: Implications for Research and Policy’, unpublished mimeo. Las Banos: International Rice Research Institute. Prasad, J. (1993). ‘Marketing of Farm Inputs: A Case Study of Private Groundwater Market in Bihar’, The Bihar Journal of Agricultural Marketing, 2(2): 209–15. Shah, T. (1993). Water Markets and Irrigation Development: Political Economy and Practical Policy. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Shah, T. and V. Ballabh (1995). ‘The Social Science of Water Stress: An Exploratory Study of Water Management Institutions in Banaskantha District, Gujarat’, in M. Moench (ed.), Groundwater Management: The Supply Dominated Focus of Traditional NGO and Government Efforts. Ahmedabad: VIKSAT Natural Heritage Institute. Shah, T. (2001). ‘Muscle, Diesel and Electrical: Energy-Irrigation Dynamics in Eastern Uttar Pradesh’, Monograph, Anand: Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation. Shah, T. and K.V. Raju (1987). ‘Working of Groundwater Markets in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat: Results of Two Village Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly, 22(13): A23. Shah, T. and V. Ballabh (1997). ‘Water Markets in North Bihar, Six Village Studies in Muzaffarpur District’, Economic and Political Weekly, 32(52): A83.

12 Political Economy of Groundwater Governance in Gujarat: A Micro-level Analysis Anjal Prakash

I NTRODUCTION For more than a decade, Gujarat has been at the forefront of debates concerning water scarcity and the level of decline in the groundwater table. This is rightly so, as water scarcity for drinking and irrigation is the order of the day in today’s Gujarat, particularly in areas where groundwater recharge is low and rainfall is scanty and erratic. The consecutive droughts of 1999–2001 aggravated the problem that compels to look into the systems of water governance in the state.1 The immediate fallout of increasing water scarcity and groundwater level decline is the deceleration of agricultural growth and productivity seriously affecting the livelihoods of millions of people staying in the hinterland. The question is—what are the measures taken by the government to check this process and confer the livelihood rights of the people who are directly affected? The issue of groundwater governance comes as a necessary and important point in these deliberations due to heavy reliance of the state on groundwater resources for agriculture. More than 80 per cent of the state’s irrigation requirements are met through groundwater, a resource that has been overdeveloped in recent years. The crisis of depleting aquifers and increasing threat to the livelihood of the poor is in fact a crisis of governance. Gujarat stands in the queue of weak groundwater-governed states of India due to its failure in managing a precious resource. This is largely manifested in inadequacies to enforce rules regarding access and use of groundwater. Far from it, the state has encouraged groundwater exploitation through encouraging groundwater-based agriculture intensification. Further, it turned a blind eye on expanding private groundwater markets in the early 1980s and late 1990s which exploited the deep aquifer through a subsidised electricity structure and lack of enforcement of regulatory mechanism. Most of these markets have been shrinking due to decline in water levels and increasing prices to access them from deep aquifers. Agricultural intensification suffers from stagnation due to land degradation and crop failure narrowing the gap between agricultural investment and profit. The water resources have been exploited to

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such an extent that even the famous Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), professed as the panacea to solve the water problems, would also not be able to enhance much of the lost groundwater in critical areas. This chapter traces the history of groundwater governance in Gujarat by looking into the causes and distribution of water scarcity, showing how scarcity is historically grounded in the social-ecology and larger political economy of the state. The chapter begins with sketching the groundwater scarcity in different eco-regions of Gujarat. This is followed by focus on the process of agricultural intensification in the pre and post-Independence era marked with new technology that relied on groundwater irrigation that aggravated the problem of its depletion. This process also increased inequity in resource access, where the gains from agricultural intensification largely benefited the affluent classes within the village society. It then discusses the possible changes brought about in the groundwater ecology of Gujarat through the famous SSP and its distribution networks. At the end, the chapter summarises the discussions and looks into alternative forms of groundwater governance, focussing on restoring communitybased surface water bodies and ecologically-benign agricultural development to enhance the productivity of the ecosystem.

T HE A GRO - ECOLOGY

OF

G UJARAT

Within its limited geographic area, Gujarat has a unique bio-climate ranging from dry desert areas to high-altitude rain forests. According to the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Planning, Gujarat can be broadly divided into eight major eco-regions based on variability in rainfall potential and actual evapo-transpiration and other ecological factors. These regions are marked by erratic and uneven rainfall on one hand and heavy rains on the other. Gujarat receives only one rainfall each year from the south-west monsoon between June–July to September–October that ranges from 1,000–2,000 mm in the southern rocky highland to around 250–400 mm in Kutch. The distribution of rainfall determines the water regime of the state. Around 70 per cent of Gujarat’s total geographic area falls in the arid or semi-arid region and is droughtprone (see Table 12.1). The surface water is generally concentrated in southern and central parts of the state. The northern alluvial plain lacks a perennial source of water but is rich in groundwater sources. Most of the groundwater resource is concentrated in unconsolidated formations covering 40 per cent of the area of the state. Around 70 per cent of this potential is in the alluvial plains (Patel 1997). For the purpose of the present analysis, the agro-ecological zones of Gujarat are broadly divided into four regions: water-abundant south Gujarat; central alluvial plain or middle Gujarat; semi-arid northern alluvial plain or north Gujarat; and peninsular Gujarat including Saurashtra and Kutch. The differential rainfall in the above regions has resulted in a particular agro-ecology across the state. The rainfall diminishes from the southern hills (1,000–2,000 mm annually) to the northern-most districts of Sabarkantha and Banaskantha (300–400 mm annually). While the southern hills are forested, the northern plains feature good soil in Mehsana

14

Coastal zones of Gujarat

Source: Compiled from Patel (1997).

24

Peninsula of Saurashtra

8

8

Central alluvial plane

Peninsula of Kutch

14

Northern alluvial plane

13

7

Southern rocky highland

Rann and Banni of Kutch

12

Northern rocky highland

Eco-region Name

Area in Per cent

10–40 Arid to Humid

20–40 Semiarid

40 Arid

40 Arid

20–30 Sub-humid

20–40 Semiarid

10–15 Sub-humid

30–40 Semiarid

Aridity Index in Per cent

250–200

400–600

250–450

250–450

500–800

450–700

1000–2000

700–1000

Rainfall in Millimetre

Rann, wet/dry grassland

Nil Irrigated

Scrub forest waterland

Moist deciduous forest

Dry deciduous forest

Unconfined

Rainfed Littoral and Rainfed, irrigated, swamp forests, horticulture wetlands, estuaries

Unconfined and Scrub forest Semi-confined wasteland

Rainfed

Nil

Irrigated & rainfed

Rainfed, Irrigated

Rainfed

Rainfed

Agro-ecosystem

Ecosystems Natural Ecosystem

Unconfined and Scrub forest Semi-confined wasteland

Saline waste

Unconfined & Confined

Unconfined & Confined

Unconfined

Unconfined

Water Regime

Table 12.1: Eco-regions of Gujarat

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and part of Banaskantha district. The climate becomes semi-arid proceeding towards the northwest. Peninsular Gujarat consists of two sub-regions—Saurashtra and Kutch. Most of Saurashtra is characterised by semi-arid hard rock regions with an annual rainfall of 400 mm. Kutch has an annual rainfall of around 300 mm and is the most arid part of Gujarat (Wood 1999). This ecological diversity has resulted in uneven distribution of cultivable land, water and vegetation across the state, which also determines the water availability in each of the four eco-regions. The combination of climate, physiography and geology in different regions of the state provides naturally favourable conditions for water resources. The north Gujarat alluvial area has low rainfall, but good topographic conditions for recharge and ideal conditions for aquifers, making it a groundwater rich region.2 The southern hilly and forested areas have provided perfect locations for creating surface storage dam reservoirs. The arid areas of Kutch have confined aquifers and the coastal areas of Saurashtra are capable of storing the rainfall run-off from the upland rocky terrain (Hirway 2000). However, the situation has changed considerably and Gujarat is now known for water crises, mostly in north Gujarat, Saurashtra and Kutch. An extensive canal network feeds the central region while the southern region is naturally rich in water resources. Next, I illustrate the water scarcity situation in Gujarat showing the nature and extent of the areas that are affected.

The Water Scarcity in Gujarat Because of grossly mismanaged water resources, Gujarat has been facing a severe water crisis. Due to surface water being concentrated in the southern areas, Gujarat’s water needs are heavily met through groundwater resources. As discussed earlier, more than 80 per cent of Gujarat’s irrigated agriculture is dependent on groundwater, apart from several other needs such as industrial and domestic water requirements. Due to this, groundwater resources have been overdeveloped in many regions of Gujarat. Groundwater mining has resulted in areas increasingly coming under ‘overexploited’ categories. Recent figures released by the government show that while in 1984 about 162 sub-districts3 (88 per cent) were under the ‘white’ category, it has decreased to 95 (about 51 per cent) in 1997. The number of overexploited sub-districts has increased from just one in 1984 to 31 in 1997.4 Salinity ingress into groundwater is another problem that is caused by excessive withdrawal of groundwater, especially in areas close to the seashore or marshy land such as Kutch. The number of sub-districts affected by salinity ingress has increased from one in 1984 to seven in 1997. As of 1997, only 52 per cent of the sub-districts in Gujarat had groundwater that can be considered safe (ibid.). The question then is: what forces have led to the present situation of water scarcity? The answer is complex and lies in the larger political economy of the state. The earlier land use and livelihood patterns were determined by the availability of fresh water, that is, a supplydetermined pattern of land use and agriculture-based livelihoods. This pattern changed due to technological advancement, such as pump sets, and external input agriculture that increased pressure on natural resources, such as water. The increase in water demand led to changes in the topology of water utilisation in three spheres—technological, institutional and distributional—each of which have had significant effects on the nature and dynamics

Political Economy of Groundwater Governance in Gujarat

219

of the resource and its consequence on the users (Prabhakar et al. 1997). Further, an estimate on the potential of irrigation and utilisation shows that in June 2003, the ultimate irrigation potential through surface water had been assessed at 3.94 million hectares (MHa). This included 1.79 MHa to be irrigated through the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP). However, the surface water potential created up to June 2003 was only 1.71 MHa of which 1.48 MHa has already been utilised. The irrigation potential through groundwater was assessed at 2.55 MHa, out of which the potential of 2.04 MHa was created up to June 2003 and almost all of it was utilised (see Table 12.2). Altogether, the total irrigation potential created up to June 2003 has worked out to be 57.57 per cent of the ultimate irrigation potential, and maximum utilisation comes to 94.10 per cent of the irrigation potential created and 54.18 per cent of ultimate irrigation potential (Government of Gujarat 2004). Table 12.2: Irrigation Potential Created and Utilised as per June 2003 Ultimate Irrigation Potential Item Surface water Major and medium scheme Sardar Sarovar Project∗ Minor irrigation Groundwater Total

Irrigation Potential Maximum Utilisation Created up to June 2003 up to June 2003 (in Million Hectares)

3.94 1.80 1.79 0.35 2.55 6.49

1.71 1.41 0.03 0.27 2.04 3.74

1.48 1.29 0.03 0.16 2.03 3.51

Source: Government of Gujarat (2004). Note: ∗ Including conjunctive use.

Much of the problem lies with the way water resources have been managed in the state in the past four decades and in the development of agriculture. The lion’s share of total groundwater use in the state is siphoned off by agriculture. The development of agriculture in Gujarat is accounted to its response to the Green Revolution technologies. In the initial stages, diesel pump sets met this demand but had a limited capacity to cope with decreasing groundwater levels. Rural electrification boosted investment in electric tube wells which had a greater capacity to support high-powered motors to fetch water from deep aquifers. Groundwater was seen as an extremely cheap and efficient alternative to surface irrigation networks that were non-dependable. The current overexploitation of groundwater in Gujarat is closely related to this reliance (Bhatia 1992). The dependence on groundwater showed a considerable rise in well population since the 1960s with overdraft and saline intrusion problems becoming major issues in some locations. Consequently, water tables started dropping alarmingly. Depletion of static groundwater reserves became a well known problem in many areas of Gujarat (Moench 1991). Due to the stressful groundwater situation, agriculture has also suffered as the cost of irrigation increased manifold. This is coupled with land quality degradation and increased salinity of groundwater that have adversely affected the productivity of agriculture. In the next section, I historically examine these trends for Gujarat.

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A GRICULTURAL D EVELOPMENT AND G ROUNDWATER I RRIGATION IN G UJARAT Agricultural development in Gujarat can be broadly divided into four distinct phases—preIndependence (prior to 1947), pre-Green Revolution (1947–65), Green Revolution (1965–1980) and post-Green Revolution (1980 onwards). In order to understand the pattern of agriculture in Gujarat, I outline its phase-wise characteristics to see how agriculture, historically, has been heavily dependent on the use of groundwater.

The Pre-Independence Phase Pre-Independence agricultural development and revenue administration in Gujarat outlining political-economy trends have been excellently documented by Patel (1969) and Hardiman (1998). This section, therefore, draws heavily on the analysis of these scholars to understand the dependence of agriculture on groundwater in the pre-Independence era. Under the British regime, the Gujarat region formed a part of the Bombay Presidency and covered the five districts of Ahmedabad, Kheda, Panchamahals, Broach and Surat. These districts were interspersed with 148 princely states and estates like Baroda, Bansda, Dharampur, Lunawada, Deogadh Baria, Jambuaghoda, Limbdi, Idar, and Palanpur, as well as others that were under the jurisdiction of the Western India States Agency. The whole of Gujarat did not come under British rule at one stroke as the territorial connections commenced in commerce and dated back to the 17th century with Surat and then with Broach, Ahmedabad and Kheda, and lastly with Panch Mahals. The first territorial footing of the British was in 1759 when they captured Surat, followed by Broach, Ahmedabad and Kheda in 1772, 1817 and 1838, respectively. Panch Mahals was the last district of Gujarat to come under British rule in 1877 (Patel 1969: 15–18). For revenue administration the Bombay Presidency followed the Ryotwari system unlike the Zamindari system introduced in the Permanent Settlement in Bengal in 1793. The land revenue in the Zamindari system was fixed in perpetuity at 10/11th of the agricultural income and 1/11th of the rent was left with the Zamindars. The British thought that this system would create a loyal force that would help them in consolidating the empire. However, they found that the revenue flow was not up to their expectations and Zamindars under reported the actual cultivated land and hence siphoned off the share of agricultural revenue. This led to the introduction of the Ryotwari system in Madras Presidency that was based on the full survey and assessment of the cultivable land. This system proved to be giving better revenue and hence was replicated in Bombay Presidency in 1851 (ibid.: 20). However, when the British took over Gujarat, irrigation was on the decline. This decline appears to be due to the continuing warfare in the region between the British, the Peshwas, the Gaikwads and other Maratha aristocrats for ascendancy that caused the traditional forms

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of irrigation systems such as wells and tanks to decay. The British did not value the excellent irrigation system built by previous rulers (Hardiman 1998). For example, the large reservoir near Ahmedabad, the Karna Sagar–which had existed since the time of Solankis–was fed from a dam on the river Rupen. This was washed away in the monsoon of 1814. The British, who took control of Ahmedabad in 1817, never made any efforts to reconstruct this dam and the reservoir ceased to exist (ibid.: 1538). The Irrigation Commission of 1901–03 that was appointed to look into the problems of irrigation recommended irrigated projects connected with the Sabarmati, Mahi, Narmada and Tapti rivers. The Visvesvaraya Committee appointed in December 1937 observed that: …there is a keen demand in Gujarat for large storage works that would ensure perennial irrigation, but considering the meteorological conditions and the existing high intensity of cropping without irrigation in this region, it is a matter of doubt whether the increase in the value of crops raised and the revenue expected would justify the outlay (Report of Irrigation Inquiry Committee quoted in Patel 1969: 12–13). However, these suggestions were dropped or postponed on the grounds of financial stringency. In the absence of a network of irrigation works, the cultivators mainly relied on the monsoon and wells for irrigating the crops (ibid.). Wells accounted for over 78 per cent of the total irrigated area in 1930 as against only 10 per cent of the area irrigated through canals. This was because of British policies that promoted well irrigation through tax exemption. In many parts of Ahmedabad district, for example, when a new well was built to a depth of 200 haath (about eight meters) or more, the land thus irrigated was exempted from tax on rabi (spring) and unado (summer) crops for either a specified period of between two and eight years or for as long as it took to repay the cost of construction. The general rule was that the deeper the well, the longer the exemption (Hardiman 1998: 1539). The tax-relief policies, thus, gave an impetus to well irrigation which largely benefitted the wealthier communities within village societies. The Indian Easement Acts of 1882, passed by the British, provided the right to appropriate water beneath the land of the landowner. This change in the property right system created incentives for exploiting a common resource (Bhatia 1992: 64). As a result, individual well construction gained momentum followed by the development of water markets in areas dominated by agriculture in the early 19th century. The political position of the elites in the village was strengthened through the exchange of water in a sharecropping system that appropriated onethird of the produce for supplying water. Further, it gave rise to economic individualism and capitalist development in agriculture. The British also encouraged the production of non-food crops such as cotton to provide raw material to textile mills in Manchester. The landowners, who were also the village elite, used a variety of oral tenancy contracts and shifted the risk of

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cultivation to the lower classes. The Kanbis, who were elevated to the status of Patidars, were the main beneficiary of the changed land tenure system and encroached the land of the Kolis and Adivasis in the northern part of the region (Shah and Rutten 2002: 27).

The Pre-Green Revolution Phase After Independence in 1947, Gujarat came under the jurisdiction of the Western India States Agency and the princely states and estates were merged into the existing five districts of Gujarat in 1948–49. In 1956, the reorganisation of the states merged the state of Saurashtra and Kutch into the bigger bilingual state of Bombay. In 1960, Bombay state was bifurcated into Gujarat and Maharashtra. A tenancy legislation was implemented in 1951 with an objective to increase the income of cultivators by increasing the landholding. Compared to other states in India, the Tenancy Act was effectively implemented in Gujarat, especially in abolishing the Zamindari system in Saurashtra and other regions. However, the advantage of the Act was mainly taken by the affluent class and hence it did not change the basic social structure of village society. Land reforms accelerated the process of commercialisation and economic development, especially in central and south Gujarat (Shah and Rutten 2002: 27–30). Another development was a reform in the land revenue system. The Taxation Enquiry Commission (1953–54), set up by the government to look into the land revenue system, recommended that the land revenue should be reduced. The report mentioned that Gujarat had been heavily assessed in the past as a part of former Bombay state on the account of the fertility of soil and the revenue legacy of the Maratha period. Accepting the recommendations of the commission, the Bombay Government amended the Land Revenue Code by the Amendment Act XXVII of 1956, and made 1/16th of the average yield of the crops as a basis of normal and standard assessment of the land. By this time, agricultural production was rising due to early adoption of new technologies in agriculture. Therefore, the burden of land revenue on the cultivators decreased as their income increased due to higher yields in agriculture. The beneficiaries of this were large landholders who raised commercial crops with a bigger, larger marketable surplus (Patel 1969: 468–92). The process created a class of farmers within village society who had already tested the new technology and were ready to adopt the Green Revolution that was underway. During this phase, irrigation was limited to the rabi (winter) season and the karif (monsoon) season crops were mainly rainfed. Irrigation was used for rabi crops such as cotton, tobacco and groundnut, which are non-food crops. The area under non-food crops considerably increased from 1949–50 to 1963–64. This was coupled with a steady decrease in cereals and other food grains (see Table 12.3). The figures, thus, show that Gujarat slowly moved towards a cash crop economy that was largely irrigated through wells. In 1961, around 68 per cent of Gujarat’s population was directly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. According to the 1961 Census, the total population of Gujarat was over 20 million, and of the total workers cultivators constituted 53.3 per cent while agricultural labourers constituted 14.8 per cent. This dependence on agriculture led the government to invest into irrigated agriculture to increase its productivity and create employment opportunities.

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223

Table 12.3: Area Under Principle Crops (in million ha) Crop Cotton Tobacco∗ Groundnut Sugarcane Total cereals Total food grains Total oilseeds

1949–50

1963–64

0.82 0.05 0.47 0.01 4.82 5.33 0.75

1.69 0.08 1.85 0.02 3.90 4.44 2.04

Source: Patel (1969: 12). Note: ∗ Excluding Kutch and Saurashtra regions as data was not available.

Under the first Five Year Plan (1951–56), several medium and minor irrigation projects were initiated in Gujarat. But irrigation was insignificant in the early 1960s. In 1961, about 52 per cent of Gujarat’s total geographic area was under cultivation but the net irrigated area as the percentage of net sown area was only 7.8 per cent. Of this, a large part was contributed by well irrigation rather than surface irrigation through canals or tanks. In 1961–62, around 83 per cent of irrigation was carried out through wells and only 9.5 per cent of it was done through canal networks. Through investment in the public irrigation system, canal irrigation increased up to 13.4 per cent in 1965–66 but the dependence on wells and tube wells was almost the same, though the area irrigated through them increased (see Table 12.4). Table 12.4: Area Irrigated by Source (in km2) Source Government canals (including panchayat canals) Private canals Wells (including tube wells) Tanks Other sources

1960–61 652 (9.5) 6 (0.1) 5677 (83.1) 128 (1.9) 366 (5.4)

1965–66 1393 (13.4) 11 (0.1) 8625 (82.8) 296 (2.8) 87 (0.8)

Source: Statistical Abstract of Gujarat State 1985–86 quoted in (Bhatia 1992: 23a). Note: The figures in parentheses indicate the per cent distribution of the net irrigated area by irrigation source.

However, the nature of well irrigation started to change during this phase. While earlier water was extracted manually through the use of draft power, the technology of energised pumps started to enter into the village economy. The electrification of villages also played a role in boosting investment in pump sets. While the number of electrified pump sets was 5400 in 1960–61, it rose to 15,240 at the end of 1966, i.e., around 182 per cent increase over the preceding five year (Bhatia 1992: 21–23).

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Tube well technology coincided with the development of external input agriculture and created an environment for a groundwater-based Green Revolution to stand on firm footing.

Green and Post-Green Revolution During the Green Revolution phase, agriculture contributed to the state economy in more than one way. In 1970–71, the primary sector (including agriculture) contributed around 49 per cent to the net state domestic product (NSDP). The output in the state doubled during this period compared to that recorded in the 1960s. In 1981–83 crop output recorded an unprecedented growth rate of 3.6 per cent, compared to 2.2 per cent in the previous decades. The trends in agriculture over three decades, starting from 1960, show that the Green Revolution has influenced the cropping pattern to move towards cash-crop production. The data released by the Directorate of Agriculture, Gujarat, shows that from 1963–93, the area under cereals have declined from 42.5 per cent to 29.8 per cent, contributing to a total decline of nearly 1.11 million hectares (mha) (Government of Gujarat 2003). The area under food grains remained stagnant at 50 per cent of the gross cropped area during 1963–83 but declined dramatically during 1983–93 to 38 per cent. Food grains were replaced by other crops such as mustard, sugarcane and cotton (see Mathur and Kashyap 2000). The change in the cropping pattern has affected the irrigation scenario in the state. Since almost all the non-food cash crops need irrigation, the area under irrigation has increased over the years. Recent figures show that the per cent of net irrigated area to the net sown area increased from 20.91 in 1981 to 30.51 in 1996–97. During 1980–92, the percentage grew from 20.91 to 27.42 (around 7 per cent), but this growth slowed down in later years. By 1996–97, the area under irrigation increased by only 3 per cent as compared to 1991–92 (see Table 12.5). The overall area under irrigation grew during the Green Revolution and post-Green Revolution period but it was profoundly dependent on the use of groundwater resources. Irrigation through wells and tube wells accounted for 79.31 per cent of all the sources combined in 1980–81 and marginally reduced to 78.45 per cent in 1996–97. The dependence on government canals increased from 18.31 per cent in 1980–81 to 20.13 per cent in 1996–97. The net irrigated area as per cent of the net sown area for the state increased from 20.91 per cent in 1980–81 to 31.51 per cent in 1996–97. In 1998–99, this further increased to 31.88 per cent, which is around 8 per cent less than the national average (Government of Gujarat 2003). In order to meet the need of growing irrigation, numerous private tube wells have come up. The government also responded to the increasing demand for irrigation. During the severe drought of 1965–67, a centrally-sponsored scheme was introduced for groundwater development in nine states.5 The Gujarat Water Resource Development Corporation (GWRDC) was established in 1975 as a state-owned company responsible for establishing and managing irrigation tube wells with resource support from the state government. Between 1975 and 1994, the GWRDC set up 2,800 public tube wells (Shah et al. 1995). The primary objective of the public tube well programme was to increase the area under irrigation by utilising the groundwater. To an extent, it created irrigation access to the farming communities. However, it was a bureaucracy managed subsidy-based programme and hence it

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Table 12.5: Area Irrigated by Source (in ’00 hectares) Year Source Government canals Wells/tube wells Tanks Other sources Total net irrigated area Gross irrigated area Per cent of gross irrigated area to gross cropped area Per cent of net irrigated area to net area sown

1980–81

1985–86

1990–91

3668 15884 409 65 20026 23344

3586 16532 253 24 20395 23812

4731 19301 314 30 24376 29105

1991–92 1993–94 1994–95 1995–96 1996–97 5570 20565 256 34 26425 32269

5301 19709 307 88 25405 30869

5930 23656 353 82 30021 36548

5735 22665 417 105 28922 34994

6125 23863 292 138 30418 36424

21.72

22.81

27.37

29.18

28.77

32.50

31.83

32.95

20.91

21.69

26.22

27.42

26.89

31.24

29.22

31.51

Source: Directorate of Agriculture, Gujarat State; data for several years.

generated enormous losses in the process. Some of the tube wells also became defunct due to lack of repair and maintenance by the bureaucracy. The government decided to transfer the management responsibilities of the defunct tube wells to farmers’ organisations.6 It had two explicitly stated objectives for turning over the public tube wells—to reduce the financial burden on the state and to improve the utilisation of the wells. Many of these tube wells were transferred to farmer cooperatives. Simultaneous to the government’s response to increase irrigation access through groundwater, many water companies7 and farmers’ groups came up to install deep tube wells for sharing and selling surplus water to other farmers. Shah et al. (1995) compare the economic performance of the farmers turned public tube wells and water companies, and reveal that an average company earned twice the amount of an average cooperative run by the government, in gross income terms. The assessments created a policy environment where private water vending was advocated in potential areas. Institutional finance was made available for people or groups who wanted to sink tube wells to access groundwater for irrigation. In many areas of north Gujarat, private water markets emerged to access and sell surplus groundwater. These markets were mostly dominated by the village elite who had resources to invest or had adequate social networks to access institutional finance. The flat-rate electricity and its uninterrupted supply also gave impetus to this growth. As a result, small and marginal farmers became dependent on water vendors for irrigation. Within a policy environment with subsidised electricity, the number of tube wells increased considerably. As a result, the water table started dropping alarmingly and, at present, around 50 per cent of Gujarat’s groundwater falls in the overexploited category. In 1970, the Government of India introduced the Groundwater Model Bill that was a legislation-based approach to control the usage of groundwater. Since ‘water’ is a state subject, the bill brought by the central government was to be endorsed by the state and till date very few state governments have enacted it. In 1992, a revised version of the bill was introduced again but was enacted in very few states. Gujarat, where the groundwater depletion problem was much

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visible, succeeded in implementing it, but it was applied to a limited number of districts that were considered overexploited.8 Even in these districts, the act was never implemented in spirit due to the powerful farmers’ lobby opposing any such regulatory measures. Some of the indirect approaches to managing groundwater resources have come in through limiting institutional credit, electricity pricing mechanisms and electricity connections. These approaches have made little impact and have proven impossible to implement so far, as well-off farmers are generally able to bypass regulations and obtain credit or access to electricity connections. They often already have wells and, if power charges are increased, are able to afford them or make further investment to use water efficiently, such as the introduction of underground pipes instead of open channels to carry water to the field. Overall, most traditional (regulatory) management actions that could reduce rates of groundwater extraction in overdeveloped areas are likely to disproportionately affect the poor (Moench Undated: 15–22). Further, the Supreme Court (SC) of India, responding to public interest litigation (PIL) against the overexploitation of groundwater resources, directed the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to constitute the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) as an authority and exercise power under Section 5 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, for regulating the overexploitation of groundwater resources. The SC also directed to establish a State Ground Water Authority and interact at the state level for making provisions for powers to various field levels such as panchayats and village communities. The CGWB drafted ‘Environment Protection Rules for Development and Protection of Ground Water’, which included legal and institutional aspects and was circulated to all the states for their comments before notification. However, the circulation and enactments of such bills and rules raised the spectre of a vast bureaucratic machinery administering use of groundwater through licensing and supervision. Presently, the owner of the land has absolute freedom in accessing groundwater. However, many abstain from trading this freedom with bureaucratically administered licensing regimes and therefore no state has shown any inclination to adopt the proposal (GOI 1999: 213). Also, these notifications do not work because numerous new tube wells are dug to chase the water table every day all over Gujarat. The reasons for the non-implementation of the regulations are many. Foremost of them is the big farmers’ lobby which constitutes the strongest political influence in the state politics. They are also the largest group engaged in the sale of water and, hence, no regulation has had an effect on their interest. The use of political clout has ensured that the regulatory aspects of legislations are not implemented on ground. Till now, the farmers have witnessed only an indirect form of regulation through a decrease in electricity supply and cuts in institutional finance for digging tube wells. Many attempts were made to convert the present flat-rate into pro-rata tariff but it has not worked well. The electricity charges have also been raised but every time the political leadership was compelled to back-track the decision taken by departments such as the Gujarat Electricity Board. At present, there is a tussle between the government and farmers’ bodies over the electricity price issue. Recently, the price was hiked by the electricity board, which resulted in farmers refusing to pay. A strong agitation by various farmer groups has been reported followed by some form of negotiation. However, until the time of writing this chapter, an amicable solution of the issue that is acceptable to

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both farmers and government had not come about.9 As per the cut back in the institutional finance, the rich farmers have never been dependent on the state. The other sources of finance based on social networks and private credit cooperatives fill this gap. However, looking at the problems in curtaining the demand of groundwater, the government introduced programmes to increase supply and efficient management in the early 1990s. Some of them include the transfer of government-owned tube wells to farmers’ cooperatives, initiating participatory irrigation management (PIM) for efficient utilisation of canal water and undertaking watershed management at a large scale. Among other programmes, the watershed management has shown initial success in Gujarat with a significant increase in agricultural yield, which can be attributed to the substantial increase in water table (Shah 2000). However, among all the initiatives for solving the problem of water scarcity in the state, the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River has been the most visible, controversial and political in recent years. Looking at the scale at which the project is operating, it has the potential to alter the groundwater ecology in some locations of Gujarat. In the next section, I briefly introduce issues related to the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) and its distribution networks. I will also analyse the impact of the new water10 coming from the dam on the groundwater ecology of Gujarat.

T HE S ARDAR S AROVAR D AM

ON

R IVER N ARMADA

The Narmada River originates from the Maikal ranges at Amarkantak, 1,057 m above the sealevel, now in the Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh (MP) in central India. In its 1,312 km long journey before joining the Arabian Sea, the Narmada flows through the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Nearly 90 per cent of the flow is in MP, and most of the remaining is in Gujarat. It flows for a very brief stretch through Maharashtra. The Sardar Sarovar Project is a part of the bigger Narmada Valley Development Plan (NVDP) that envisaged the building of 30 big dams, 135 medium dams and 3,000 small dams on the Narmada and its tributaries. Ever since its conception, SSP has been under controversy over its costs and potential benefits. Numerous organisations and individuals including Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) led movements against the construction of the dam. NBA also filed a writ petition to review the project in the Supreme Court (SC), which stopped the construction of SSP in 1995 at the height of 80.3 m. In February 1999, the SC gave the go ahead for the dam’s height to be raised to a height of 88 meters followed by the judgement in October 2000 to allow the immediate construction of the dam up to a height of 90 m. Further, the judgement also authorised construction up to the originally planned height of 138 m in 5-metre increments subject to receiving approval from the Relief and Rehabilitation Subgroup of the Narmada Control Authority. The history of the SSP and associated controversies are well-documented (Fisher 1995; Mehta 2001; Morse and Berger 1992)11 and hence I focus only on updating the information from the view of changing groundwater ecology due to the SSP in Gujarat.

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The Status of SSP in 2002 Soon after the Supreme Court judgement in 2000, construction work took off with the revised estimated cost of Rs 131.80 million (at 1991–92 prices) against which the cumulative expenditure of Rs 126.63 million was incurred up to March 2002. The dam height has increased from 90 m to 95 m and the government claims to provide annual irrigation benefits to around 1.8 million hectares (mha) spread over 75 sub-districts in 14 districts of Gujarat. It also envisages providing water for domestic and industrial usage in about 8,215 villages and 135 townships (Government of Gujarat 2003). In December 2000, drinking water supply was started through an irrigation by-pass tunnel in the main canal. Many features of the SSP are considered remarkable by the government. For example, its spillway discharging capacity would be the third highest in the world. Upon completion, the 458 km long Narmada main canal would be the largest irrigation canal in the world with an estimated capacity at the head of 40,000 cubic feet per second (cusecs). The 1.8 mha of irrigation potential generated by the SSP would be more than the existing total irrigation potential of all major, medium and small irrigation projects of Gujarat put together. Water for irrigation will be conveyed through a 66,000 km network of conveyance and distribution system consisting of branch canals, distributaries, minors and sub-minors. There will be 42 branch canals off-taking from the main canal, out of which Miyagam, Vadodara, Saurashtra and Kutch branch canals will be the major branches having a capacity of more than 75 cubic meters per second (cumecs [2650 cusecs]). The distribution system will cover a gross command area of 3.43 Mha, spread over 3,393 villages in 62 sub-districts of 12 districts of Gujarat. As of June 2003, the Narmada main canal phase-I, that is, from the main head regulator to the Mahi River crossing was complete. The Narmada main canal in Phase-II-A, that is, from the Mahi river crossing to the Saurashtra Branch Canal off take is nearing completion. The 352 km long Kutch branch canal (KBC) is planned to run through Banaskantha and Patan districts in its initial reach up to 88 km, crossing the little Rann of Kutch and finally entering the Kutch district after travelling 101 km from the start. In the Kutch district, the canal length is from 101 km to 352 km. The total Culturable Command Area (CCA) of the KBC is 175,889 ha out of which 63,111 ha is in the Banaskantha and Patan district and 112,778 ha is in the Kutch district. A total of 0.496 and 0.087 Million Acre Feet (maf) of water is planned for irrigation, and domestic and industrial use in the Kutch district respectively. The KBC will cover 38 villages in Banaskantha, 41 villages in Patan and 182 villages in Kutch districts. The construction work at the KBC is under process. The Gujarat government issued a policy resolution dated 1 June 1995 to adopt and promote participatory irrigation management (PIM) practices under the existing as well as new irrigation schemes that also apply to the SSP command areas. These areas will be divided into village service areas (VSA) of nearly 500 ha wherein Water User Associations (WUA) will be formed which will be responsible for the distribution of the irrigation water.12

SSP’s Effect on Water Availability in Gujarat In its journey up to the Rajasthan border the canal traverses through regions with diverse agroclimatic and soil characteristics, and across numerous streams and major rivers. The major

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areas benefitted would be central and north Gujarat, Saurashtra and Kutch. Apart from bringing irrigation, the canal network is expected to alter the groundwater ecology in the canal command areas. The farmers of these areas are hoping for year-round irrigation based on the surface flow from the canal. They expect the groundwater level to go up, which will also combat salinity ingress (Wood 1999). However, the data provided by the government is treated with lots of suspicion by activists and scholars (Black 2001; Kothari 1999; Ram 1993; Roy 1999). Questions are raised on the extent of irrigation possible under the Narmada command and the cost involved in bringing water from far-off regions. It is claimed that when the original study of the water flow in the river was calculated in 1979, there was not enough historical rainfall and river flow data to produce accurate figures. The official estimates have historically underestimated the affected area and people and grossly overestimated the benefits of dams (Roy 1999). The amount of water actually available for use at the dam site at 75 per cent dependability is only 22.69 MAF and not 27.22 MAF as stated by the government. Even with the official estimate, the SSP is likely to irrigate only 44 to 52 per cent of the 1.8 MHa as the amount of water available for irrigation is substantially less than what was planned. Furthermore, the efficiency of the canal system assumed by the government seems unrealistic. The efficiency is likely to be closer to 45 per cent rather than 60 per cent as claimed and, therefore, it will further reduce water available for irrigation (Ram 1993). In the SSP command areas, the cost at which water will be brought is also questioned. The SSP has taken away a whopping 80 per cent of the total irrigation budget of the Gujarat government for almost a decade between 1994 to 2003. In the 2000–01 annual plan, the SSP was allocated US$ 811 million—half the state’s entire budget. The expenditure is on the ground of the persistent water scarcity in drought-prone districts of Saurashtra, Kutch and north Gujarat. Experts say that water cannot enter the canal by gravity until the dam reaches 110 m. Therefore, a decision was taken to pump water into the canal from the Sardar Sarovar reservoir (Black 2001). Many believe that the cost of pumping water into the canal is too high and unaffordable. For example, in October 2002, water from the Narmada was pumped into the dry beds of River Sabarmati. The people of Ahmedabad experienced the river flowing bank-to-bank after many years. The water was not directly used for drinking but recharged the French wells that were used to supplement the drinking water supply from Raska weir. However, later the Gujarat government slapped a Rs 102 crore charge on the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) towards the water flowing in the River Sabarmati at the rate of Rs 6.40 for every 10,000 litres. As a result, AMC was forced to increase taxes by nearly Rs 3.3 million in its interim budget for the year 2003–04. However, the interim budget was rejected by the standing committee of the AMC under pressure from people and civil society institutions.13 This example shows that the cost of bringing water into canals will be high and only time will tell how people are going to react to the increased cost of irrigation. Even at the cost decided by the government, the fact is that the Narmada water will reach only 2 per cent of drought prone areas in Kutch, 22 per cent in Saurashtra and 17 per cent in north Gujarat. There are other areas such as Sabarkantha, Banaskantha and many villages of Saurashtra that need water but are not under the command area of the SSP.14 In rabi, in 2002, water was released in the Narmada canals for irrigating 80,000 ha in the Narmada, Bharuch and Vadodara districts where the canal infrastructure up to minor level is either fully or partially

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ready. While the full reservoir capacity was likely to be created once the dam height was raised to 135 m by 2003, it will take 10–15 years before the canal network gets constructed to cover the entire command area of the project (Shah 2003). Even in the command area of SSP, water availability is expected to go down as the project cycle increases due to various environmental changes. A 2003 article published in a national daily quotes V.B. Patel, Chairman of the Task Force on Interlinking of Rivers, who warned that Gujarat is running out of its water resources despite the fact that waters from the Narmada reservoir were now reaching several parts of the state. He stated that the estimated population of Gujarat will grow from the present 50 million to 80 million before it stabilises in the next 60 years when the per capita water availability will reduce to nearly two thirds of what is available in 2003. The present availability of water is around 700 cubic metres per capita per year, which is expected to go down to 400 cubic metres in the next 60 years. The present water availability of Gujarat is 300 cubic metres, which is much less than the internationally accepted 1,000 cubic metres per capita per year marked as a water scarce condition.15 Narmada, therefore, should not be mistaken as a panacea for solving the groundwater depletion of Gujarat. Is there a way out of the situation? In the concluding section, I examine alternative methods to counter the problem of water scarcity and groundwater overdevelopment.

C ONCLUSION : T OWARDS AN E COLOGICAL P ERSPECTIVE OF G ROUNDWATER G OVERNANCE This chapter shows how scarcity is historically grounded in the unique ecological situation of Gujarat, ranging from rocky highlands to marshy wet lands and alluvial planes to coastal zones. This diverse situation has resulted in an uneven distribution of land, vegetation, surface and groundwater resources. The land-use patterns that were earlier determined by the availability of surface water, slowly changed due to the introduction of the Green Revolution technology, which was based on external inputs. In order to meet the demand, numerous wells and tube wells came up, mining the deep aquifers in many locations. The government policy of subsidising electricity for the farming community promoted extensive groundwater markets. The market flourished in some of the alluvial zones suitable for tapping deep aquifers but was largely inequitable in providing control over the resource to the society that was marked with socio-economic inequality. Further, these markets helped in consolidating positions of some of the upper class farmers, feeding back to the political linkage that worked against regulatory mechanism for checking groundwater overexploitations. Altogether, the present form of governance has, in-fact, been detrimental on the limited water resources of the state. To an extent, it has allowed the exploitation of surface and groundwater resources for private gains and for a particular class of Gujarati society, making the pattern largely unequal and unsustainable. As one of the responses to the growing problem of water scarcity, the Gujarat government proposed to build a high dam on the river Narmada. A close examination of the

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water available through the SSP shows a limited effect on the groundwater ecology of Gujarat until 2002. The distribution networks of SSP covers only part of the scarcity zones and hence should not be seen as a solution for solving the crisis of scarcity for the large part of Gujarat. Further, the cost at which this water will be available from the SSP has been questioned by planners and experts. An immediate fallout of the scarce water situation is reflected in the contribution of different sectors to the economy and their growth in recent years. A close examination shows that the Gujarat economy has shown an upward trend with a balance between the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors during the 1960s and 1970s. However, since 1980, this growth is tilted more towards the secondary and tertiary sector. Agricultural growth sharply declined from 2.27 per cent in 1960–70 to 0.26 per cent in 1990–96.16 The annual growth rate in agriculture fell to 1 per cent while the secondary and tertiary sector showed a big jump to around 7 per cent during the 1980s. During the 1990s, the annual compound growth rate in agriculture remained at less than 1 per cent while secondary and tertiary sectors rose to 9.45 and 10.61 per cent respectively (Hirway 2000). Further, the share of agriculture towards the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) dwindled from 19.9 per cent in 1993–94 to 13.6 per cent in 2002–03, while the secondary sector showed an increase from 35.8 per cent to 37.2 per cent during the said years, respectively. The tertiary sector showed the highest jump from 38.8 per cent in 1993–94 to 45.6 per cent in 2002–03 (Government of Gujarat 2004). This deceleration of agricultural growth is accounted to several technical constrains such as present high yield variety (HYV) seeds losing their genetic potential, decreasing government’s expenditure on agriculture, irrigation and electricity, and the lack of capacity of small holders to sustain risk (Desai 1997). Over the years, the pressure on land has increased compared, in absence, to major diversification from agriculture leading to increased pressure on natural resources such as land and water. Experts in Gujarat are calling for complementing seed-centered new technology with resource-centered new technology to combat the situation (Hirway 2000). Does this worry planners in Gujarat? A possible answer, advanced by many, to the negative pattern of agricultural growth and its decreasing contribution to the GSDP is that in an industrialising economy this is what is exactly predicted—a move away from primary to secondary and tertiary sectors. However, the declining trend is problematic as agriculture still employs more than half of Gujarat’s population. In 2001, 52.05 per cent of the total workforce of Gujarat came from this sector and hence any decline in its growth directly affects half of the state’s workforce.17 This analysis leads to the concern for an alternative form of groundwater governance in Gujarat, as the present form has been unsustainable, unequal and detrimental to people living on the margins and deriving source of livelihood from their immediate environment. Mehta (2003) analyses the contexts and construction of water scarcity through its linkages with ecological, socio-political, temporal and anthropogenic dimensions and stresses not to conceive it in absolute terms. Water scarcity has distributional and relational aspects as it does not have a universal impact on all social groups. Further, according to her, scarcity is not permanent but is a combination of the period of abundance and bounty. Paranjape and Joy (1995) describe the primary and secondary productivity of an ecosystem from an ecological perspective. According to them, primary productivity is the productivity of an ecosystem

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without any external inputs. The increase in productivity is achieved through the use of the external inputs, which is categorised as secondary productivity of the ecosystem in relation to the particular level of input. The analysis shows that the sum of primary and secondary productivity may rise while the primary productivity of an ecosystem actually declines. In order to maintain the level of productivity, there will be a further increase in external inputs that often leads to diminishing returns. The early warnings signals of the fall in primary productivity of the ecosystem are scarcity of drinking water and increasing external inputs such as more water, and fertilisers to maintain the productivity. This analysis closely follows the Gujarat case where the agricultural production system has heavily relied on external inputs leading to high agricultural production in the beginning. In recent years, there has been a sharp decline in agricultural productivity decreasing the gap between investment and profit. Further, it also has posed environmental dilemma such as depleting aquifers and declining primary productivity of the ecosystem. The big question is—how have the construction of water scarcity and a deeper understanding of ecosystem helped us in developing an alternative ecological framework for groundwater governance? First, the ecological perspective would mean understanding the environmental deterioration that is located in land use, local ecology and patterns of development. Second, the perception of scarcity is rooted in historically evolving politico-economic relations. It is more so in societies encompassed by large socio-economic inequalities in access and control over resources. Water scarcity, therefore, does not have a universal effect on all social groups. An ecological framework means devising strategies to protect the interest of historically marginalised groups in the wake of extreme scarcity situations. In combination, the alternative groundwater governance framework encompasses the political, economic and social processes and institutions and signifies a variety of ways to combine decentralised conservation, supply augmentation and demand management within the understanding of socio-economic asymmetries.

Notes 1. During 1999–2000, the government declared 8,666 villages (of a total of 18,637 villages) scarcity-hit in the wake of monsoon failure. The total scarcity was declared in 6,675 villages while 1991 villages were semi-scarcity hit. 7,467 villages faced severe shortage of drinking water. The deficient monsoon during the year led to a decline of 29–31 per cent of crop production in Saurashtra, Kachchh and North Gujarat districts. The estimated figures of production show decline of 45 per cent in pearl millet, 83 per cent in sorghum, 72 per cent in groundnut and 41 per cent in moong. The total crop failure was estimated to Rs 45.89 million (Government of Gujarat [GOG] 2000). The problem continued in 2002 when 13 out of 25 districts received less than normal rainfall. Some 5,144 villages in these districts were declared scarcity/semi-scarcity hit. The production loss for kharif season was estimated to be 23 per cent, amounting to rupees 18.74 million, while, in the rabi season, the loss was of the order of Rs 9.69 million (GOG 2003). 2. In the villages of Mehsana, the colloquial term describes North Gujarat having three Narmadas beneath its land. This means, North Gujarat can store (or has stored) three times the water available in the Narmada River.

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3. According to the 1991 Census, there were 19 districts and 184 sub-districts in Gujarat. However, in 1998, the districts of Gujarat were reorganised and new districts were carved out of older districts for administrative purposes. Navasari, Bharuch, Anand, Patan, Porbandar and Narmada are the six new districts totalling to 25 districts that exist in Gujarat from 2001. Similarly the number of sub-districts also increased from 184 to 226 (Census of India 2001). 4. According to the Central Groundwater Board, Government of India, the overexploited sub-districts are areas in which level of groundwater is more than 100 per cent of annual recharge. Dark blocks are areas in which level of groundwater development is between 85 and 100 per cent of annual groundwater recharge. Similarly, grey blocks areas that have between 65 and 85 per cent of groundwater development. 5. In order to support the scheme, geo-hydrological units were set up in eight states. The programme was further facilitated by the rapid electrification of the rural areas and the increased availability of institutional finance. The estimated fourth plan outlay of Rs 13.53 million on groundwater schemes (Rs 2. 53 million from the public sector plus Rs 6.50 million from financial institutions plus Rs 4.50 million from the cultivators themselves) was expected to lead to a net increase in the irrigation potential of 4 million hectares (Planning Commission 1974: 1). 6. ‘In the recent years when the government has begun to restrict subsidies, the GWRDC has accumulated a loss of over Rs 700 million. Most of the corporation’s problems are those of any public-sector bureaucracy. It has acquired a permanent staff of 6,400 imposing a staggering wage bill of Rs 220 million per year; as a result, its overheads were 31 per cent of its total operating cost in 1993. Compared to this, the annual gross income of all its tube wells is a mere Rs 60 million which can barely meet a fourth of the salary bill, leave alone the costs inclusive of capital’ (Shah et al. 1995: 160). 7. These are private companies engaged in water vending. In most cases the investment comes from the private sector. 8. ‘After some prodding from the central government, the Bombay Irrigation Act (governing Gujarat) was amended in 1976 to regulate new deep tube wells and the use of water in the existing tube wells. As a result of a series of legislative delays, the amendment only entered into force in 1988 and currently applies to nine districts’ (Dubash 2002: 70). 9. Based on Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission’s (GERC) award, dated 10 October 2000, the Gujarat government hiked the tariff of electricity used in agriculture from June 2003. There are an estimated 600,000 farm connections in the state, wherein farmers pay for electricity according to the contracted load of their motors. The rates for electricity motors of less than 7.5 HP capacity were increased from Rs 350 per year to over Rs 1,100 and on that of more than 7.5 HP capacity to Rs 1,260 from Rs 500 per year. Many believe that the government acted under pressure from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to do away with subsidy in the farm sector following which it was decided to cut subsidy to the Gujarat Electricity Board worth Rs 11.56 billon. Around 57 per cent of this is shouldered by the agriculture sector alone. The Gujarat government spends Rs 1,700 crore every year as subsidy to farmers. However, soon after the declaration of tariff hike, strong agitations sparked off from farmers’ organisations. They stopped paying electricity bills and, in some cases, did not allow the electricity department officials to enter the village to demand payment or severe connections due to non-payment. A number of farmers’ organisations were involved in the agitation. Most prominent upon them was the Gujarat Farmers’ Agitation Forum led by Bipin Desai, Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), the farmers’ wing of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and Gujarat Khedut Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS) backed by the Congress party. The agitations led to two state-wise bandhs in 2003 wherein the government used force to suppress the violent agitations. A 31-year-old farmer in Surat district died in September 2003 after police officers beat him up while he was taking part in

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Anjal Prakash a demonstration against power tariff hike. However, as the general elections were round the corner in 2004, the government offered 25 to 33 per cent reduction in power tariff. This would mean that the farmers using up to 7.5 HP pumps would have to pay Rs 750 per HP per year instead of the proposed Rs 1,050. Similarly, those using motors higher than 7.5 HP capacity would pay Rs 900 instead of Rs 1,200 per HP per year. The new tariff was also not accepted by the farmers’ organisation and they continued their resistance. In February 2004, one of the farmers’ organisations, BKS, compromised with the government and called off its strike after a decision on lowering the tariff further by Rs 50 per HP. However, other organisations are continued with their agitations calling it a great betrayal by BKS due to their closeness with the ruling BJP. In the general elections of 2004, the ruling BJP got a major set-back, loosing 12 of the 26 Parliament seats including Mehsana (compiled from various newspaper reports, discussions with farmers and their organisation leaders). I have borrowed this term from Wood (1997) who describes the ‘new’ availability of water in the context of variety of water management initiatives possible in different zones of Gujarat including water available through the Sardar Sarovar Dam. The new water has to attend to technical, social, economic, institutional and political challenges. The history of the SSP is available at number of internet sites. They are—www.sardarsarovardam.org (official website of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd, Government of Gujarat), www.nvda. nic.in (official website of Narmada Valley Development Authority, Government of Gujarat) and www.narmada.org (website of the sympathisers of Narmada Bhachau Andolan, one of the activist organisations that is highly critical of the SSP). Compiled from information available at www.sardarsarovardam.org The information is based on the newspaper reports in The Times of India: ‘Water wars waged over Rs 100-cr bill’, The Times of India, 19 September 2003a; ‘What Rs 102 crore means to cash-strapped AMC?’ The Times of India, 21 September 2003b; and ‘AMC standing committee rejects interim budget’, The Times of India, 21 September 2003c (Ahmedabad edition). In Junagadh district in Gujarat, the coastal areas of Mangrol block have become the scene of a major health scare. Take Loej village five kilometers from coastline for instance. The 200-odd families have one thing in common: each has at least one member suffering from kidney stones. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) norms, the total dissolved solids in drinking water should not exceed 500 ppm. In Leoj, the TDS content is 4,000–8,000 ppm [parts per million]. Over the past three decades, salinity ingress has made groundwater unfit for drinking in village after village. Out of the 60 villages, 23 are gripped under total salinity ingress. In 29 other villages it has contaminated more than half of the groundwater resources. As the state’s drinking water schemes always remained a pipedream, villagers had to rely on well water, even while groundwater table was depleting fast. The rhetoric of Narmada water supply cannot put balm as the scheme is meant for only parts of Jamnagar and Rajkot (sourced from report in The Indian Express, 28 April 2003 quoted in Dams, Rivers & People, Vol 1, Issue 6–7, July–August 2003, Delhi: p. 26). ‘State running out of water despite SSP, warns expert’, The Times of India, 16 October 2003 (Ahmedabad edition). The sector ‘Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing’ registered a negative growth rate of 2.35 per cent during 1998–99 compared to 1997–98. The sectors that registered significant growth during the same period are mining and quarrying (13.08 per cent), communications (18.64 per cent), banking and insurance (13.88 per cent) and public administration (24.89 per cent) (GOG 2000). During 1961, agriculture in Gujarat engaged 64 per cent of the total workforce that has reduced to 56 per cent in 1991. This indicates that the state is reducing its dependence on agriculture for income and employment generation and hence going through structural transformation. This transformation

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is a result of ‘textile first strategy’ vis-à-vis ‘machine first strategy’ apart from inducing agriculture and industry linkages. This strategy manifested in decline of the share of cereals and food grains and a rise in non-food grain crops (Mathur and Kashyap 2000).

References Bhatia, B. (1992). ‘Lush Fields and Parched Throats: Political Economy of Groundwater in Gujarat’, working paper, Helsinki, Finland: World Institute for Development Economics Research. Black, M. (2001). ‘At The End Of The Line’, New Internationalist, 336, July. Sourced at http://www.newint. org/issue336/endline.htm, accessed 23 September 2007. Census of India (2001). Provisional Population Totals-Paper-2 of 2001 Rural-Urban Distribution. Series 25. Gujarat: Directorate of Census Operations. Desai, B. (1997). Colloquium on Development of Agriculture and Allied Sectors in Gujarat: A Strategic Perspective for the Ninth Plan. (Quoted in Hirway, 2000). Dubash, N.K. (2002). Tubewell Capitalism: Groundwater Development and Agrarian Change in Gujarat. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fisher, W. (ed.) (1995). Towards Sustainable Development? Struggling over India’s Narmada River. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. Government of Gujarat (2000). Assessment of Economy in Brief: Socio-Economic Review 1999–2000 (Gujarat State). Gandhinagar: Directorate of Economics and Statistics. ——— (2003). Assessment of Economy in Brief: Socio-Economic Review 2002–03 (Gujarat State). Gandhinagar: Directorate of Economics and Statistics. ——— (2004). Assessment of Economy in Brief: Socio-Economic Review 2002–03 (Gujarat State). Gandhinagar: Directorate of Economics and Statistics. Government of India (1999). Integrated Water Resources Development: A Plan for Action, Report of the National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development. New Delhi: Ministry of Water Resources. Hardiman, D. (1998). ‘Well Irrigation in Gujarat: Systems of Use, Hierarchies of Control’, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(25): 1533–44. Hirway, I. (2000). ‘Dynamics of Development in Gujarat: Some Issues’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35 (35–36): 3106–20. Kothari, A. (1999). ‘An Open Response to Gail Omvedt’s Open Letter to Arundhati Roy’. Pune: Kalpavriksh. Mathur, N. and S. P. Kashyap (2000). ‘Agriculture in Gujarat: Problem and Prospects’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35: 3137–46. Mehta, L. (2001). ‘The Manufacture of Popular Perceptions of Scarcity in Gujarat, India: Dams and Waterrelated Narratives in Gujarat, India’, World Development, 29(12): 2025–41. ——— (2003). ‘Contexts and Constructions of Water Scarcity’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(27): 2439–45. Moench, M. (Undated). Debating the Options: Groundwater Management in the Face of Scarcity–Gujarat, India. Vikram Sarabhai Centre for Development Interaction (VIKSAT) and Pacific Institute Collaborative Research. Ahmedabad, India: VIKSAT. Moench, M. (1991). Sustainability, Equity and Efficiency in Groundwater Development: Issues in Western U.S. and India, Berkley, California: The Pacific Institute of Studies in Development, Environment and Security. Morse, B. and T. Berger (1992). Sardar Sarovar: Report of the Independent Review. Ottawa, USA: Futures International Inc.

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Patel, G.D. (1969). ‘The Land Revenue Settlements and the British Rule in India’. Theses Publication Series-7, Ahmedabad: Gujarat University. Patel, P.P. (1997). Ecoregions of Gujarat. Vadodara: Gujarat Ecology Commission. Planning Commission (1974). Study of Tubewell Irrigation and Groundwater Development Programme-1974. PEO Study No. 88. New Delhi: Government of India. Prabhakar, R., V. Vani, K. Tatu and S. Patel (1997). ‘Case Studies on Fresh Water Management in the Arid Region’, Submitted to UNICEF, Anand, Gujarat: Institute of Rural Management. Paranjape, S. and K.J. Joy (1995). Sustainable Technology: Making the Sardar Sarovar Project Viable. Ahmedabad: Centre for Environment Education. Ram, R.N. (1993). ‘Muddy Waters: A Critical Assessment of the Benefits of the Sardar Sarovar Project’, Monograph, Pune: Kalpavriksh. Roy, A. (1999). ‘The Greater Common Good’, Frontline, 22 May–4 June. Shah, Amita (2000). ‘Watershed Programmes: A Long Way to Go’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35: 3155–64. Shah, G. and M. Rutten (2002). ‘Capitalist Development and Jan Breman’s Study of the Labouring Class in Gujarat’, in G. Shah, M. Rutten and H. Streefkerk (eds), Development and Deprivation in Gujarat. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Shah, T., V. Ballabh, K. Dobrial and J. Talati (1995). ‘Turnover of State Tubewells to Farmers Cooperatives: Assessment of Gujarat’s Experience, India’, paper presented at the International Conference on Irrigation Management Transfer, 20–24 September, Wuhan, China. Shah, T. (2003). ‘Framing the Rules of The Game: Preparing for the First Irrigation Season in The Sardar Sarovar Project’, Report of the International Water Management Insititute (IWMI)-Tata Research Team, Anand, Gujarat. The Times of India (2003a). ‘Water wars waged over Rs 100-cr bill’, 19 September. ——— (2003b). ‘What Rs 102 crore means to cash-strapped AMC?’, 21 September. ——— (2003c). ‘AMC standing committee rejects interim budget’, 21 September, Ahmedabad edition. ——— (2003d). ’State running out of water despite SSP, warns expert’, 16 October, Ahmedabad edition. Wood, J.R. (1999). ‘Changing Institutions and Changing Politics in Rural Water Management: An Overview of Three Zones in Gujarat’, in T. Beck, P. Bose and B. Morrison (eds), The Cooperative Management of Water Resources in South Asia. Vancouver: Centre for India and South Asia Research.

13 Governing the Groundwater Economy: Comparative Analysis of National Institutions and Policies in South Asia, China and Mexico Tushaar Shah

T HE C OMMON C HALLENGE Regions of Asia, where food security and rural livelihoods have come to depend precariously on intensive use of groundwater in agriculture, have expanded at a frightening pace, especially after 1970. Recent analyses of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) suggest that 1970 was probably the watershed year: prior to that, steady rise in food production depended squarely on growth in surface irrigation. Since then, however, South Asia and North China experienced a massive groundwater boom and by the early 1990s, groundwater irrigation had overtaken all other sources in explaining the total area irrigated as well as in contribution to farm output and incomes (DebRoy and Shah 2003). An extraordinary aspect of this boom is its quiet, furtive character: governments in many Asian countries have remained unaware of this wildfire growth of wells and tube wells fueling right under their noses. As a result, by the time resource managers begin to size up the challenge facing them, they find they are fighting a losing battle. Many regions of Asia are now discovering that the groundwater boom comes with a price tag in the form of groundwater depletion, pollution and quality deterioration (because of fluoride, arsenic, nitrates, etc.) raising serious concerns about the future sustainability of such intensive groundwater irrigation. What these need direly is a practical strategy of managing this runaway growth in the bubble of groundwater economy before it bursts, causing misery all around. The phrase ‘groundwater governance’ has come into currency primarily in the wake of the recognition that managing groundwater has come to involve, not just physical and ecological processes but a complex of socio-economic and institutional relationships with far-reaching impacts on society. Drawing from the experience of Western United States, Europe and Australia, international thinking on the ways forward on improving groundwater governance has veered towards a complex of stylised prescriptions: (i) countries should get an appropriate legal and regulatory framework for groundwater appropriation and use; (ii) a new system of groundwater rights should replace the present open-access regime; (iii) groundwater should be treated as an

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economic good and priced to reflect its scarcity value; (iv) an institutional structure created for development of the resource should be transformed into one that is appropriate for resource management; and (v) policies should be redefined and adjusted to the new priority of sustainable management. Against these stylised prescriptions, we find vast variations in the way nations actually respond to the problems of groundwater stress. In this chapter I attempt to explain why. I do this by developing a comparative analysis of institutions and policies for groundwater management in South Asia, China and Mexico. My purpose is to explore to what extent the responses to groundwater overdevelopment in these regions conforms to these stylised prescriptions and why. In the second section, I draw a broad comparison between the South Asian and Chinese situations because one finds marked similarities in these in several respects. In the third section, I develop the Mexican case study. In the fourth section, I offer some general conclusions and argue for a more nuanced understanding of the context within which groundwater economies operate in different parts of the world, and which shape their strategies of governing its appropriation and use.

C OMPARING G ROUNDWATER I NSTITUTIONS AND P OLICIES IN S OUTH A SIA AND N ORTH C HINA History and Context South Asia and North China have important similarities in terms of very high population densities, small land holdings and predominance of groundwater. While South Asia’s irrigation history goes back to the millennia, North China’s goes back to all of 50 years. However, when it comes to the history of groundwater irrigation, an unprecedented expansion in it after 1970 was spurred in both the regions by nearly the same compact of factors, that is, intensification of farming and the propagation of seed-fertiliser technologies, reduced and undependable surface water supplies, role of groundwater in mitigating the impacts of drought and early encouragement from public policy makers to groundwater irrigation. In both the regions, well densities increased in spurts during drought periods and with active support from the state (Ronghan 1988: 83). Booming groundwater-based irrigated agriculture in both the regions is facing imminent threat of decline as a result of resource depletion or salinisation caused by constant over-draft. Secondary salinisation has yet not emerged as a critical problem in large areas of North China, especially in the western parts (Kendy et al. 2002) as it has in Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh and Indian Punjab and Haryana. However, groundwater depletion and secular decline in the water table, high fluoride content, rising energy costs of pumping, problems of land subsidence, falling well-yields and high rate of failure of wells are problems common to both the regions.

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Organisation of Village Groundwater Economies However, there are notable differences in other respects, mostly in the institutional fabric of the two regions. First, it is the sheer numbers: China has an estimate of 3.5 million agricultural tube wells, mostly in the North China Plains (NCP), which extract an estimated 75 km3 of groundwater/ year; in comparison, South Asia had 19 million agricultural wells and tube wells during the mid-1990s, which may well have increased to 23–25 million now, extracting some 210–230 km3 of groundwater. Then, the structure of land and water rights and groundwater institutions are different. Throughout South Asia, an overwhelming majority of groundwater wells and pumps are privately owned by farmers. Rights to groundwater are not separately specified and are treated as an easement attached to land; as such, land owners act as if they have unrestricted ownership rights on groundwater. However, exercising this right requires a well and a pump; and many small farmers’ holdings are too small to make a mechanised well viable. Moreover, because of high levels of land fragmentation, even those who own wells cannot irrigate all their fragments by their own wells. A major institutional response to this problem is the emergence of pervasive, local, fragmented pump irrigation markets which have helped smooth out these rough edges of the groundwater economy in a South Asian village and have expanded access to groundwater irrigation to the resource poor. This institution of South Asian groundwater markets—or, to be precise, pump rental markets—has been extensively studied in the South during recent years (Shah 1993; Saleth 1994; Palmer-Jones 1994; Janakarajan 1992; Kolawali and Chicoine 1989; Meinzen-Dick and Sullins 1994; Strosser and Kuper 1994). Like markets in general, these create new wealth and help alleviate rural poverty; but they also make the organisation of the groundwater economy a chaotic maze of intense, criss-crossing interaction amongst pump owners and water buyers without any mediating influence. In many regions of South Asia, farmers invest in tube wells and pumps primarily for selling water for profit; even when the primary motive is irrigating own land, pump owners can still earn significant supplemental income from selling water as a side activity (Kolavalli and Chicoine 1989). As water markets mature, intense competition amongst water sellers confers benefits to buyers in terms of lower price and better service; but it also encourages huge overlaps in command areas of private tube wells and excess pumping capacity. In a typical South Asian village, the groundwater economy is completely untrammeled by any regulatory authority or mediating agency. It permits no role for even the village level governance structures (such as India’s gram panchayats or Pakistan’s numberdars). No norms are effectively in place for siting and licensing of groundwater wells. The only government agency the pump owners have any interaction with is the electricity utility and some times public sector banking institutions. India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), which refinances bank loans for groundwater structures, stipulated some siting norms; however, these are extensively violated (Shah 1993). In groundwater depletion, areas such as North Gujarat in west India, where capital investments as well as risks in making

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successful tube wells are high, farmers come together to form cooperative tube well organisations (Shah and Bhattacharya 1993). However, their prime aim is to secure irrigation for their members and they play no role whatsoever in guiding or managing the overall groundwater socio-ecology of the village. All in all, in South Asia’s chaotic village groundwater economies, all formal and informal institutions function with the sole aim of maximising present wealth creation from groundwater irrigation. In a typical North China village, however, the case was nearly the opposite until the early 1980s. Before the sweeping agrarian reforms initiated by the Deng administration in 1983, irrigation organisation in the Chinese country-side was uniform and orderly in comparison. Collectives were responsible for making and maintaining tube wells as well as pumps and distribution systems. This did not necessarily mean that they were efficient in techno-economic terms; however, it did mean the presence of an over-arching governance mechanism at the level of the collective and above that oversaw the working of the irrigation economy. With the onset of reforms and the household responsibility system, one finds a wide variety of institutional arrangements have now come into play in the Chinese countryside (Xiang et al. 2000). Table 13.1 outlines a range of institutional arrangements we came across for tube well management in nine villages of the Hanan and Hebei province in the course of fieldwork during 2002. Where water tables are high and the cost of making tube wells low—as, for example, in the lower Hanan province—it is common for pre-existing shallow tube wells to be owned and maintained by village committees (VCs) through agricultural taxes.1 Where new shallow tube wells (STWs) need to be built, VCs still do so, especially if they have buoyant tax revenue; else, they invite private farmers to build and operate tube wells under formal contracts, which vary from very simple to the quite complex. Regardless of whether STWs are collectively managed or contractor managed, pumps and ground pipes are generally owned by farmers or borrowed from friends or relatives. Unlike in South Asia, where the ownership of a pump in many regions is not the only source of significant extra income but, as some social scientists claim, also of social status and political power (Wood 1995; Dubash 2002), in STW areas in North China, pump ownership yields the owner neither profit, nor power nor status. The chief reason is the relatively low real cost of machine capital in China in comparison to the rest of the developing world. In deep tube well (DTW) areas of Hebei and Shandong provinces, the village irrigation organisation undergoes marked changes; tube wells are bigger and fewer, each serving a larger command. Some VCs here also build and operate DTWs, which are a much costlier affair compared to STWs. Here tube wells going to the depth of 350 m or so, motor-pumps generally of 28 KW and 1,000–1,500 m of buried pipeline network—which comprises a tube well assembly—may entail an investment of Yuan (Y) 250,000–300,000 (US$ 31,000–38,000) apiece. Each tube well here commands 600–1,000 mu (15 mu = 1 hectare) and is beyond the reach of any individual farmer unless he fancies himself as a water entrepreneur. It is common for DTWs to be established, funded and owned by the village development committee; but its operation is commonly contracted out. A variety of contracting arrangements seem to be

7–8 m

10 m

17 m

26–30

5

220

Guantun,Yanjin county, Henan

Xijie, Yanjin county, Henan

Zhao Zhuang, Ci county, Hebei

Dong wan gnu, Ci county, Hebei

Shi cun Ying, Ci county, Hebei

Pumping Water Level (metres)

Xiaotan, Yanjin county, Henan

Village, County, Province

Farmers own & share pumps

Farmers own & share pumps

Motor Pump

Nil

Nil

Nil

Nil

Nil

Deep Tube Well

Private and stake-holder group owned and managed deep tube wells with pumps and buried pipe networks

Farmer-contractors operate STWs & maintain them

12 contractors operate collective STWs; 12 private service providers; 5 share-holder service providers

STW maintenance by VC; but O & M of STW and pump by contractor who charges Y 1/kWh against Y 0.7/kWh to be paid to electrician

BOM by VC

BOM by VC

Shallow Tube Well

Contractors charge Y 0.82/kWh from irrigators and pay Y 0.565/kWh to electrician

STW operators collect Y 1/kWh from irrigators against electricity cost of Y 0.565/kWh

TEB electrician collects irrigation fee @ Y 1/kWh and pays the contractor Y 0.3/kWh as his margin

TEB’s electrician collects based on meter reading on each motor pump

TEB’s electrician collects based on meter reading on each motor pump

Collection of Electricity Fee

(Table 13.1 continued )

Collectively owned Tube well owners by VC charge Y 10/hour from irrigators and pay 0.565/kWh

Owned and managed by VC

4 managed by private contractors; 2 by VC

O & M by township electricity bureau

O & M by township electricity bureau

O & M by township electricity bureau

Transformer

Table 13.1: Variety of Institutional Arrangements for Groundwater Irrigation in Nine Villages of Henan and Hebei Provinces

220

250

250

Yao Zhung Zi, Chang Zhou county, Hebei

Xi Huayuan, Chang Zhao county, Hebei

Xi Tun Zi, Chang Zhou county, Hebei

Farmers use own or borrowed pumps

Motor Pump

Transformer

VC collected Y 200/mu to build 7 collective DTWs at a Collectively cost of Y 620,000; each has a 400 m deep DTW, 30 kW owned and pump and 1200–1500 m of underground pipeline managed by VC network.

Four private DTW owners own a transformer each

6 DTWs owned Collectively & managed by owned the VC by VC

Deep Tube Well

VC owns and operates 6 DTWs and private farmers operate 4, all with 28 kW pumps; the former operate as a utility, the latter as a business

15 STWs managed by VC

Shallow Tube Well

VC employed DTW operators charge Y 15/ hour and pay Y 0.48/ kWh to electrician

Private DTW owners charge Y 1.1/kWh and pay Y 0.48/kWh; VC DTW charges Y 0.65/ kWh and pays Y 0.55/ kWh to TEB.

DTW operators employed by VC collect Y 16/hour from irrigators and pay Y 0.45/kWh to electrician

Collection of Electricity Fee

Source: Based on author’s field work and notes in 2002–03, International Water Management Institute and Tata (ITP) Water Policy Program. Notes: BOM—Build, Owned and Managed; DTW—Deep Tubewell; O&M—Operation and Maintenance; VC—Village Committee; STW—Shallow tubewell; TEB—Township Electricity Board.

Pumping Water Level (metres)

Village, County, Province

(Table 13.1 continued )

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in vogue, each presenting interesting alternatives in the design of incentives. Regardless of whether they are privately or collectively managed, in DTW areas of the North China Plain (NCP), such as in most of Hebei province, irrigation is a far more expensive proposition than in the STW areas. In these villages, everyone is a water buyer and pays a water rate that is generally linked to energy use. In this increasingly complex maze of irrigation institutions in North China, private irrigation service providers are emerging as key players. Unlike in South Asia, where local water markets find their own prices, in North China, the village leaders or party leaders often fix or have a say in deciding the margins to be charged by contractors, which hovered around Y 0.2–0.35/kWh (US Cents (c) 2.5–4.4/kWh). Even where private irrigation providers fixed prices, their gross margins tend to be in this range. There is hardly any competition in the sense that it operates in South Asian groundwater markets mostly because there is little overlap in the command areas served by different tube wells; and it is common for contractors and private sellers to collude in setting a common price under the watchful guidance of the VC. The net result is that the ratio of irrigation fee to energy cost—which in India may be as high as 2.5 or more—seldom exceeds 1.5 in China. In villages, with alternative irrigation sources or in years of good rainfall, tube well irrigation is sparingly used and contractors make little money. All in all, compared to South Asia, village governance institutions are stronger in China in that they enjoy and use greater authority in village affairs and, therefore, have a pervasive influence not only on the irrigation organisation but also on the entire village economy and society. Compared to the South Asian farmer who virtually pays no direct taxes, the Chinese farmer is heavily taxed. A major reason for the heavy taxation is the burden of the salary of the local government officials. Every village has a village leader and a village Communist Party leader. The former is elected by a village committee of seven elected members. The party leader for each village is selected by the township level party leadership by all party members in the village. The party leader is all powerful in village affairs; if there is a dispute between the VC and the Party, there are negotiations to settle the differences, but ultimately what the party leader says goes. Party members, and particularly the party leader, are selected supposedly for their social concern and awareness and a strong ‘extension motive’ (McClelland 1985). This helps somewhat in keeping the institution from becoming oppressive and hegemonic. The party leader as well as the village leader and members of the VC are salaried officials. In the Henan villages we discovered, the party leader gets Y 140 (US$ 17.50) per month; while others get Y 120 (US$ 15) per month. These salaries have to come from land tax. Land tax is also used to sustain the township government, which lays claim on upto 50 per cent of all land tax collections at the village level. This parallel structure of local government and party organisation may not be perfect or even ideal; however, it ensures the presence, in the average Chinese village, of state authority, which is largely or completely absent in the South Asian villages. In an Indian village, farmers can chase away an Electricity Board meter reader with impunity and in Pakistan, the Water and Power Development Authority has to use the military to take meter readings on electric

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tube wells (Sunday Times 2002); but in China many rules of the game get formulated as well as enforced by the village-level governance structures. The ‘soft state’ is as evident in a South Asian village as the ‘hard state’ is in a Chinese village (see Table 13.2). All in all, the organisation of village groundwater economy in North China differs in several material ways from that in South Asia in that: (i) The village committee and the village leader play a significant mediating and regulatory role in shaping the irrigation economy in North China whereas throughout South Asia, the village groundwater economy operates in a laissez faire style. (ii) Monopoly premiums are non-existent or marginal on pump rental markets in NCP whereas they are significant in South Asia; in the NCP, monopoly rents emerge with the rise of private water sellers in DTW areas. (iii) Since STWs as well as DTWs in the NCP have no overlapping command areas, the opportunities for ‘competitive deepening’ and destructive chasing of falling water tables encountered in South Asia is absent in the NCP; this advantageous feature is likely to stay as long as the village committee and the village leader play an influential role. (iv) Finally, effective costs of groundwater irrigation tend to rise as one moves from STW areas to DTW areas in a manner that broadly reflects the social cost of groundwater. Table 13.2: Comparing Features of Village Groundwater Economies in South Asia and North China South Asia

North China Plain (NCP)

Ownership of tube wells

Private

Collective, contracted

Ownership of pumps

Overwhelmingly private

Mostly private; some collective

Do all farmers own pumps

No

No

Do tube well command areas overlap

Yes, extensively

No, rarely

Do pump owners compete to increase water sales

Yes because of active markets in pump irrigation service with powerful productivity and equity impacts

No because tube wells are sited to serve specified command areas

Are water prices fixed by the operation of the market?

Yes, entirely; there is no regulation whatever of the way fragmented, local pump irrigation markets function

No, it is guided by village committee and village leader; usually it is fixed on energy-cost plus basis

Is water selling viewed as a source of significant income?

Yes, especially in eastern India, Nepal terai and Bangladesh

No except in DTW areas where farmers make heavy investments

Irrigation cost as a proportion of total value of output?

20–25% for water buyers

3–5% for water buyers

Source: Based on author’s field work and notes in 2002–03, International Water Management Institute and Tata (ITP) Water Policy Program.

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Direct and Indirect Cost of Groundwater Irrigation Neither in South Asia nor in North China is groundwater itself priced on the margin. Under the new Chinese Water Law, farmers are required to obtain a ‘permit’ for which they have to pay a fixed fee. This was nowhere in effect; even if it were, it would not determine the marginal cost of groundwater use. What does, however, affect the marginal cost of groundwater use is the cost of energy used for pumping. In this, there are major differences between South Asia and North China. Energy costs of groundwater in South Asia seldom fully reflect the scarcity value of groundwater or energy. For instance, the cost of m3 of groundwater purchased by a small farmer is around INR 4 (US c 8) in eastern Uttar Pradesh or North Bihar in India, where it is abundantly available2; but it is less than INR 2 (US c 4)3 in North Gujarat, where it is mined from 800 feet or more. In Bangladesh, where groundwater is abundant and can be pumped from 10 feet below ground, irrigating a hectare of paddy with purchased groundwater costs a high Taka 6,000 (approx. US$ 100) (Mainuddin 2002, personal communication) which drives many small holders to manual irrigation; but in Tamil Nadu, where almost all groundwater presently being used is mined, irrigating a hectare of paddy with purchased groundwater costs less than INR 1,500 (~US$ 30). The main reason why groundwater irrigation costs do not reflect its scarcity in India is the distorted electricity pricing policies pursued by Indian state governments. Collecting electricity charges from millions of farmers scattered over a huge countryside has been a nightmare for South Asian countries like India and Pakistan. The logistical difficulty and economic costs of metering electricity used by tube wells has been found to be so high that most Indian states have done away with metering and instead charge a flat tariff-based on horse-power rating of the pumps (Shah 1993; Shah et al. 2004b). Pakistan too tried flat tariff for nearly a decade before reverting to metering in 2000. In India, there is growing opposition to flat tariff in part because it is believed to induce inefficient use of power and groundwater, but in part also because flat tariff has been used by populist politicians to subsidise tube well irrigation. Electricity subsidy is thought to be the prime reason why many State Electricity Boards in India are on the verge of bankruptcy. Thus, the management of this ‘energy-irrigation nexus’ in South Asia is central to the governance of the region’s groundwater as well as energy economies. Surprisingly, the electricity-irrigation nexus, in ways widely discussed in South Asia, is not a subject of discussion in China at all. Indeed, researchers and technocrats with whom we raised the topic had difficulty in understanding why the two need to be co-managed at all. The Chinese electricity supply industry operates on two principles: (i) of total cost-recovery in generation, transmission and distribution at each level with some minor cross-subsidisation across user groups and areas; and (ii) each user pays in proportion to his use. Unlike in much of South Asia, where farmers pay either nothing or much less than domestic and industrial consumers for power, agricultural electricity use in many parts of North China attracts the highest charge per unit, followed by household users and then industries. Here, operation and maintenance (O&M) of local power infrastructures is the responsibility of local units, the village committee at the village level, the Township Electricity Bureau at the township level and the

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County Electricity Bureau at the county level. Equally, the responsibility of collecting electricity charges too is vested in local units in ways that ensure that the power used at each level is paid for in full. At the village level, this implies that the sum of power use recorded in the meters attached to all irrigation pumps has to tally with the power supply recorded at the transformer for any given period. The unit or person charged with the fee collection responsibility has to pay the Township Electricity Bureau for power use recorded at the transformer level. To allow for normal line losses, 10 per cent allowance is given by the Township Electricity Bureau to the village unit.4 Under a new Network Reform programme initiated by the National Government with the objective of improving power supply infrastructure, village electricians in many areas of NCP have organised to provide improved services to their customers. However, these too levy a service charge for attending each request for help to cover their cost or transport on motorcycle. The village electrician, who generally enjoys the support of the party leader, is feared; and the new service orientation is designed partly to project the electrician as the friend of the people. The hypothesis that with better quality of power and support service, farmers would be willing to pay a high price for power is best exemplified in Henan where at Y 0.7/kWh (US c 8.5/kWh, INR 4.27/kWh) farmers pay a higher electricity rate compared to all categories of users in India and Pakistan, as also compared to the local diesel price at Y 2.1 (US c 26) per litre. Thus, the Chinese have all along had the solution to the energy-irrigation nexus that has befuddled South Asia for nearly two decades. In the way the Chinese collect metered electricity charges, it is well nigh impossible to make financial losses since these are firmly passed on downstream from one level to the level down below. Would transposing the Chinese institutional design for consumption based pricing of electricity and water work in South Asia? After all, it should be simple to put the meter reader of a state electricity board on a salary plus performance-linked incentive or disincentive; and equally, to put the canal guard too on a similar system of performance-linked rewards, with minor adjustments in physical infrastructure. Our assessment is that it would not work because of the break-down of local authority structures in South Asia. The primary reason why the metering system works in China is that, in order to perform their tasks effectively, the electrician can invoke the authority of the state through the village committee, the village leader and, above all, the village party leader. And since the Chinese are used to taking this authority seriously, the electricians too invoke a measure of fear and compliance. The ease with which an electrician in a Chinese village can recover the difference between power fee deficit by levying a cess on all users is suggestive of the authority they vicariously enjoy.

The Organisation and Reach of the Water Bureaucracy Never in the 2,500 year history of South Asia have ordinary citizens been subjected to a unified system of governance for a sustained period of time. A major reason probably is that except for brief periods—when regents like Asoka, Harshawardhan and Akbar unified vast territories—what are now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal were ruled over by numerous kings through feudal chiefs and overlords constantly engaged in internecine strife.

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These regions came under unified administration only during the Colonial period which created a bureaucracy as an institution of governance. Until then, each South Asian village was pretty much a republic. In contrast, for most parts of over 2,000 years, right until 1911, China has been a unified, tightly-governed state that ensured respect for law and the authority of the state. Since the time of Qin Shi Huangdi (circa BC 250), China’s first Emperor who unified numerous feuding kingdoms into an efficient and organised state, China’s political system and governance institutions seem to have changed very little. The Chinese state that Huangdi built has survived, in its essentials, to date with a single currency, nationalised land and natural resources, standardised weights and measures, a single script with 3,000 characters. In a brief reign of 11 years, Huangdi also produced homogeneity in people’s thought by destroying all books apart from legalist works and rallied society around the common goal of creating a ‘rich and powerful country’. Despite numerous efforts to recreate pre-Huangdi kingdoms, China retained, until well into the 20th century, the tradition of a unified state with, uniform penal code, the legalist political system and a vast, centralised bureaucracy with a formidable reach and ambit, which are evident even today. The organisation of the South Asian water administration is thin, fragmented, top-heavy, bureaucratic and in general ill-equipped to manage a sector that is rapidly growing in size and complexity. Take for instance India; in a typical Indian block (or taluka or tehsil) that covers some 100 villages and a population of over 200,000 people, the total number of government officials (excluding the lowest rung, such as canal chowkidars and public tube well operators) working on water probably does not exceed 10; and for a district, which may have 18–30 such blocks and a population of 2–3 million, this number is probably around 100. Moreover, these are vertically organised into line departments—such as irrigation, groundwater, water supply and sanitation—which hardly interact with each other. Canal irrigation departments are commonly the largest; whereas groundwater departments are either absent (for instance in Gujarat, where the Gujarat Water Resources Development Corporation doubles up as one) or thinly staffed. Each department functions as a bureau, often pursuing a mandate that has long become irrelevant. For instance, the groundwater departments in most Indian states still believe further development of groundwater to be their key mandate; these are nowhere close to making a transition from the ‘resource development mode’ to ‘resource management mode’. Likewise, once the construction of new projects gets over, canal irrigation bureaucracies too feel unable to move into the new role of system management and service delivery. Their ambit of operation is linked to administrative units—such as districts and talukas—rather than a river basin or sub-basin. Finally, the water bureaucracies in much of South Asia have increasingly become a drag on the society; over 90 per cent of their budgets get used up by salaries and establishment costs, and the heavily subsidised water fees—of which only a small fraction is actually collected—can hardly meet even a part of this salary and establishment cost, leave alone contribute to infrastructure maintenance and improvement. Chinese water administration differs from the South Asian in at least two respects: it has much greater presence at the grassroots level, and increasingly, it is paying for itself through service fees. China has a nested hierarchy of water institutions at each level, controlled mostly

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by the government at that level but within an overall policy influence of the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) (Wang and Huang 2002). Like South Asian bureaucrats, Chinese water bureaucrats too have a ‘resource development’ rather than a ‘resource management’ mindset. However, there are indications that water management concerns are increasingly coming to a head, especially in provinces like Hebei where groundwater scarcity, depletion and quality deterioration are emerging as paramount concerns. Compared to South Asia’s fragmented water administrations, China’s Water Bureaus represent an effective first step towards integrating and unifying water management tasks at local levels (see Figure 13.1). Until a decade ago, water management in a typical county in China was fragmented as in a South Asian local administrative territory (such as a tehsil or a district). A serious—and avoidable—water crisis in Shenzhen in 1991 led its municipal administration to create a unified Water Affairs Bureau which manages water source development and construction, flood control and drainage infrastructure, urban water supply, water saving programmes—all under one umbrella. The Water Affairs Bureau model caught on and by May 1999, 160 counties had Water Affairs Bureaus. In May 2000, Shanghai brought in even more functions under a new Shanghai Water Resources Bureau (ibid.). Water Bureaux are substantial outfits even at the county level (equivalent to 2–3 taluks/ blocks/tehsils/thana in South Asia). In Ci County in Hebei province, which has 19 townships Figure 13.1: Structure of Chinese Water Administration and its Funding

Wholly funded from provincial budget Provincial Water Bureau: 100–180 staff

County Water Bureau: 50–70 staff

Township Water Bureau: 20–30 staff

Village Committee: 1–6 water staff

Partially financed from farm and other taxes

Wholly financed from local taxes

Wholly financed from local taxes

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and 390 villages under it, the County Water Bureau staff is only 60 and a typical township water bureau employs 20–30 officials; however the entire hierarchy of water bureaus in the county employs some 560 people. Hebei province, for instance, has nine city-level water bureaus and 200 water bureaus of counties like Ci, which manage water resources in 4,000 small townships and villages. Thus, when all levels are taken together, the Water Bureau structure in a province may employ several thousand officials. Whereas the Provincial Water Bureau is fully supported by the state budget, the County Water Bureau has to raise a portion of its own budget and the Township Water Bureau is wholly self-financed (see Figure 13.1). Thus, Ci County, for example, has an annual budget of Y 30 million; in this, Y 10 million is contributed by the national government under the drought mitigation programme; however, the balance of Y 20 million has to be raised by the County Water Bureau from farmers’ taxes and local incomes. Kendy et al. (2002), in their study of groundwater institutions and policies in Luancheng County near Beijing, note that ‘fee revenues are sufficient to fund the County Water Affairs Bureau, but not to finance water conservation county-wide’. Changing incentives facing bureaucrats is an economy-wide phenomenon that seems designed to transform China’s bureaucrats into entrepreneurs (Scott et al. 2000). The Water Bureau structure is apparently undergoing a strategic transformation under the 1998 reform; indeed, recently, in some provinces these are renamed Water Management and Service Bureaux and are strongly encouraged to adopt a business ethic rather than a regulatorybureaucratic approach and generate resources locally by selling services. True, this may be easier said than done, especially since revenue-yielding water infrastructural assets are commonly held by provincial bureaus or the national government. Even so, many researchers believe that unified water resources management under the overall leadership of the much-restructured MWR is gradually becoming a reality in China (Wang and Huang 2002). From the groundwater perspective, another major 1998 reform was to remove groundwater management from Ministry of Geological and Mineral Resources to MWR, a more logical home. The Chinese bureaucracy—of the government as well as the party—in general has been a subject of much criticism by western scholars and researchers. However, the potentially powerful role of an effective bureaucracy in governance of scarce natural resources such as water has, in general, been underestimated. In India, for example, the Supreme Court announced two far-reaching environmental decisions in the span of a decade: in the first, it enjoined the Forest Department to bring illegal felling of trees in reserved forest areas forthwith, and the Forest Department, which has a large bureaucracy with significant presence at the local levels, effectively implemented the Supreme Court’s injunction throughout the Indian countryside and deforestation of reserved forest was significantly reduced. In 1996, alarmed by widespread groundwater depletion, the Supreme Court, in an equally momentous judgement, empowered the Central Groundwater Board of India as the Central Ground Water Authority charged with the task of controlling groundwater depletion forthwith. Six years later, nothing had changed; beyond launching a limited regulatory programme in the Union Territory of Delhi, the Central Groundwater Authority had been totally unequal to the task because it had no operational bureaucracy comparable to the Forest Department (Down to Earth 2002). The Groundwater Board

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has been used to its traditional role of groundwater monitoring, which it has been performing with the help of a thin force of scientific staff at the state level.

Groundwater Law, Policy and Their Implementation In the context of growing scarcity, the task of managing water resources is becoming complex entailing numerous tasks at the ground level such as: 1) the need to register users and control free riders; 2) [building] the technical capacity to deliver agreed upon discharges at different points on the network; 3) the establishment of a process of collective decision making where groups of users are federated in higher hierarchical levels, with corresponding representatives; 4) the definition of partnership between users and irrigation officials, where service fee contributes to payment of field staff; 5) a legal framework to support this new institutional setting; 6) a strong commitment from the administration and politicians (Barker and Molle 2002: 21). Barker and Molle also argue that in the Asian context, ‘the growing importance of common pool groundwater resources add greatly to the complexity of the problem’ (ibid.). Doing this will require resource management and regulatory institutions with wide reach. South Asian countries are at ground zero in all these. None of them has in place a system of registering water users nor a law or a legal framework. In India, as well as in Pakistan, draft groundwater bills have been making rounds for several years; but there is no will to make them into a law because of doubts about their enforceability (Steenbergen and Oliemans 2002). China has more of the necessary conditions in place to make a beginning. Starting with the epoch-making 1988 National Water Law, which defined a new legal and policy framework for water management, China has enacted three more laws and issued some 30 water management regulations during the 1990s (Wang and Huang 2002). A slew of new laws are in the making. The 1998 reforms, which marked a further transition from a planned economy to a ‘socialist market economy’, pressured water bureaux at various levels to increase efficiency, reduce staff and generate resources through service provision. In 1992, when the Communist Party voted in favour of transition to a socialist market economy, the MWR proposed a strategic framework for water conservancy reform that focused on five key areas: water investment system, water asset management, water price and charge collection, water legislation and regulation, and water services provision (ibid.). Institutional reform in China’s water sector has relentlessly pushed this five-point agenda in recent years. As of now, however, there is little evidence that this is having much effect on the ground. Chinese as well as Western observers and researchers are critical of the ineffectual role of the Chinese water bureaucracy in managing groundwater depletion in North China. Several reasons explain this. First, the Chinese bureaucracy has for long been fed on the developmental rhetoric of ‘protecting people against floods and droughts’ (Boxer 2001: 337); moreover, rising from the farmers’ ranks, the local bureaucracy empathises more with farmers’ needs to eke out

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a livelihood than the objective of long-term environmental sustainability. Second, there are also informal kinship ties and network and cultural institutions such as quanxi, which create a gulf between macro-level policy making and micro-level implementation. Finally, in their exhortations, even national and provincial leaders betray this ambivalence between protecting livelihoods and food security on the one hand and mitigating groundwater degradation on the other. There is growing, though scattered, evidence of successes in groundwater demand management in North China. In Luancheng County in Hebei, Kendy et al. (2002) note that a cost-share programme of water saving—in which the provincial, prefecture and county water bureaux share 30 per cent each while the farmer contributes 10 per cent—resulted in a shift from flood irrigation to sprinkler sets serving 2,900 ha, drip irrigation to 20 ha and buried pipe networks to 6,700 ha. Similarly, a panel of UN experts studying basin management in the Huiahe river basin, east of the Yellow river, noted that: with the same irrigated area and water consumption, the grain output [in the basin] almost doubled from 1980 and 1993, increasing from 40.4 to 73.6 million tons. This may point to a significant improvement in agricultural and irrigation practices over a short space of time, but is probably due largely to the uncontrolled expansion of groundwater irrigation to supplement existing surface schemes (UNDP 2000: 8). Later, the report says, ‘While the predominant approach has been supply oriented, demand management has made its mark. In irrigation, efficient water-use is an important programme that is reported to have had significant impact during the past 15 years’ (ibid.: 9). In South Asia, such demand management initiatives by local governments or water bureaucracies are rarely to be found even in areas like Mehsana in North Gujarat, Ramnathapuram in Tamil Nadu or Kolar in Karnataka—examples of Indian districts suffering extreme groundwater stress. Here, to start with there is no legal or regulatory framework under which groundwater use can be regulated; even if there were one, there is no administrative structure that might enforce it. In any case, there is no water administration at the district or taluka (block) level that might develop and implement anything like the strategy that the Chang Zhou water bureau has come up with. Above all, even at the higher levels of the bureaucracy and political leadership, there is no recognition of environmental sustainability as an important policy variable; the focus of attention is still on how best to protect livelihoods. It is not surprising that in most Indian states, electricity supplied to farmers by state-controlled power utilities tend to become cheaper, not costlier, as one moves from groundwater-abundant to groundwaterdepleted areas. To summarise the arguments, China has in place more of the socio-economic and institutional preconditions needed to make direct as well as indirect management work on the ground (see Table 13.3). In particular, (i) even as these are weakening, China’s village, township and county level governance structures play a more proactive and effective executive and regulatory role than comparable local governance structures in South Asia; (ii) China has in place, for well over a decade, a water law and a water permit system that are already enforced

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Tushaar Shah Table 13.3: Comparing Water Institutions and Policies in South Asia and China—Summary South Asia

China

1. Does the village government have significant regulatory role?

No, except in Baluchistan

Yes

2. Are there significant taxes on agriculture? Are these collected?

No.

Yes

3. Is there a system of registering and licensing groundwater structures? Is it enforced?

No

Yes; but not enforced strictly

4. Nature of the water bureaucracy?

Fragmented; thin presence

Less fragmented; but more presence

5. Water as an economic good; does water command an economic price?

No; most users pay a tax

Yes, most users pay a water price

6. Does the water administration have capability to enforce broad-spectrum measures?

No.

Yes; rice cultivation in NCP completely eliminated

7. Are there institutional limits to ‘competitive deepening of tube wells’?

Only indirect; unenforced

Avoided easily, even with privatisation

8. Adoption of water saving methods and technologies

Very limited

Extensive and growing

9. Macro-economic safety valves: is there scope for shift of population from farm to off-farm livelihoods?

No; except in small pockets

Yes, with the work permit system liberalised

Focus on cost recovery through IMT

Chinese water admin. in a ‘franchise mode’ rather than IMT

10. Institutional reform: is the focus just on cost recovery or productivity and environment sustainability?

Source: Based on author’s field work and notes in 2002–03, International Water Management Institute and Tata (ITP) Water Policy Program.

on industrial and municipal users where as South Asian countries are still debating a water law; (iii) the Chinese water administration is better integrated and has a greater and more effective grassroots presence and reach compared to South Asia where water administrations are fragmented and have thin or no presence at the local level; (iv) the Chinese are much closer to transforming water into an economic good than South Asians; a large proportion of Chinese water-use—domestic, industrial, agricultural—is paid for based on consumption or its surrogate; most South Asian water charge is aimed at recovery of O&M and is collected as a tax rather than as a price; (v) in search of viability for its water infrastructure and institutions, China is transforming its water bureaucracy into a business-oriented service provider which is likely to place water productivity at the centre stage; South Asia, in contrast, is trying to turn over irrigation management to water user organisations; such institutional reform may achieve

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better cost recovery but it is unlikely to mount effective regulation aimed at sustainable use; and (vi) finally, with a work permit system being liberalised, a rapidly industrialising China is likely to witness massive population shifts from water-stressed North to wealthy South and East, especially the Pearl River Delta enjoying economic boom. China’s industrial growth presents it with a safety valve to take population pressure off its irrigated land; and its challenge of producing enough food is easier to meet than of creating millions of rural livelihoods, which is South Asia’s central concern. To South Asian policy makers, China’s experience offers four lessons. (i) Local resource management or community rule making are unlikely to offer effective solutions to unsustainable groundwater use in the South Asian rural context where food and livelihood security are uppermost concerns of water users. Effective regulatory frameworks and vigorous demand management require strong authority structures at micro, meso and macro levels. (ii) Making a national water policy or groundwater law has no meaning unless it is underpinned at meso and local levels by institutional structures to implement these. (iii) The first essential step South Asian countries need to take in order to manage water better as an economic good is to start charging a price for it rather than a tax. To do this, two things seem essential: first, focus needs to expand from infrastructure creation to service provision and resource management; second, ways need to be explored to drastically reduce transaction costs of consumption linked pricing. In doing both these, the Chinese experience is valuable. (iv) Finally, in the medium to long term, a big part of the solution to the upcoming groundwater crisis is economic growth and urbanisation, and shifting people from farm to off-farm livelihoods.

M EXICO : A GGRESSIVE R EFORMS IN THE G ROUNDWATER E CONOMY Like India and China, Mexico too suffers from chronic imbalance of population and water availability in different regions. Arid and semi-arid areas of Mexico account for 76 per cent of the population, 90 per cent of the irrigated area and 70 per cent of the industries, but these receive only 20 per cent of Mexico’s total precipitation (Barker et al. 2000). As a result, groundwater depletion is rampant in the North, North-Western areas and in the Mexico Valley. States like Sinaloa, Sonora, Guanajuato, Coahuila and Tamaulipas are water scarce but have intensive agriculture; Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatan and Quintana Roo are water abundant but have the bulk of Mexico’s poverty. In the former, which constitute Mexico’s food basket, dealing with groundwater depletion is a critical policy issue that Mexico’s water reforms have tried to grapple with.

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Mexico’s irrigation reforms—of which groundwater reforms are an integral part—are a product of its agrarian history and the larger programme of restructuring the economy that began during the early 1980s. The agrarian structure we find in Mexico today can be traced back to the series of peasant uprisings that culminated in the 1915 revolution and ensuing the 1917 Constitution. The far-reaching land reforms—driven by the principle ‘land belongs to those who work it’—that were ushered in by the 1930s (but in fact took decades to consummate) declared the Mexican state as the custodian of all land and broke up large feudal estates into 100–800 ha holdings. Two different forms of land rights followed—pequeña propiedad (‘small’ private property) and the ejido (or agrarian collective). The former had unattenuated ownership rights over land; the ejidatarios (or ejido members) got a legal identity but had only usufruct rights on land—they could use and inherit land but not mortgage or sell it. Up to 1983, 25,589 ejidos were formed. Mexico enacted its first Irrigation Law in 1926; this was replaced by a Federal Water Law in 1972. But it was the Law of the Nation’s Waters of 1992, combined with an amendment to article 27 of the Constitution in the same year that became a watershed in Mexican agrarian as well as water reforms. Up until 1989, all irrigation was managed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources; and like in India, the government policy towards agriculture and irrigation was guided by the socialist thinking of a welfare state. The reform process pursued four fundamental and far reaching aims: • Make water infrastructure self-financing by withdrawing the government from its management. • Improve the efficiency of water-use by establishing tradeable private rights on water as well as by involving users in managing water infrastructure. • Restrict and even reduce groundwater depletion by the Comisión Nacional del Agua (CNA) operationalising the authority to issue rights (concessions) to draw groundwater and by enforcing the concessions. • Achieve basin level optimality in water-use through basin level co-ordinating mechanisms. Did Mexico’s reform process achieve all these aims? A discussion of this question is presented elsewhere (Shah et al. 2004a); here we focus on how far Mexico’s water reforms have helped achieve sustainable management of its groundwater economy. Before 1992, groundwater rights in Mexico were tightly linked to land rights, much like in Asia today (Wester et al. 1999). There was some discussion of creating private water rights separate from land rights during the 1980s itself; and a National Registry of Water Rights was created well before the sweeping reforms in the water sector took place in 1992. In 1989, the National Water Commission (or CNA) was created as the first step to separating the management of water from that of the agrarian economy, recognising the declining role of agriculture in Mexican economy and the growing non-agricultural demand for water. The new Law of the Nation’s Waters aimed to (i) ‘provide for administrative modernization, planning and programming’ in the water resources sector; and (ii) ‘reinforce a more efficient and

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rational use of natural resources’ (Shah et al. 2004a). The National Water Registry was charged with the responsibility to maintain a national register of newly-created private property rights in water. The design manual of the CNA provided that no user could impound or divert more than 1,080 m3/year of water except by obtaining a ‘concession’ from the CNA. In sum, all water used for purposes other than domestic personal use, had to be ‘titled’. Thus, Mexico has sought to create tradable private property rights in water by: (i) first, declaring water as national property, thereby severing the linkage between land rights and water rights; (ii) allowing existing users to get their use ‘regularised’ by obtaining a concession from the CNA; (iii) by setting up a structure for enforcing the concessions; and (iv) by levying a volumetric water fee from concession holders (barring irrigators), which would help generate resources to maintain water infrastructure. Under the new Water Law, all diversions of water other than for direct personal use are allowed only through concessions. Even sand-mining in river beds—these are considered Federal property—requires a concession. Concessions for different users, uses and sources are for different periods and specified volumes. The Law enjoins the concession holders to abstain from over-stepping the agreed volumes, to establish mechanisms to measure volumes used and report these periodically to the CNA. What has been the outcome and impact of this rights reform? Mixed, as of now. Large water users, especially industrial and commercial establishments, have been quick to secure proper concessions and pay water fee to the CNA. This has been a significant source of revenue for the CNA. Surface irrigation associations (Water User Associations or WUAs) are few, organised and therefore easy to bring within the purview of the concessions; and since each WUA holds a concession on behalf of its members, it is administratively simple to formalise their water rights. Similarly, Municipal Councils are to obtain concessions that cover all users within their ambit. By and large, municipal diversion has conformed to the volumes they are entitled; however, municipal water boards have regularly defaulted on the payment of water fees to the CNA, which recently had to write off M$ 72 billion owed by them to it by way of accumulated water fees. One expectation was that the new system of rights would stimulate an active market in water; however, this expectation has been largely belied because ‘water rights are not rigidly enforced and legal processes to redress grievances are difficult, costly and drawn out’ (Scott and Silva-Ochoa 2001). The real difficulty has been with water rights of numerous agricultural users who account for over 80 per cent of the water-use and seem to be at the heart of the matter. In particular, there are three problems: (i) Getting agricultural users to get ‘regularised’ by obtaining a concession; (ii) coping with the administrative workload involved in processing applications for concessions and issuing them; and (iii) enforcing the terms of the concession. Even amongst agricultural users, tube well irrigators have responded to the law quite well. Most tube well irrigators we interviewed, on private farms as well as in ejidos, held a concession or had already applied for one. One reason perhaps is that tube wells in Mexico are quite large, by Asian standards. A typical tube well in Guanajuato goes to a depth of 150–250 m, has a lift of 60–90 m, and has a 75–150 hp motor-pump and a 6 inch outlet pipe yielding 30–60 litres per second. Thus, a typical tube well may have a command area of 40–80 ha; only large private

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farmers have individual tube wells. Most ejidatarios share tube wells through informal ‘well societies’ similar to the tube well partnerships and companies found in North Gujarat (Shah and Bhattacharya 1993). Another reason why tube well owners keenly seek ‘regularisation’ by securing concessions is that they are linked to the formal economy through their dependence on the Federal Electricity Commission (FEC) for power supply. The FEC would require a concession before issuing an electricity connection for a new tube well. Then, there is also an incentive for existing tube well owners. Power supply to agricultural users in Mexico is subsidised; farmers pay around M$ 0.23–0.28/kWh against the average power tariff of M$ 0.55–0.65/kWh. And although the CNA and the federal government have yet not used that stick, they have certainly issued threats that tube wells without concessions would attract commercial power tariff, while ‘concessioned’ tube wells will keep enjoying subsidised tariff. This is a major factor; an average tube well in Mexico probably uses 50–80,000 kWh of power in a year; and access to power subsidy at current rates would mean a saving of M$ 12–18,000/year in their electricity bill— high enough to make it worth getting the concession. However, it is one thing to issue a concession to a tube well, it is quite another to specify its volumetric water right, and yet another to limit its pumping to the volume specified. The ‘concession’ in itself is nothing more than the registration of a well, which is easily done from the records of the FEC in the Mexican context, where all groundwater pumping is done by electric pumps. The creation of a water right lies in entitling each concessioned tube well to a particular volume of extraction. We found, however, that the volumes entitled are based on a combination of the current use implicit in the yield of the well and the area owned. Thus, groundwater concessions merely regularise the status quo and do not aim to curtail present levels of groundwater use, except through ban on new tube wells which can be more efficiently imposed simply by putting a cap on new agricultural power connections. Monitoring the actual extraction and enforcing it to ‘entitled volumes’ has proved impossible even in a small state like Guanajuato where agricultural tube wells are all of 15,000 in number. The CNA has legal powers to undertake surprise inspections and monitor water-use under concessions. However, it has only two field teams in Guanajuato; and if these were to make a single inspection visit to each irrigation well, it would take several tens of years to complete one round. Now, the state CNA has got seven brigades of two members each against a request for 20 brigades. This is better but is still much less than what is needed to begin to monitor actual groundwater extraction. In law, concessions are supposed to forfeit if the concessioned volumes are not used by the holder; however, this provision can be enforced only if there is regular monitoring of water-use by concession holders. This is proving well nigh impossible; and there is already talk of extending the ambit of the ‘environmental police force’—already created at the Federal level primarily to enforce industrial pollution—to cover groundwater extraction. Compared to tube wells, a far trickier animal is the bordo, a small tank-like water harvesting and storage structure—and presas that are somewhat larger—which have been proliferating in the uplands of Mexico at a frightening pace.5 Bordos and presas too are growing especially in up-land areas with intensive livestock farming for meat or dairying. In Guanajuato alone,

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around 200 large presas are organised as Unidades de Riego6—nominally controlled by the state agriculture department but are in fact farmer controlled and managed as much as smaller bordos and presas are. If the tube wells listed as unidades (because they have received some government assistance for drilling and so on) are included, together, these informal water structures irrigate more land in Guanajuato than all the WUAs do together. Under the new Water Law, each of these structures needs a concession; but most, as yet, do not have them. Bordos and presas present a catch-22 situation for the Mexican experiment in creating private water rights: if their owners persistently avoid applying for concessions, the intent of the Water Law will be frustrated in substantial ways. However, if they begin applying for concessions in large numbers, it may raise important issues of administrative logistics as also of equity and integrated river basin management that Mexico is trying to achieve. In the hilly upland areas of Mexico, and the catchment areas of major river basins, bordos have emerged as the backbone of a rainfed crop–livestock farming system. Conditions in these hilly upland areas are worse than in the plains. The new Water Law, under which all water bodies are required to be concessioned by the CNA, has created enormous confusion for owners of the bordos which store 5,000 to 50,000 m3 of water. Besides finding it pointless, the up-land farmers we interviewed were worried about the hassle and transaction costs which are out of all proportion to the value of bordos. Concessions have set into motion a new race for privatising the rainwater run-off. Another major concern was also about how the Water Law hits the poor in the remote areas particularly hard. The government keeps issuing ordinances and new time limits for compliance but people in remote areas do not even know about these for months and get left out. In the meanwhile, the smart and aggressive use these proactively to entrench and strengthen their positions by legalising them. They have found that getting concessions is an easy way of establishing private rights over what was so far open access run-off. This kind of mass manipulation also occurred in the bajío areas, the low lands of southcentral Guanajuato, for their intensive groundwater use in agriculture. Here, groundwater depletion is a 50-year-old problem; the first ban on new groundwater structures was announced in 1948 and since then 14 such bans have been issued. However, every announcement of an imminent ban—or injunction to regularise existing tube wells, such as in 1995—here stimulated a flurry of tube well-making activity in the hope that if made before the deadline, they would get regularised. Indeed, intended bans and injunctions for regularisation can be counted as one of the chief reasons for the runaway rise in tube well density in central Guanajuato. One such injunction was issued without a time limit in 1995; another with a time limit in 1996; and yet one more was issued in February 2002 with a time limit up to September 2002. Farmers also used other ways to manipulate the concession-grants. Many made new wells in the name of ‘repositioning’. Fransisco García, a senior CNA official lamented that in 2001, against 250 applications for repositioning wells, 1,000 new wells were made commonly with power connections drawn from a concessioned transformer. The CNA’s decision to form and support COTAS (Aquifer Management Councils) was born out of the recognition that concessions and private water rights, by themselves, would be of little help in getting the water users in the ‘informal sector’ to play the ball-game of sustainable water management, and that new mechanisms and structures needed to be experimented with

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to engage this vital sector in implementing the spirit of the Water Law. To their protagonists in the CNA, COTAS were government promoted non-governmental organisations (NGOs) fashioned as user organisations; and Guanajuato, where these early experiments first began under the leadership of Governor (now President) Fox, continues to lead Mexico’s COTAS experiment to date. Of the 47 COTAS in Mexico, 14 are in Guanajuato, one for each of the 14 aquifers delineated in the state. Now COTAS have been adopted as a national model and the CNA is promoting them in the rest of the country. However, federal COTAS differ from Guanajuato COTAS (Technical Councils for Water Management) in that the latter are termed water management councils that sound more inclusive whereas the federally promoted COTAS (Technical Committees for Groundwater Management) seem limited in their scope. Guanajuato COTAS concern themselves with managing all water resources; COTAS in other states focus squarely on groundwater. Guanajuato COTAS are also supported more liberally with state financial support; each is provided a rented office, a car and salaries for a manager, a technician and an administrative assistant. Federal COTAS have far more meager support from the CNA. Everywhere, however, COTAS have key design features that are common: their operational domain is defined by an aquifer boundary, which clearly gives primacy to their groundwater management role; they are all designed as representational non-profits. Registered as a Civil Association, each has a general assembly, an elected board and a small hired staff. Recently, all the Guanajuato COTAS were federated into a State Water Management Council with a representational structure akin to a COTAS. The Office of the Guanajuato Water Resources Council (CEH) is the organisation that represents all water users in the state. In its evolutionary process, the state council first brought the 14 COTAS together in this representational structure; but its ultimate goal is to bring all water users/stakeholders into the forum. They already have six representatives of surface irrigators now, four from two important irrigation districts of the state and two more to represent the 200 odd Unidades de Riego. The idea of COTAS is bold; and the expectations from these structures high. A COTAS is expected to be an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) promoter in the state, bringing together different actors and stakeholders to protect the water resources in quantity and quality (Shah et al. 2004a). The State Water Commission of Guanajuato (CEAG) expects that a COTAS should become a local water management organisation, and mature to a stage where it becomes a rallying point for all water users; that as they get formally recognised by the Water Law (which for the present they are not), they will come up with and implement practical water management and conservation actions and policies; they will mediate water conflicts; and enforce/implement national water policy on the ground level (Sandoval 2004). A common expectation is also that the COTAS—particularly, their state-level federation—will become a powerful instrument of implementing the Law of the Nation’s Waters; they will interact with authorities and water regulatory agencies and provide decisive inputs on the creation, establishment, control and changes in water management plans. Above all, COTAS are expected to mediate between the state and the federal water authority and water users they represent. This is why COTAS were designed as representational organisations.7 The sub-text in all this is that with their closer grassroots presence, COTAS will do what the CNA cannot: restrict groundwater extraction by enforcing the Water Law.

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Will Mexico’s COTAS fulfill these multifarious, often conflicting expectations? These are still early days; COTAS, even in Guanajuato, the state that pioneered them, are all of four years old; and according to Francisco García, Deputy Director of Water Administration, CNA, Guanajuato, COTAS will take time to become effective. ‘After all, Texas took 16 years to constitute its first aquifer management organisation through a state assembly decree, and 5 more years to actually put it on the ground. Mexico’s COTAS need to be given time to congeal and find their feet’ (Shah et al. 2004a). Guanajuato’s COTAS had until 2004 to find their feet; after that, the financial support from the state’s water commission would have ceased and COTAS left without alternative sources of funds would have had to liquidate their operating systems, and would, in effect, cease to exist. Stuck in such a situation, the normal propensity of a member organisation would be to turn to its members for sustenance; it would begin providing services that its members value and in turn expect them to contribute fees for such support. This is what Guanajuato’s módulos (WUAs) do; for instance, as a member organisation, the Irapuato módulo offers its members better irrigation service and has jacked water fees five times in five years, partly to fund its own growth and partly to improve existing services. A fundamental design flaw in COTAS may well be its concept itself: it is not allowed to provide what a majority of its members value most, i.e., unrestrained access to groundwater, and its members are reluctant to pay it membership fees for enforcing the Water Law on them, which its creators think is the mandate of the COTAS. It is not surprising then that industrial players—whose water-use was closely regulated even before the new Law—have been quick to take to the COTAS and even dominate them; but the farmers, the prime target of the Water Law’s groundwater provisions, have been staying away from the COTAS. As a result, COTAS are ploughing along without a strong sense of direction. Most have no notion of formal membership. With its 20,000 concession holders, Guanajuato’s 14 COTAS should each have 1,000–15,000 members with full user participation8, but their general assembly meetings often have just a few dozen participants. The Ocampo COTAS, one of the few which offers formal membership, has less than 100 members of the several hundred groundwater concession holders; however, Ocampo is not an important groundwater irrigation region. COTAS are little known amongst common people and their presence on the ground is thin or non-existent. Some 45 farmers we interviewed in various parts of Guanajuato—these included all types, small holders as well as large farmers, men and women, a few young and mostly old farmers—all were uniformly blank on COTAS. Most COTAS boards were elected by a general assembly attended by a small fraction (often 5–10 per cent) of total concession holders.9 Partly for this reason, the office bearers of COTAS enjoy little regard and allegiance of the wider public and citizenry, neither do they seem under pressure to respond to an aggregate of member priorities from COTAS. Many elected office bearers of COTAS seek to pursue their own ideals or have their own passions and ‘bees in their bonnets’, and they drive their COTAS in that direction rather than working on aggregated priorities of members, as would be the vogue in a responsive member organisation (Shah 1996). For instance, the president of a predominantly agricultural COTAS was able to focus all its work on issues related to industrial water-use that he feels strongly about, although most concession holders in the COTAS domain are farmers.

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A major reason for member apathy is that the high-ground assumed by the COTAS leadership often fails to connect with the here-and-now priorities of its members. In Jaral de Berrios, one of the best performing COTAS according to the Guanajuato Water Commission, only a couple of dozen farmers, all above 70 years of age participated in a council meeting to strategise for groundwater management.10 Concerned about the bleak agricultural future of the region, the COTAS president, a large private land holder, delivered an impassioned speech advocating the need to restrict groundwater use by regulating the area under tube well irrigation and presented an elegant formula to link total groundwater draft to the previous year’s rainfall. The old farmers in the audience were unmoved. One 75-year-old ejidatario got up and said, ‘My farming is already down to 2 hectares; how much more do you expect me to cut?’ Another rose and said, ‘It took me six years after making an application to get my concession; and by then, my tube well needed to be deepened and I was ready for a new concession. Can’t the COTAS help us cut through this maze?’ Yet another farmer described how he put his life’s savings in an expensive drip irrigation system, which failed and irrevocably damaged his well and pump due to lack of technical support. In sum, the present role and future direction of the COTAS are unclear to say the least. The CNA expects them to implement the Water Law; in particular, help contain groundwater extractions to concessioned limits and help curb illegal well-drilling. Ambitious COTAS presidents, such as in Jaral de Berrios, want to transform the COTAS in to a strong water user organisation that can mediate between the users and the authorities. Many COTAS managers view their role as one of promoting IWRM. There is no indication yet that COTAS are ready to play any of these roles. However, what they have been doing may not be without value. Many COTAS have been monitoring water levels; most have been carrying out water education campaigns. They have served as forums in which users can participate in discussing their water problems. And others have been trying to promote technification. At least in one COTAS, farmers shifted wholesale from cultivation of wheat to barley which uses less water.11 In any case, regulating agricultural use of water, especially of groundwater, is a challenge that has nowhere been met fully; and perhaps, the CNA will be well placed to support COTAS for a long time to come, with full recognition that they will not be able to achieve the ulterior goal behind the CNA support, that is, to help CNA implement the provisions of the Water Law on the informal water sector. Considering that the 14 Guanajuato COTAS have cost the State Water Commission (CEAG) less than US$ 2.5 million to support for five years12, one can easily argue that the capacity building and attitudinal impact COTAS can produce through targeted research and public education activity may justify such investment in view of growing importance of water in Mexico’s evolution. An early vision of the COTAS was that they would foster selfpolicing by users themselves taking the responsibility of self-monitoring their extraction to the agreed volume. Even though idealised, some believe that such a scheme can work in Mexico aided by European-style ‘water notaries’ that might be used to certify the actual extraction. We believe many conditions will need to be fulfilled before such a schema might work reasonably well; one of these is high quality public education on groundwater issues. And COTAS are certainly equipped to deliver this.

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C ONCLUSION In this chapter, I have reported results of field research on groundwater management institutions and policies in three regions of the world where agriculture, food and livelihoods depend heavily on intensive use of groundwater which is becoming increasingly unsustainable. My purpose was to review institutions and policies in place to promote sustainability and draw lessons from comparative analysis. Table 13.4 summarises my key conclusions from such a comparative analysis. My overriding impression is that South Asian countries have not even Table 13.4: Groundwater Governance: Comparative Analysis of Institutions and Policies in South Asia, China and Mexico China

Mexico

1. Government share in GW Miniscule; <0.01% provision to agriculture

South Asia

No

No

2. State provision of GW to urban settlements

Significant

Significant

Significant

3. State participation in GW monitoring

Yes

Yes

Yes

4. Incentives to private investment in groundwater development

Significant in India and Sri Lanka, None or often perverse; discontinued in insignificant Pakistan, Nepal, B Desh

None

5. Incentives to operating costs

Huge in India; less in other countries

Nil or insignificant

Yes, energy subsidies

6. Targeted disincentives in capital or operating costs

None

None

None

7. Registration of GW structures

No

No

Yes

8. Permits to abstract groundwater

No

Yes, but mostly Yes, but water to villages, quantities municipalities unenforceable and industries

9. Promotion of water saving technologies

Ineffective

Yes, strong

Some

Strong in western India; but growing elsewhere in India

South-North water transfers

Yes, in highlands where bordo’s are the mainstay of livestock farmers

10. Promotion of small-scale water harvesting and recharge works

Source: Based on author’s field work and notes in 2002–03, International Water Management Institute and Tata (ITP) Water Policy Program.

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begun to address the problem in any serious manner; China has, but will take time before its initiatives bear fruit. Mexico has gone, by far, the furthest in creating a legal and property rights structure that might be drawing a leaf from an institutional economics text book. Interestingly, we find no evidence that these have helped Mexico move towards sustainability; and Mexico’s efforts need to produce better results before they can be held out as a model that other groundwater-using countries can follow. However, the comparative analysis does suggest the outline of a framework that tells us what might work where. How countries respond to the challenge of sustainable management of their groundwater economies depends on a constellation of factors that defines the peculiar context of each country. This constellation of factors differs vastly across regions and countries; and these differences have decisive impact on whether an approach that has worked in one country will work in another with a different context. As a simple illustration of this point, Table 13.5 sets out some key variables that define the organisation of the groundwater economy in six different countries that make intensive use of groundwater in agriculture. The United States uses around 100 km3 of groundwater for irrigation; but to manage its economy, it has to monitor and regulate only around 200,000 pumping plants, each producing around 500,000 m3 of groundwater per year. Mexico is in the same league as the USA. India uses 150 km3; but to manage this groundwater economy, it has to manage the owners of over 20 million small wells, each producing an average of 8,000 m3 of water per year. Clearly, the task of US groundwater managers is enormously simpler compared to their Indian counterparts. With just 95,000 agricultural tube wells, the task of governing Mexico’s groundwater economy is even simpler.13 The nature of the political system also matters. Iran has been able to impose a complete ban on the sinking of new tube wells throughout its central plains that encompass two-thirds of the entire country (Hekmat 2002). Table 13.5: Structure of National Groundwater Economies

Country India

Annual Groundwateruse (km3) 150

No of Groundwater Structures (million) 19

Extraction/structure (m3/year)

% of Population Dependent on Groundwater

7,900

55–60

Pakistan–Punjab

45

0.5

90,000

60–65

China

75

3.5

21,500

22–25

Iran

29

0.5

58,000

12–18

29

0.07

414,285

5–6

100

0.2

500,000

<1–2

Mexico USA

Source: Based on author’s field work and notes in 2002–03, International Water Management Institute and Tata (ITP) Water Policy Program.

But, as we noted, Mexico has been trying to ban new tube wells in its bajio for 50 years and has yet not succeeded. China has a large number of tube wells scattered over a huge country-side; yet chances are that over the coming decade, it will be able not only to bring these within the ambit of its permit system but also succeed in influencing their operation. Doing something

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like this in India or Pakistan will remain unrealistic for a long time to come because of the political structures and systems that exist in these countries. Besides what is feasible and practical, there is also the question of the social impacts of approaches adopted. In Mexico and the US, where a miniscule proportion of people depend on groundwater for livelihoods, governments may easily adopt a tough regulatory posture. In South Asia, where over half of the total population may directly or indirectly depend on groundwater use for their livelihood, it is not surprising that political and administrative leadership is reluctant to even talk about regulating groundwater use, leave alone acting on it. In fact, even in China, where political resistance from farmers is not an overriding issue, and Mexico, where irrigator class is small enough to be ignored, governments have steered clear of tough regulatory measures. Those strategies are much more difficult to implement in the context of South Asia.

Notes 1. Chinese farmers pay several types of land tax—notably, crop tax, education tax, water use tax, electrician tax, and the like. In Xiaotan Village, Yanjin county in Henan, for instance, half of the annual tax collection of Yuan (Y) 20,000 is turned into the township government and half is retained by the village leader. Of the village share of Y 10,000, some 15 per cent is earmarked for the maintenance of tube wells. 2. Water purchased from a 5 hp diesel pump with an hourly discharge of 12,000 litres costs Rs 50 in most parts of eastern India. 3. Water purchased from a 75 hp electric pump with an hourly discharge of 55,000 litres costs Rs 90 in north Gujarat. 4. The village electrician’s reward system encourages him to exert pressures to achieve greater efficiency by cutting line losses. In Dong Wang Nu village in Ci County, the village committee’s single large transformer, which served both domestic and agricultural connections, caused heavy line losses at 22–25 per cent. Once the network reform programme began, he pressurised the VC to sell the old transformer to the Township Electricity Bureau and raise Y 10,000 (partly by collecting a levy of Y 25 per family and partly by a contribution from the Village Development Fund) to get two new transformers, one for domestic connections and the other for pumps. Since then, power losses have fallen to the permissible 12 per cent here. 5. IWMI estimated the number of these at 29,000 in the late 1990s (Shah et al. 2004). The State Water Commission believed that although bordos are traditional structures, a large majority of these came up during the past 10 years as a popular response to growing water scarcity. Local farmers we interviewed supported the view that a majority of bordos found today are less than 8–10 years old. 6. These are used by rainfed farmers, essentially to get one irrigation to establish the rainfed sorghum crop. 7. In a typical COTAS in Guanajuato, accordingly, the general assembly elects a 10-member board that has a President, Treasurer, General Secretary, one representative each from agricultural users, public services (which includes domestic and municipal users) and industrial users. A back up candidate is elected for each of these, which takes the total board size to 10. The General Assembly generally meets twice every year; the board meets every month. There are few women on elected boards; however, five are hired as employees by different COTAS. In keeping with their broader, more ambitious

264

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Tushaar Shah mandate of IWRM, the Guanajuato COTAS drew representatives from various stakeholder groups although their domain was defined by the aquifer boundaries. In these 14 COTAS, 12 of the 29 elected representatives of farmers represent surface water irrigators whereas 17 represent groundwater users. In theory, only concession holders are official members of the general assembly of a COTAS; however, in practice, the State Water Commission staff ends up spending a great deal of effort in getting all users to participate. As a matter of fact, the State Water Commission (CEAG) has tried to break out of the norm that only concession holders can be COTAS members; it has been trying to broaden participation into COTAS affairs from wider cross-sections of the citizenry. For instance, in the four-year-old Silao and Romita COTAS, which also cover the town of Guanajuato, the general assembly including 2,049 well owners, 93 per cent of them agricultural, should reflect farmer concerns. However, a general assembly attended by some 100 members elected a manager of the General Motors as the President, a manager of the Leon airport as the Treasurer. Jaral de Berrios aquifer, shared by Guanajuato and the neighbouring state of San Luís Potosí, faces critical problems of over draft but has only a few hundred wells. The Guanajuato side in fact has only 334 wells, 89 per cent of them agricultural. Only 200 of these are concessioned yet others have applied some years ago and are waiting to receive their concessions. These large tube wells, going to 250–280 m and using pumps of 75–100 hp produce discharges of 25–40 litres per second which they deliver into a large tank and from thence, water conveyed by buried pipes to different fields. Typically, a well irrigates 30–35 ha and if all users use drip irrigation, the area irrigated can go up to 55–60 ha. However, only 3 per cent of the tube well irrigated area uses drip; and farmers feel reluctant to ‘technify’ their irrigation systems because of the dismal after-sales support of irrigation equipment companies. Many would also expect government support to install such technologies. Wells are private as well as group-owned, the latter common among ejidatarios. This is a great achievement; however, besides the educational effort of COTAS, the key catalyst to this change has been the establishment of a Corona beer plant in its territory that created a steady, remunerative market for barley far better than wheat. This suggests that in the complex business of groundwater regulation, an ounce of positive incentive may do the work of a ton of regulatory effort. The cost of catalysing and sustaining COTAS in Guanajuato has been met by the State Water Commission (CEAG) through providing them budgetary support as follows: Support to 14 Guanajuato COTAS 1998 US $153,471 1999 US $459,184 2000 US $607,142 2001 US $510,204 2002 US $766,490

13. However, in actuality, even in Mexico, enforcing concessions on agricultural tube wells has proved almost impossible. Similar is the experience even in Spain where With the passing of the 1985 Water Law, it was declared as of ‘public ownership. This represented a fundamental change in relation to water rights. Yet this drastic change, compounded by lack of knowledge and a poor information campaign (in relation to the legal changes and to groundwater use) has led to many situations of ‘hydrologic disobedience’ in relation to water rights and abstraction in almost every stressed aquifer. Indeed the question remains as to what came first, hydrologic disobedience or stressed aquifers. A typical example of this situation is the Upper Guadiana basin (Lopez Gunn and Llamas 1999).

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References Barker, R., C.A. Scott, C. de Fraiture and U. Amarasinghe (2000). ‘Global Water Shortages and the Challenge Facing Mexico’, International Journal of Water Resources Development, 16(4): 525–42. Barker, R. and Molle (2002). ‘Perspectives on Asian Irrigation’, paper presented at the conference on Asian Irrigation in Transition-Responding to the Challenges Ahead in the Asian Institute of Technology, 22–23 April, Bangkok, Thailand. Boxer, B. (2001). ‘Contradictions and Challenges in China’s Water Policy Development’, Water International, 26(3): 335–41. DebRoy, A. and T. Shah (2003). ‘Socio-ecology of Groundwater Irrigation in India’, in R. Llamas and E. Custodio (eds), Intensive Use of Groundwater: Challenges and Opportunities. The Netherlands: Swets and Zetlinger Publishing Co. Down to Earth (2002). ‘Ground Reality’, special report, 31 May, 11(1): 38. Dubash, N. (2002). Tubewell Capitalism: Groundwater Development and Agrarian Change in Gujarat. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hekmat, A. (2002). ‘Overexploitation of Groundwater in Iran: Need for an Integrated Water Policy’, paper for the International Water Management Institute-Indian Council of Agricultural Research-Colombo Plan sponsored Policy Dialogue on Forward-Thinking Policies for Groundwater Management: Energy, Water Resources, and Economic Approaches organised in India International Center, 2–6 September, New Delhi. Janakarajan, S. (1992). ‘Inter-linked Transactions and Markets for Water in the Agrarian Economy of a Tamilnadu Village’, in S. Subramanian (ed.), Themes in Development Economics: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Adiseshiah. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kolavalli, S. and D.L. Chicoine (1989). ‘Groundwater Markets in Gujarat, India’, Water Resources Development, 5(1): 39. Kendy, E., T. Steenhuis and C. Liu (2002). ‘Policies Drain the North China Plain: Hydrologic Impacts of Institutional Changes Affecting Luancheng County, Hebei Province, 1949–2000’. Unpublished draft. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering. Lopez, G. and M.R. Llamas (1999). ‘New and Old Paradigms in Spain’s Water Policy’, proceedings of the Forum Water Security in the Third Millennium Mediterranean Countries and a case. UNESCO Science for Peace Series, Como, Italy, 12–15 April. Mainuddin (2002). Personal Communication. McClelland, D. (1985). Achieving Society. Boston: Replica Books. Meinzen-Dick, R. and M. Sullins (1994). ‘Water Markets in Pakistan: Participation and Productivity’. EPTD Discussion Paper No. 4. Washington D.C: International Food Policy Research Institute. Palmer-Jones, R.W. (1994). ‘Groundwater Markets in South Asia: A Discussion of Theory and Evidence’, in M. Moench (ed.), Selling Water: Conceptual and Policy Debates over Groundwater Markets in India. Ahmedabad: VIKSAT. Ronghan, H. (1988). ‘Development of Groundwater for Agriculture in the Lower Yellow River Alluvial Basin’, in G.T. O’Mara (ed.), Efficiency in Irrigation: The Conjunctive Use of Surface and Groundwater Resources, Washington, D.C: The World Bank. Saleth, Maria R. (1994). ‘Groundwater Markets in India: A Legal and Institutional Perspective’, The Indian Economic Review, 39(2): 157–76. Sandoval, R. (2004). ‘A Participatory Approach to Integrated Aquifer Management: The Case of Guanajuato State, Mexico’, Hydrogeology Journal, 12(1): 6–13.

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Scott, C.A. and P. Silva-Ochoa (2001). ‘Collective Action for Water Harvesting Irrigation in the LermaChapala Basin’, Water Policy, 3(6). Scott, R., A. Park, J. Huang and H. Jin (2000). ‘Bureaucrat to Entrepreneur: The Changing Role of the State in China’s Grain Economy’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 48(2): 227–52. Scott, C.A., P. Silva-Ochoa, V. Florencio-Cruz and P. Wester (2001). ‘Competition for Water in the LermaChapala Basin: Economic and Policy Implications of Water Transfers from Agricultural to Urban Uses’, in A. Hansen and M. van Afferden (eds), The Lerma-Chapala Watershed: Evaluation and Management, New York: Kluwer Academic. Shah, T. (1993). Groundwater Markets and Irrigation Development: Political Economy and Practical Policy. Bombay: Oxford University Press. ——— (1996). Catalyzing Co-operation: Design of Self-governing Organisations. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Shah, T., B. Koppen, M. de Lange, D. Merrey and M. Samad (2002). ‘Farmer Management of Government Irrigation Systems: Can Africa’s Small-holders do it?’, research report No. 59, Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute (Shorter versions also published in IHDP Newsletter January, 2001; and PRADAN News reach February 2001). Shah, T. and S. Bhattacharya (1993). ‘Farmer Organisations for Lift Irrigation: Irrigation Companies and Tubewell Cooperatives of Gujarat’. Overseas Development Institute Network Paper 26. London: Overseas Development Institute. Shah, T., C. Scott and S. Buechler (2004a). ‘Water Sector Reforms in Mexico: Lessons for India’s New Water Policy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(4): 361–70. Shah, T., C. Scott, A. Kishore and A. Sharma (2004b). Energy-Irrigation Nexus in South Asia: Improving Groundwater Conservation and Power Sector Viability. Research Report # 70. Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute. Strosser, P. and M. Kuper (1994). ‘Water Markets in the Fordwah/Eastern Sadiquia Area: An Answer to Perceived Deficiencies in Canal Water Supplies?’, working paper No. 10, Colombo: International Irrigation Management Institute. Sunday Times (2002). 7 April, p. 7. UNDP (2000). ‘Perspectives on Integrated Basin Management for a Policy Study on the Huaihe River Basin, China’, unpublished draft, New York: UNDP. Van S., Frank and W. Oliemans (2002). ‘A Review of Policies in Groundwater Management in Pakistan 1950–2000’, Water Policy, 4(2002): 323–44. Wang, J. and J. Huang (2002). ‘Water Institutional and Management System at National and River Basin Level in China’, internal paper, Beijing: Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy. Wester, P., B.M. Pimentel and C. Scott (1999). ‘Institutional Responses to Groundwater Depletion: The Aquifer Management Councils in the State of Guanajuato’, internal draft, Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute (Presented at the International Symposium on Integrated Water Management in Agriculture, Gomez Palacio, Mexico, 16–18 June). Wood, G. (1995). ‘Private Provision after Public Neglect: Opting Out with Pumpsets in North Bihar’, occasional paper. Bath: Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath. Xiang, Q., J. Huang and J. Wang (2000). ‘Property Right Innovation and Cropping Pattern Adjustment: Case Study of Groundwater Irrigation System in Hebei, China’, draft. Beijing: Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy.

Section IV The Way Forward

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14 Multi-stakeholder Participation, Collaborative Policy Making and Water Governance: The Need for a Normative Framework K.J. Joy, Suhas Paranjape and Seema Kulkarni The overthrow of opinion is not immediately followed by the overthrow of institutions; on the contrary the new opinions dwell for a long time in the desolate and haunted house of their predecessors, and conserve it even for want of a habitation (Nietzsche, 1909–13, Section 8, Number 466 as quoted in Connick and Innes 2003: 177).

G OVERNANCE

AND

M ULTI - STAKEHOLDER P ARTICIPATION

Governance is emerging as one of the important themes in development discourse. It may not be wrong to say that ever since the Dublin Conference in 1992, governance has become an important theme in the discourse on water too. The Global Water Partnership (GWP) Framework for Action stated that the ‘water crisis1 is often a crisis of governance’ and identified making water governance effective as one of the highest priorities for action (GWP 2000 as cited in Rogers and Hall 2003). Water governance as a theme draws its urgency from, and is very closely linked to water sector reforms that are underway in most of countries. In broad terms, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines water governance as ‘the range of political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society’ (UNDP 2007). It involves (i) political concerns related to democracy, human rights and participatory processes; (ii) match and mismatch between the politico-administrative system and the ecological system or in terms of operation and management of services; and (iii) financial accountability and administrative efficiency (ibid.). The issue of governance is at the interface of state and (civil) society. In the contested arena of state-society relationships and interactions, the governance system is supposed to provide the power balance (Rogers and Hall 2003); and the present-day discourse on governance pitches itself more towards the society-end of the continuum (more society-centred) and tries to move away from statism (less state-centred). The governance agenda is also an integral part of the political reform towards

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democratisation, decentralisation and devolution of power, and it explores the ‘non-state spaces’2 such as community and civil society (Shah 2004) to hothouse new institutions. Water governance cuts across different geo-hydrological, social, political and administrative scales and boundaries. It is as significant and relevant in the context of a micro-watershed of let us say 500–1000 hectares (ha) as it is in the context of a sub-basin, a basin, a nation-state and even a region comprising many nations, as well as upstream-downstream, inter-basin, interstate, and international relationships. In the context of India and its neighbouring nations, the new-found ‘national’ interest in the interlinking of Indian rivers has added one more international dimension to the issue of water governance. Similarly, the talk of ‘virtual’ water transfers across the globe, the overall ambience of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG), international trade agreements, and inclusion of water resources in the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) add yet another scale and dimension to the issue of water governance. Thus, it is important to bear in mind that when we talk about water governance, it includes not only localist, ‘small is beautiful’ type of scenarios, but we also refer to issues at a much larger scale, including the global restructuring of the water sector. Similarly, we are talking about many different types or sets of ‘actors’ who have different ‘stakes’ in water and whose actions (or non-actions) can affect the water sector in many different ways. Today, there seems to be an overwhelming opinion in favour of the participatory approach in water governance (participatory water governance, or PWG), and of the necessity to make necessary institutional and legal changes to make water governance more decentralised. The National Water Policy also recognises such a need. Several scholars are arguing for MultiStakeholder Participation/Platforms3 (MSP) to facilitate decentralised water governance. MSP and Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) have gained currency as the new-found approaches to resolve some of the issues confronting the water sector (Ballabh 2004). To ensure good governance, the involvement of the public is needed and the interests of all stakeholders need to be included in the governance system (Hague Ministerial Declaration 2000). Given the complexity of water use within society, developing, allocating and managing water equitably and efficiently and ensuring environmental sustainability requires that different interests, needs and voices be heard and accommodated in decisions over common waters (Rogers and Hall 2003). Collaborative policy making, an important arena of MSP, has become increasingly significant for environmental management. Collaborative dialogue among stakeholders is the most productive way to address many complex and controversial policy questions (Yankelovich 1999). According to Connick and Innes (2003: 177): When the process is well managed, the stakeholders are interdependent, the issue demands action and the stakeholders cannot address their concerns by working alone, they are likely to stay at the table and develop new ideas and strategies. Sometimes even if no agreements are reached at the end, the results indicate that the process itself was very valuable. Unfortunately, however, very often the focus is on agreements—a process is considered a failure

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if no formal agreement is reached, or if an agreement is reached without some participants’ assent, or if someone challenges the agreement, etc. This focus on agreements misses the most important aspects of collaborative dialogues—specifically the way they reshape the policy context and instigate new forms of action.

T HEORETICAL U NDERPINNINGS Multi-stakeholder processes and collaborative policy making efforts, to a great extent, are theoretically founded on Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality (and deliberative democracy), which reflects a consensus-building process built on interests (Connick and Innes 2003).4 Habermas developed the notion of the public sphere, distinct from state and economy, in which citizens participate and act through dialogue and debate to eventually build consensus based upon reason. In his deliberative democracy model, Habermas proposed that a rational and reasoned consensus could be built among the opposing viewpoints through arguments and counter-arguments—deliberations (Habermas 1981). What needs to be done for building this consensus among interest groups is to institutionalise appropriate procedural means so that various opposing views can be expressed and the better argument can come into play (Shah 2004). However, there has also been a critique of this belief that consensus can be achieved as a result of a free deliberative process, especially from academics like Mosse (1997a, 1997b). According to Mosse, the notion of the common good of various actors (or stakeholders) drastically vary; they have different worldviews and come in conflict with each other, depending upon actors’ location; and whether the different actors can easily arrive at the location of ‘rational communication’ in order to resolve conflicts itself is questionable. Later researchers have also talked about the possibility of ‘elite capture’ of participatory processes. Another context of multi-stakeholder processes and collaborative policy making emanates from the critique of the modernist paradigm of governance and its legitimacy. According to Connick and Innes (2003), in the conventional paradigm of governance (which some call the ‘modernist’ paradigm of governance), the formal institutions of governance include legislative bodies, administrative and executive agencies responsible for implementation and independent judiciary for arbitration, especially in countries that have adopted ‘democratic’ polity and way of governance. Here, the governance framework gains its legitimacy because the leaders or legislators who make the laws are elected by the people, the persons who manage the administrative machinery are often appointed by those who are elected and courts are supposed to follow certain accepted procedures and apply agreed-on criteria in making decisions. The assumption is that the world works like a machine, in a predictable manner, and with adequate information and expertise, one can come up with policies, programmes or regulation that will meet a defined social objective and produce the desired outcomes. It also assumes that procedures for adjudication will resolve differences and the results will be fair and beneficial for society.

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The critics say that there are many problems with such an idealised version of governance— the most important being the waning legitimacy, trust and confidence in the state and its various institutions. They see the world as: a complex, evolving system, the behaviour of which, unlike a machine, cannot be controlled by any agency, person or institution, regardless of how clever and well informed.... In the right circumstances (and assisted by appropriate institutions, norms, and heuristics) complex systems, whether natural, social or physical, can become intelligent adaptive systems. These systems can respond proactively to stresses, demands, and information from the environment, and to unanticipated consequences of their own internal dynamics, with the result of not just surviving but also moving to higher levels of performance . . . [I]n the process, the whole system evolves and develops’ (Connick and Innes 2001: 8). They also conceptualise multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) in the need to build new institutions— institutions that mesh better with collaborative policy making and offer new expectations about outcomes and new criteria for success. Development of new institutions is also more suitable for the post-modern information era.

Water as an Ecosystem Resource The necessity of MSPs, to a great extent in water management, is related to the very nature of water as an ecosystem resource and its characteristics. Some of these important characteristics are as follow: (i) Water is divisible and amenable to sharing. (ii) It is a common pool resource (CPR). While this is true of all forms of water it is presently clearly accepted only in respect of surface water. Groundwater falls predominantly within the private property regime and is exploited and managed privately, though there is an increasing awareness of the need to treat it as a CPR and manage it accordingly. (iii) It has multiple and competing uses and users and there are resultant trade-offs involved. (iv) The problem of excludability is inherent in its nature. The exclusion costs involved are very high. (v) It involves the issue of scale and boundaries and evolving some understanding around them. For example, what does one call local and exogenous, downstream and upstream and what are the relationships between these entities? (vi) The way water resource development is planned, used and managed causes externalities— both positive and negative—and some of the externalities may be unidirectional. These important characteristics of water as an intrinsic part of the ecosystem and CPR do have a bearing on the question of water governance and the institutions crafted for the same.5 These characteristics also have certain other immediate fallouts. One, they have the potential

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both to become an instrument of equitable and sustainable prosperity for all those who depend, directly or indirectly, on water for their livelihoods as well as to trigger contention and conflict, thus becoming an instrument of polarisation and exclusion. To quote from the Report of the World Commission on Dams (WCDs): The unfolding scenario for water use in many parts of the world is one of increasing concern about access, equity and the response to growing needs. This affects relations between rural and urban populations; upstream and downstream interests; agricultural, industrial and domestic sectors; and human needs and the requirements of a healthy environment (WCDs 2000). In terms of scale, these conflicts range from conflicts between micro watersheds to river basins and from riparian states to nations. In fact, one of the immediate and compelling reasons for MSP is in its potential for conflict resolution. Two, given all this, it follows that we need to design institutional mechanisms and social processes which can regulate the actions (and non-actions!) of the different stakeholders. MSP could be a good instrument for this collective regulation.

Multi-stakeholder Participation on Ground: Experiences from the United States of America Though in India MSPs are in their nascent stages, in countries like the US multi-stakeholder participation is fast becoming an integral part of the governance system.6 The CALFED BayDelta Program in the state of California is often cited as a good example of collaborative policy making and MSP in water management (see Box 14.1). Box 14.1: CALFED Bay-Delta Program CALFED Bay-Delta program is a collaborative policy making and a multi-stakeholder water management process among the 18 (now 23) state and federal agencies that had responsibilities for managing water supply and protecting related natural resources. The process grew out of endangered species protection, but has come to encompass water supply development and allocation, flood protection, water quality and habitat restoration. This is the first time that such an extensive collaboration had been tried among so many state and federal agencies in California, many of which had been at odds with one another for decades. The process also involved stakeholders from non-governmental interest groups, Native American tribes and local and regional agricultural and urban water agencies. It was state-wide effort in that it focussed on developing a consensus-based plan for restoring and protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem. It was to resolve decades-old conflicts over water use and environmental protection. Its tasks included: identifying the actions needed to protect the environment and water supply; developing new operations and management strategies to help make better use of water; and making decisions (Box 14.1 continued)

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(Box 14.1 continued ) about needed facilities and environmental restoration projects. In this case, agencies and stakeholders developed historic and extraordinary proposals in a largely collaborative manner. This process produced innovative ideas for new institutions and practices, and also seemed to have brought to an end 100 years of water wars. Though there are occasional skirmishes and dissatisfaction among certain stakeholders, the collaborative water management and many projects that got initiated through this process continue to move forward with backing from a wide array of stakeholders and agencies. Source: Connick and Innes (2003: 177–97).

Another arena where MSP has been significant is in the case of the review of existing dams and dam removals (or decommissioning of dams). There is a very elaborate and systematic review process that takes place in which all interest groups come together and explore different options before a decision is taken. For example, in the case of the Englebright dam (on Yuba river in California), which was assessed on various aspects during 2003–04, three distinct interest groups/teams were involved in the process: one, the river team consisting of people and groups who were basically interested in restoring the river; two, the lake team who were interested in maintaining the lake/reservoir because of various interests like recreation, or other economic interests; and three, the agency team, which consisted of government agencies, utilities, and the like. Experts, academics and their institutions also played a significant role in this. Different options were explored (such as, fish ladders, removal of dam, flooding, maintaining the dam); these options were discussed with the stakeholders and from this process the final decision was taken. Scientific knowledge played a big role in the decision making process. The procedure, structure, protocol, methodology and study plans were agreed upon by the stakeholder groups right at the beginning. The stakeholder groups oversaw all these. The value of this process could be gauged from the observation of Mike Matz: …the belief that different stakeholders can come together and then work out a plan to the satisfaction of all looks is rather tricky. There are issues like: why should different opposing interests come together? Also, through MSPs all are looking for an ’agreement’ which satisfies all as an end product. Success is decided based on whether an agreement has been reached or not. But even the process, the type of interactions between some of the stakeholders and the socio-political capital it generates are also important. These are related to: (i) Social and political capital, (ii) Agreed-on information and shared understanding, (iii) End to stalemate, (iv) High-quality agreements, (v) Learning and change beyond what the original stakeholders came with, (vi) Innovation, (vii) A cascade of changes in attitudes, behaviours and actions, and (viii) Institutions and practices that involve flexibility and networks. (See Connick and Innes 2003 for details.) However, there are also deep-seated suspicions amongst some of the stakeholders. For example, there is lot of suspicion about the conservationists’ agenda because of the country’s historical legacy and the way it affected some of the Native American tribes/communities.

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The conservationists evoked legislations like ‘The Extinct Species Act’ (especially in the case of fish) to force Native Americans as stakeholders to collaborate on conservation, and thus provided a platform for compromised the interest of these marginalised people in the final outcome. There are two important principles, which all the stakeholders agreed to right at the outset of the review process that guided the dam review process. One, people would be kept ‘whole’; meaning if whatever course of action is decided through the multi-stakeholder processes and that action negatively affects certain people, then they would be given adequate compensation; and two, any action taken would not be allowed to flood the downstream. This prior agreement on these principles helped decrease conflicts. So, deciding the principles became the guiding force of any conflict resolution in the MSP. If agreement on principles is reached, other issues can be resolved easily. The role of ‘public’ science is also very important in multi-stakeholder processes. In situations where the conflict is very active and sharp, science helps to narrow down the uncertainty factor (or narrow the boundaries of uncertainty), helps to produce synthetic concepts (‘composite rationality’) and also helps to put issues in a larger context or create a larger picture. Similarly, public perception about issues is another factor that affects the multi-stakeholder processes. The US experience shows that the strength of these two—science and public perception—can come together to make MSP more meaningful. How scientific and cultural concepts and the organisation of knowledge and scientific research affect public discourse about and action toward environmental problems is an issue that needs to be further explored in the context of MSP-processes. Multi-stakeholder participation in the water sector in the US (especially in California) is also affected by some of the laws in place. The notable ones include The Clean Water Act, The National Environment Policy Act, The Extinct Species Act, California Water Rights Law, and The Public Trust Doctrine. Similarly there is a distinct public perception in favour of environmental needs. Hence, during times of water scarcity, the first cut is applied to agricultural use and this is, by and large, socially accepted. Broadly speaking, the experience in the US shows that the MSP is not a completely open-ended, unbound process; it is very much a guided, ‘bounded’ process. It takes place on the basis of agreed upon principles and procedures and also within the overall policy framework that governs the water sector.

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In India, the efforts at initiating MSP processes has been comparatively recent and that too limited only to a few river basins.7 Many of them have been initiated by donors and/or outside agencies as part of research studies and have not come up from the felt needs of the direct stakeholders themselves. One notable example of a MSP-like process is the dialogue between the water users from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu on the vexed issue of sharing the Cauvery waters. Here, the process of dialogue was initiated by some of the researchers associated with the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS). Though this dialogue may not have

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resulted in any path-breaking agreements to break the deadlock, it helped the farmers’ representatives from both the states to be involved in dialogue process with each other, face to face, and understand each other’s constraints and viewpoints. In South Maharashtra, the Shetmajoor Kashtakari Shetkari Sanghattana (SKSS)—a rural toilers’ organisation—along with the Maharashtra Rajya Dharangrasth va Prakalpagrasth Shetkari Parishad—an umbrella organisation of the project-affected persons (PAPs) —was able to bring together two important stakeholders with seemingly entirely conflicting interests, namely, the drought-affected farmers and the PAPs (or displaced persons), on to one platform and organise combined agitations and force the government to come to the negotiating table. Though this initiative may not be considered a typical case of the multi-stakeholder process, the efforts did help to expand the arena of contestation and negotiation, forcing the government to discuss with the direct stakeholders and even explore the possibility of restructuring some of the projects. For example, reducing the height of one of the dams to bring down submergence, or changing the conventional norms of water allocation based on landholding in a designated command to a norm allocating a share of water to villages on the basis of their population, and so on. For a number of years, the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM) has been working in the water sector and has initiated MSP-like processes around many specific issues. Sometimes, this has taken the form of a bilateral or a multi-lateral dialogue between the major stakeholders and though it has not often led to the establishment of a formal MSP, MSP-like initiatives have constantly emerged. We could mention here the mutual interaction between SKSS, SOPPECOM and the state government and departments where SOPPECOM has attempted to play the role of initiating an MSP-like process around specific issues and projects. The more notable examples are the Chikotra Valley issue, the Uchchangi Dam issue and the Tembu Lift Irrigation Scheme. SOPPECOM has played an important role in initiating MSP-like processes in all of these, which have led to very positive outcomes. In Chikotra Valley, the movement is demanding an equitable access to the water from the Chikotra valley project for all upstream areas. This has brought in the displaced as well as upstream farmers as stakeholders into an MSP-like process. A process of continuous interaction is ongoing between the Chikotra Valley farmers, the classical command area farmers, the displaced farmers, the government officials and ministries, as well as noted irrigation experts. In the case of the Uchchangi Dam, the farmers in Uchchangi were opposed to the dam because of the area that would be submerged by the dam, and also because they felt that the same objectives could be achieved by smaller dams at different sites. Here too, SOPPECOM helped initiate and maintain an MSP-like process where there was an effort to reconcile the stakeholder interests. A final compromise solution of a dam with reduced height was accepted as an interim solution. The issue of the Tembu Lift Irrigation Scheme (TLIS) is perhaps the one that comes closest to an MSP. The TLIS is a large lift scheme that will irrigate 79,600 hectares (ha) in South Maharashtra by lifting water from the Krishna River. It involves many important issues. SKSS, the South Maharashtra-based movement, has demanded a restructuring of the scheme to ensure equitable access to all farmers in the drought-prone region through which it passes,

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including local lifts wherever needed. The other issues are the cost of energy that is involved in lifting the water, how it is to be paid for and what is to be the cost. With the help of an International Water Management Institute (IWMI)-supported study on co-management of energy and water8, SOPPECOM held a series of meetings of all the stakeholders involved: the farmers and their leaders, the irrigation officials, the ministry representatives, the electricity board officials, the energy development agency for the state, environmental groups and other experts and interested groups drawn from civil society. The meetings were extremely helpful in facilitating and extending the understanding between various stakeholders. Since then, the state government has started joint exploration of the possibilities of restructuring the scheme for equitable access for all farmers in the Atpadi taluka portion of the scheme on a pilot project basis. The farmers on their part have shown readiness to take over the scheme, pay full water charges in advance every season and pay the full electricity charge, provided they are charged on rates on par with all other farmers.

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Another aspect is especially important in the Indian context. In India, struggles and viewpoints about water issues have been highly polarised. The richness and diversity of contexts in India—bio-physical, social, economic as well as political—creates a fragmented polity and tends towards polarisation rather than synthesis. Viewpoints tend to crystallise around polarised positions with no meeting ground. This also characterises the state-civil society relationships. Intransigence leads to a long drawn-out war of attrition between different vulnerable sections, and the only ones to gain from the process are often the bureaucracies and the vested interests which profit from this polarisation. MSPs and especially MSP-like processes become much more important in such contexts. If we look at many of the struggles around us, it could be argued that MSP-like processes would have resulted in better outcomes than what polarised wars of attrition have resulted in. However, based on our experience so far, we feel that there are a few aspects that need urgent attention if MSP-like processes are to graduate to meaningful, stable MSPs and foster decentralised water governance. MSPs will need to take into account the following: • The heterogeneity of stakeholders and give proper attention to it. • Take prior rights and context of MSP formation into account. • MSPs will have to be informed by an innovative approach to water sector reform that will allow accommodation of different stakeholder interests. • MSPs will need to be supported by access to reliable data, information and decision support systems. • Lastly, MSPs require the presence of a committed support and resource agency.

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Above all, there is the question of a (normative) framework under which the MSP would take place. As Rogers and Hall (2003: 11) point out, ‘one of the key elements of governance is to create an inclusive framework (institutional and administrative) within which strangers or people with different interests can practically discuss and agree to co-operate and co-ordinate their actions’. This is all the more important in the water sector as there are sharply divided opinions about some of the crucial issues confronting the water sector and the framework adopted on these crucial issues could tilt the MSP process and governance in one way or another. For example, there is the debate about whether water is a social good or an economic good. If we say that water is a social good and see it as a basic human right then the resulting process of negotiation and contestation would be quite different than if we take a stand that water is an economic good or commodity. Similarly, there is a sharp difference of opinion about the way we look at source creation and the controversy about ‘large versus small’ is part of this. The framework adopted in respect of this issue will certainly influence the direction of the MSP process one way or another. In fact, we may often need a framework that creates the space for a dialogue before an MSP can be initiated. For example, if the framework accepts that the displaced marginalised communities like the adivasis (tribal people) should suffer for the ‘greater common good’ (a viewpoint that still dominates the mainstream water sector establishment), or that no large dam is acceptable even though it may provide reliable water supply to severely drought-affected areas (a viewpoint that dominates the opposition to dam building per se), then it leaves very little room for the displaced losers and the drought-affected beneficiaries to even sit together and talk. However, if we take a viewpoint that there is a need to integrate the small and the large, and that in this process we could also attempt to reduce destructive submergence as much as possible and store as much as possible of the monsoon and post-monsoon flows in the so called service/command areas and not behind the dam as it is being done today, then it opens up space for a joint exploration by the two important stakeholders: the would-be project-affected and the its beneficiaries. Tackling issues related to equity also needs a similar, integrative framework. We need a similarly accommodative framework if MSPs and MSP-like processes are to become feasible and productive. There are issues of whether the MSP-like processes are supposed to substitute formal, political institutional processes or supposed to aid them. Finally, all these issues also need to be seen through the perspective of the overall developmental objectives. Generally, there seems to be a consensus that sustainability, equity and participation/democratisation should be the over-arching, foundational objectives of any development. To translate this consensus to practice, one needs to go into the details of these concepts; and often the devil lies in the details. Unless we can build up a certain level of mass awareness about these issues and develop a mass/societal mandate about these to lend legitimacy to MSP processes, it would be difficult to build up MSPs as viable forums of governance. Immediately after Independence, there seems to have been some consensus on the developmental priorities and the path to that development, but today this seems to have broken down and new issues have come up. Hence, there is a need to rethink many things and evolve a minimum set of normative principles

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which can guide future governance. We discuss some of these important concepts and issues around which we need to develop a framework below.

The Role of MSPs and the State The first point that needs to be considered is the issue of what exactly should be the role of MSPs? Though often couched in ‘what is’ terms, it is essentially a ‘what should be’ question, a normative question. In view of the importance that civil society institutions are acquiring vis-à-vis the state this is a legitimate concern, and it is of founding importance in the formation of MSPs. In the overall context of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, today, there is a tendency to call for a withdrawal of the state and hand over those functions to user institutions or to the private sector. MSPs may tend to be seen in the same light as taking over state functions in respect of water. In our opinion this would be erroneous. First, we need to note that the taking over of some of the state functions by user groups is not necessarily synonymous with privatisation, though it often tends to be seen in that light since the state has withdrawn from those functions. However, users exercising collective control over the resource they share and use are a different phenomenon than turning over the functions to profit-driven corporate bodies, and this distinction needs to be emphasised. Similarly, there is a need to make a distinction between the allocative functions and the service delivery functions. While service delivery could be legitimately seen to be open to privatisation, allocative functions remain essentially political and need to be taken over by bodies that aim not at profit-making through providing services or goods, but at representing adequately the interests of collectives they represent. However, the question still remains; should MSPs then serve as the body that decides on water allocations since it incorporates practically all stakeholders? In our opinion, MSPs are not bodies that take these decisions, but bodies that facilitate these decisions. There is no clear way in which stakes can be measured, represented and weighted in any decision making process that the MSP may attempt to set up; and any attempt to do so would immediately be saddled with the problem of either replicating the political mechanism that may be in place or building up an elaborate quasi-political process outside the existing political processes. User control, when it is limited to manageable proportions and single uses, is an attractive option because of its apparent simplicity. However, as soon as we allow multiple uses and stakes, the situation changes and it is difficult to see a decision arising without a political process, without a state. In our opinion, MSPs would simplify polity and result in the ‘withdrawal’ of the state from many spheres, not by aiming to replace the state as a decision making body but by facilitating the process of decision making itself. As things stand, most stakeholders are not aware of the nature and extent of stakes of the others. MSPs make every stakeholder aware of other stakeholders and the nature and extent of that share, and, by bringing them together, force them to engage with one another. Implicit in this is the assumption that it is better to have a consensus of some sort or the other; the assumption that some common solution is necessary.

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This orients stakeholders towards, at least, exploring various scenarios rather than remaining within the confines of a single preferred solution that universalises their own stake. In some ways, one may say that the main function of MSPs is to see that there is a ‘level playing field’ for all stakeholders and bringing them together on such a field. Its role is to bring stakeholders together so that they can fruitfully engage with each other, sharpen and/or narrow down issues and explore possible scenarios that could provide a consensus. There is also the debate about the need for ‘nested’ institutions, multi-layered institutions as against the single-point joint management institutions. (For a detailed discussion see Ostrom 1990 and Lele 2002.) This is valid in the context of MSPs too. If we have to address issues like scales, positive and negative externalities and the unidirectional impacts of water, then it is best to design MSPs at different scales and ecosystem units (like micro-watershed, sub-watershed, watershed, river basin). Similarly, the need for nesting and multi-layering also arises from the heterogeneity of stakeholders. For this, one may distinguish between different types of stakeholders in terms of the relationship that the different stakeholders have with water. This may involve working out a contextual typology of stakeholders in relation to water. A first distinction could be made between the direct stakeholders and the indirect ones. The direct stakeholders in a quantum of water may be identified as the ones who depend on the use of that water for their livelihoods, whether directly or indirectly. It could include agriculturists, labourers, pastoralists and shepherds, fishing communities, craft persons and women. In this context, water-use that entitles persons to become direct stakeholders may include water for drinking and domestic use, for cattle, for agriculture, for industries, for craft-based production systems, for recreation, and the like. There is also a need to explicitly acknowledge two kinds of stakes as direct stakes. First, the persons displaced as a consequence of water-related projects need to be treated as direct stakeholders and as a separate category of stakeholders with full right to be involved in the MSP processes. Second, there is now an increasing awareness that the ecosystem requires a minimum water-use and there is a need for basically keeping certain portion of the flows and storages unbound and ‘unutilised’ so that the river systems, ponds and lakes can perform their ecological functions and services. The ecosystem, therefore, needs to be treated as a stakeholder with a direct stake. After this come the indirect stakeholders, like the state and its different agencies, civil society organisations and groups, professionals, experts and others who may be related to water from the point of its ‘governance’ rather than direct use. Here, the term ‘governance’ is used as an umbrella term including all aspects like water resource planning, source creation, distribution, regulation and cost recovery. Depending on the specific context and scale, the composition of both the direct and indirect stakeholders could change. Once we identify the different stakes and the respective stakeholders within a specific context and scale, it lays the ground for other processes: the actual process of negotiations, different roles, norms of access, prioritisation of water-use, how and where to apply cuts in scarcity situations, how to price water for different uses, and so on.

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A Set of Minimum Principles One of the important agendas in the formation of an MSP has to be to evolve a simple and minimum set of principles that can serve as a common reference point in the deliberations at the MSP. As elaborated elsewhere (Paranjape and Joy 1995; Joy and Paranjape 2004) we believe that sustainability, equity and participation form a set of minimum principles that can be referred to in resolving issues. Obviously, this does not obviate the differences in interpretation that surround these terms and the variations can be certainly very wide. Our view of the matter is detailed in the Normative Framework that we have worked out for the Watershed Review that we did as part of CISED (Joy and Paranjape 2004); what follows in Box 14.2 is a very brief summary of the essentials. Box 14.2: Minimum Set of Principles for MSP Sustainability • Environmental sustainability as mediated by human intervention. • Sustain the underlying bio-physical process. • Conserve and enhance the primary productivity (productive and assimilative potential) of the ecosystem. • Use water within renewability limits: use annual flows, stock to be used only in bad years with the understanding that it would be replenished in good years. • Minimise import of water, do it in a fair manner. • Sustainability as dependability. • Global aspect, especially in technology choice, reduction in non-renewable and non-local materials and energy use. Equity • Inequality inscribed into the social structure: class, caste, ethnicity and gender. • Spatial aspects of inequality: location within watershed, command deciding the access to water; upstream and downstream and off-site impacts. • Inter-sectoral equity: water use prioritisation. • Assurance of a basic service needed for livelihoods assured to all at affordable costs. • Separation of land rights and water rights. • Women’s access to water (domestic and for other productive uses). • Sensitivity to the problems of project affected persons, exploration of options which reduces submergence, exchange of behind-the-dam submergence with submergence in service area, rehabilitation as an upstream area development programme with water rights and this to be made part of the project. Participation • Goal as well as means. • Separation of allocation and regulation functions (governance functions) from service delivery or production-related functions. • Democracy: Primacy of local community in decision making, accountability. (Box 14.2 continued)

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(Box 14.2 continued) • • • • • • • •

Representation of women, landless and other resource poor sections. Right to information. Participation of the would-be project-affected persons in the decision-making process. Outsiders have a definite role. Capability building for informed choice. Raising issues related to equity and sustainability. Two-way traffic and learning. Accountability of larger structures and agents to the local community.

Source: Adapted from Joy and Paranjape 2004.

Water: Right or Economic Good/Commodity? One vexed question on which any MSP would have to come to some understanding is the issue of whether water is a basic human right or an economic good? These are two different directions and perspectives that will create their own pulls within an MSP. In our opinion, water is both, a basic human right as well as an economic good. The problem lies in demarcating where the human right ends and where the economic good starts and vice versa. The problem is rendered even more difficult because at least in form, even the right is delivered in the form of an economic good. In our opinion, and we have been advocating this opinion for a fairly long time, a distinction needs to be made between basic service and an economic service. The basic service is what everyone receives as a right and the economic service is what anyone receives over and above that basic service. This distinction is not only in terms of quantum, but it also carries with it different ways of dealing with the quantum, pricing and cost recovery. While the former has to have a high degree of dependability and must be affordable for all, the latter will have to be variably tied to opportunity and full cost recovery. Introducing these distinctions does not truly resolve the question of water as a right and as an economic good/commodity issue. All the terms still remain to be decided: what quantum of service should be treated as basic service? what price is to be considered affordable to all? These questions do not disappear. However, they are framed in a manner that allows a broader dialogue and is more closely related to final outcomes. It makes issues tractable and facilitates consensus building and decision making. This is precisely what the role of MSPs should be. MSPs, since they generate this need for information, may be expected to facilitate the collection of this information. There are various ways of doing this. They range from the strictly scientific (collection by meteorological and department scientists in person) to the strictly participative (participatory rural appraisal and allied activity). None of them by themselves have been found satisfactory and by now some kind of consensus has begun to emerge that a combination of scientific and participatory techniques is needed. Some of the techniques that

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attempt to arrive at an optimal blend have been described extensively in many SOPPECOM papers (especially see SOPPECOM 2001). There is a need for such information to be collected and pooled if MSPs are to play a truly facilitating role in the water sector. One precondition for the meaningful functioning of MSPs is this whole area of reliable data and information. And as things stand in India today, this is also one of the weak links in the whole process. Most of the data is collected and managed by the government agencies. The reliability of the data is very often under question. For example, we have seen that in the context of inter-state river conflicts in India it is said that the contending states keep two sets of data and a particular state uses the set of data which is advantageous to it as per the context. Also it is very often extremely difficult to get access to data where there is such conflict. Then there is the question of getting access to it as most of it is under the ‘secrecy’ domain. This is irrespective of the fact that an official Right to Information Act is in place in many states. The inter-state water disputes have further complicated matters. So, one of the primary tasks is to generate reliable data both through participatory and other scientific methods. There is lot of discussion about natural resource data management systems (NRDMS), but there is very little that is being done on the ground to combine various methods of collecting data, synthesising and analysing them and also making them available to different stakeholders in a usable form so that rational decisions and informed choices can be made. In fact, agreed upon data is one of the outputs of multi-stakeholder processes (Connick and Innes 2003). All these should lead to decision support systems and they should be able to simulate various scenarios in terms of resource availability, resource-use prioritisation and resource-use efficiency.

An Agency Committed to MSP and an Innovative Approach It is all fine sentiment, but what function can MSPs serve if there are, at least on the face of it, seemingly irreconcilable differences between stakeholders? The need for an innovative approach and the need to eschew standard stereotypes cannot be overemphasised. It needs to be acknowledged that, in the form in which it takes place, much of the debate between small versus big and traditional versus modern, similar stereotyped dichotomies are essentially sterile in terms of suggesting ways of resolving the situation. The case for going beyond these sterile dichotomies has been argued in detail elsewhere (Paranjape and Joy 1995). Here, we shall just deal with one example, that of the small and the big water sources. Big sources may be tapped by diverting the water and using that water to fill and refill local storages, and reducing behind-the-storage to a small regulatory storage that will minimise behind-the-dam large submergence. In addition, since instead of devising an independent centralised irrigation system of its own, the big system delivers water to dispersed local systems that have an identity and organisation independent of the big system; the big source serves to strengthen and supplement local sources rather than to replace them. In effect, this creates the possibility of reinforcing a synergic bond between the large and the small that has the potential to bring stakeholders to an arrangement of mutual benefit. In the alternative to the present Sardar Sarovar Project (ibid.) the attempt is

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precisely to combine the big and the small into a single system that meets the requirements of sustainability and equity. It would be wrong to expect such MSPs, as we are advocating, to come up on their own. Ironically, while there are many kinds of stakeholders in the water sector, there are none that have a natural stake in MSPs! We therefore need to create an agency from within the water sector organisations that will be committed to the MSP process and willing to shoulder the responsibility involved. Further, that agency needs to also adopt the minimum set of principles and an innovative attitude that eschews sterile dichotomies if it is to bring all the stakeholders to the table with mutual common concerns. Without this process, we are afraid that all the talk about basin wide organisations, regulatory bodies and the like will really fall to pieces. It may remain so in namesake, but will not be able to go beyond where the political process carried us today.

Notes 1. Chapter 1 ‘Governance of Water: Issues and Challenges’ (by Vishwa Ballabh) captures some of the important issues related to water crisis in India. Also see Vaidyanathan (2006). 2. The issue of what is non-state space itself is open to debate as there could be a divergence of views as to where the boundary of the state ends and where sphere of the community/civil society really begins. 3. The term MSP is used to mean multi-stakeholder process, participation and platform. 4. This small section on the theoretical basis of multi-stakeholder platforms and collaborative policy making is largely drawn from Esha Shah’s (2003) book, Social Designs: Tank Irrigation Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka, South India, and her 2004 work on ‘Community, Participation and Democratisation’ for a study of Community Managed Natural Resource Management initiated by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development (CISED). Also, we have used Connick and Innes (2003) extensively throughout this section. 5. There is considerable amount of literature available on some of the points discussed above especially about CPRs, their defining characteristics and the ‘fit’ between these characteristics and the institutions to manage them. See a recent article by Sharachchandra Lélé titled ‘Beyond State-community Polarisation and Bogus Joint“ness”: Crafting Institutional Solutions for Resource Management’. 6. This section on the experience of MSP in the US, especially California, is based on the discussions and interactions K. J. Joy had with a broad section of academics and activists and they include Judith Innes, Mathias Khondolf, Tim Duane, Jeff Romm (belonging to various departments of University of California at Berkeley), Mike Matz (Ph.D. student in Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley), Peter Gleick (Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security), Patrick McCully (International River Network), Steve Rothert (American Rivers), Carolina Balazs (Natural Heritage Institute), Nigel Quin (Laurence Berkeley National Laboratory), Thomas Graff (Environmental Defence), Pete Downs (Stillwater Sciences), Marcin Whitman (California Department of Fish and Game), and some of the literature he could trace during his visit to California on a Fulbright Fellowship. 7. One of the first serious attempts in India to look at the MSP from an academic point of view was by the Wageningen University as part of its Ph.D. programme. The workshop held at Hyderabad two years back [give date here] on MSP and Deliberative Democracy brought together researchers, activists, NGO personnel and bureaucrats for the first time on this issue. 8. For details see, Joy and Paranjape (2002).

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References Ballabh, V. (2004). ‘Governance in Water Sector’, theme paper presented at the workshop on Governance Issues in Water Sector, organised by Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), to commemorate 25 years of its existence, 14–19 December. Connick, S. and J. Innes (2001). Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making: Applying Complexity Thinking to Evaluation, working paper 2001–08, University of California, Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Regional Development. ——— (2003). ‘Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making: Applying Complexity Thinking to Evaluation’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 46(2): 177–97. Gleick, P.H. (1998). ‘Water in Crisis: Paths to Sustainable Water Use’, Ecological Applications, 8(3): 571–79. Gleick, P. (1999). ‘The Human Right to Water’, Water Policy, I, ElsevierScienceLtd, http://webworld. unesco.org/water/wwap/pccp/cd/pdf/educational_tools/course_modules/reference_documents/issues/ thehumanrighttowater.pdf. ——— (2000). ‘The Changing Water Paradigm: A Look at Twenty-first Century Water Resources Development’, Water International, 25(1): 127–38. Habermas, J. (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and Rationalisation of Society. Boston MA: Beacon Press. Hague Ministerial Declaration (2000). available at http://www.waternunc.com/gb/secwwf12.htm, last accessed 20 September. Joy, K.J. et al. (2003). ‘Multi-Stakeholder Platforms (MSPs) in Water Resources Management: Some Issues and Suggestions’, paper presented at the National Workshop on Deliberative Democracy-Negotiated Development: Prospects for Multi-stakeholder Platforms (MSPs) in Water Resources Management in India, organised by National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad, 3–5 February. Joy, K.J and Suhas Paranjape (2002). ‘Energy-Water Co-management and Challenges in the Tembu Lift Irrigation Scheme’, Atpadi Taluka, Maharashtra’, study report (unpublished). Pune: SOPPECOM. ——— (2004). Watershed Development Review: Issues and Prospects. Bangalore: CISED. Lélé, S. (1991). ‘Sustainable Development: A Critical Review’, World Development, 19(6): 607–21. ——— (2004). ‘Beyond State-Community and Bogus “Joint-ness”: Crafting Institutional Solutions for Resource Management’, in M. Spoor (ed.), Globalisation, Poverty and Conflict: A Critical ‘Development’ Reader. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Mollinga, P. (2001). ‘Power in Motion: A Critical Assessment of Canal Irrigation Reform with a Focus on India’, working Paper/Monograph Series No. 1, New Delhi: Indian Network on Participatory Irrigation Management (IndianPIM). Mosse, D. (1997a). ‘The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History, Ecology and Locality in a Tank-Irrigated Landscape in South India’, Development and Change, 28(3): 467–504. ——— (1997b). ‘Ecological Zones and the Culture of Collective Action: The History and Social Organisation of a Tank Irrigation System’, South Indian Studies, 3(January–June): 1–88. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1909–13). The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Levy (ed.), 18 Vols. Edinburgh and London: Foulis. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paranjape, S. and K.J. Joy (1995). Sustainable Technology: Making Sardar Sarovar Project Viable. Ahmedabad: Centre for Environment Education.

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Rogers, P. and A.W. Hall (2003). ‘Effective Water Governance’, TEC Background Papers, No. 7, Sweden: Global Water Partnership Technical Committee (TEC). Shah, E. (2003). Social Designs: Tank Irrigation Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka, South India. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. ——— (2004). ‘Community, Participation and Democratisation’, note for internal discussion for the Community Based Natural Resource Management study initiated by Centre for Interdisciplinary Study in Environment and Development, Bangalore. SOPPECOM. (2001). SOPPECOM Approach to Natural Resource Data Management Systems. Mumbai/Pune: SOPPECOM. ——— (2004). ‘Participatory Irrigation Management: An Overview of Issues and the Way Ahead’, paper presented at the ‘National Workshop on Participatory Irrigation Management and Volumetric Measurement’, organised by Water and Land Management Institute, Aurangabad and Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management, Pune, from 2–3 July, Aurangabad. UNDP (2007). ‘Effective Water Governance’, available at http://www.undp.org/water/about_us.html, last accessed 20 September. Vaidyanathan, A. (2006). ‘India’s Water Resources–Contemporary Issues on Irrigation. Mumbai: Oxford University Press. WCED (1987). Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press. World Commission on Dams (2000). Dams and Development, A New Framework for Decision-Making. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications Ltd. Yankelovich, D. (1999). The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict Into Cooperation. New York: Simon and Schuster. Websites http://www.irn.org/revival/decom/index.asp?id=bulletins/rrb38.html http://www.friendsoftheriver.org/Publications/RiversReborn/yuba.html

15 Multi-stakeholders’ Dialogue as an Approach Towards Sustainable Use of Groundwater: Some Experiences in the Palar River Basin, South India S. Janakarajan

I NTRODUCTION The basic motive of this chapter is to demonstrate how groundwater, which is regarded as a common pool resource (CPR), has been subject to over-extraction and pollution due to unlimited access enjoyed by individuals and also due to competing users. This has implications for increasing rural indebtedness, rural unemployment, rural poverty, social inequity and conflict in many parts of India, particularly in the state of Tamil Nadu. For rural agricultural populations, groundwater has almost replaced land as a determinant of social and economic status. Further, increasing groundwater access has undermined maintenance of tank irrigation1 systems and other surface sources. In the process, it has shifted the determinants of water access away from communities and into the hands of individuals. Access to groundwater has never been equitable due to its natural variability and availability; this has contributed to the growing inequity in resource conditions, landownership and wealth. Patterns of inequity are socially embedded and exacerbated by factors such as inheritance patterns. In many cases, the ownership of individual wells is now divided among many people. This can be a source of conflict and often results in differential access between dominant owners and others who are less capable of exercising their partial ownership rights. Competition and conflict are increasing in the face of pollution and substantial decline in the water level. Falling water levels are leading to greater competition and, in many areas, large financial losses as existing wells become dry or new, unproductive wells are drilled. In many areas, shallow dug wells have gone dry and farmers now drill multiple bores alongside or within existing dug wells. The fall in the water level is are also leading to decline of traditional surface sources, such as ‘spring’ channels (sub-surface flow/streams), which used to supply irrigation water to thousands of

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hectares (ha) of land. In other words, increasing access to ‘private source of irrigation’, namely, wells, has contributed to rapid decline in the collective action of community-based natural resources. The decline in the water level and pollution are affecting the availability and reliability of water supplies for irrigation and other uses. Although farmers have responded to scarcity by adopting some water-use technologies, water scarcity has resulted in reduced yields and crop pattern changes; this has a direct impact on agricultural incomes. Informal markets, for example, initially emerged as farmers with access to surplus water supplied water to adjacent farmers who either lacked the financial resources to dig their own wells or had insufficient supplies in their wells. Now, water markets are declining as farmers reserve all available supplies for their own use. Furthermore, even where water markets continue to exist, their operation is often highly inequitable since they function as part of interlocked land and labour markets where purchasers are dependent on the goodwill of water sellers. As water becomes increasingly scarce, dependency relations intensify with purchasers in an ever-weaker bargaining position (Janakarajan 1992; Shah 1993). What does this imply for policy? The evidence of increasing poverty, due to degradation of the groundwater resource base, implies that government policies supporting further groundwater development in areas suffering from overdraft must be changed. Policies such as supply of highly subsidised power for all sections of farmers are problematic. Furthermore, there is a great deal of ambiguity in defining rights over groundwater; as per the existing norms, anyone who has got access to a piece of land is also the de facto and de jure owner of the groundwater underneath. Since the amount of groundwater that can be extracted is not dependent upon the extent of land owned, there are seemingly no limits to the amount of groundwater that can be extracted provided a land owner possesses resources to drill deep bores, or there is availability of potential aquifers and diesel or electrical energy for pumping. In addition to encouraging indiscriminate and wholesale pumping, the benefits from such policies are largely captured by wealthy sections of the rural population as well as by the urban rich who extract and transport groundwater from rural to urban areas for industrial and other uses. The urban users not only take away potable water from rural areas but also turn out the used water as sewage and effluents back into the rural areas. This requires a strong policy intervention to regulate water transport as well as to control pollution generation. Such policy interventions are often either ineffective or fictional. Overall, policies that support more equitable access to—and sustainable use of—available groundwater resources are essential. Furthermore, in areas where inequity is high and current groundwater use patterns are unsustainable, policies to support the efforts of marginal populations to shift out of agriculture and into other forms of livelihood may be required. Inherent inequities in power relations within rural communities of South Asia imply that ‘simple’ legal or other reforms to directly address groundwater overdraft and pollution are likely to be insufficient. Therefore, to make policies effective, appropriate law enforcement and monitoring mechanisms need to be evolved.

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The expansion of groundwater irrigation in India has two distinct phases: the first, beginning from the mid-1960s up to 1990; and the second from 1990 onwards. The first phase began with the introduction of high-yielding crop technology and ended around the time the economic liberalisation process began in India and elsewhere in South Asia. The second phase began with the opening of the Indian economy to the international market. The first phase was the period in which well irrigation was growing at an exponential rate. During this period, groundwater irrigation proved to be more profitable for well-owning farmers as it helped to increase productivity and farm employment, stabilised production and livelihoods, reduced vulnerability and intensified cultivation, and, above all, helped to build capital formation and household savings. Indeed, over the past few decades groundwater has played a critical role in increasing India’s food production ( Janakarajan and Moench 2003). Furthermore, well irrigation has been considered a key factor in addressing issues such as poverty reduction. The reverse is also equally true when groundwater overdraft and pollution reach unbearable proportions (Moench 1992a, 1992b; Janakarajan 2003). This is exactly what has happened in the second phase. In many areas, the twin problems of groundwater overdraft and pollution have not only resulted in the reduction of groundwater stock, but have also adversely affected crop yields, farm income and health, and aggravated the problem of rural-urban migration (forced migration). Farmers have started feeling the burden of maintaining a well due to ‘competitive deepening’, leading to the continuous fall of water tables, increased unit cost of pumping water and competing demand for water from industries and urban domestic users. And for many, wells have become a source of debt accumulation; this is particularly true in the low rainfall regions of South India, where although the first phase of groundwater expansion contributed to welfare (both for individuals and for the society), the second phase of intensive groundwater use has contributed to illfare. In the second phase, covering the past decade or so, the key issues which attracted the attention of many researchers centered on the theme ‘hard times’ or ‘adversity’. Some of the broad issues of this phase were: mining of groundwater, increasing investment on wells, conflicts and competition, rural-urban water transactions, mismatch between extraction and recharge, groundwater pollution, sea-water intrusion and groundwater-energy nexus as a mechanism to control groundwater over-extraction. (See for instance Bhatia 1992; Janakarajan 1997a; Janakarajan and Moench 2003; Moench 1992a, 1992b; Moench et al. 1999; Rao 1993; Vaidyanathan 1996.) Until recently little data was available to document the extent of water level declines in specific locations.2 The local level information was available only through individual researchers and their observations, for example, the field-level data gathered by this author in a couple of river basins called the Palar and the Noyyal in Tamil Nadu shows a rapid decline in the groundwater table over the past couple of decades ( Janakarajan and Moench 2003). The steep decline in the water table has also been accompanied by changes in modern water extraction technologies. As a consequence, there has been an intensive and

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extensive competition between well owners within rural areas in groundwater extraction. In addition, because many farmers have installed lateral as well as vertical bores, water availability in adjacent wells is often severely affected.While disputes over water and well deepening are common, no dispute from lateral bore installations was reported in our survey, even when they penetrated adjacent farmlands. Despite the extent of competition and conflict over well deepening, farmers did not seek justice through the court of law because groundwater property rights are known to be quite ambiguous. This has heavy implications for future well users and adds tremendously to the costs faced by current users (Janakarajan 1997b). It is significant to note that competitive deepening is virtually absent in villages affected by pollution since farmers have no incentive to use groundwater for irrigation. From the field data, it appears that ownership of wells and access to groundwater is quite diffused across all types of farmers. For instance, surveys carried out in three river basins in Tamil Nadu, indicate that over two-thirds of wells are owned by small and marginal farmers who own less than 5 acres of land (Janakarajan 1997a, 2001). The capacity of these wells, measured in terms of water yields and water quality, is quite poor compared to those owned by larger farm operations. Since these wells remain dry for most of the year, incidence of crop failure is very high among the smaller farmers. As a result, many who are already heavily in debt tend to sell their land or abandon their wells. This class of farmers does not also have the option of purchasing water from water sellers, since the water market in the rural areas is on the decline due to groundwater depletion. Further, resource-rich farmers, who have surplus water, are keen to sell to urban users because the water commands a better price (Janakarajan 1997b; 1999; 2001). Local groundwater conditions, given the inequity in its use pattern, variability and hydrogeological conditions, and the presence or absence of pollution, have a large impact on the costs of wells and irrigated areas. Well irrigation has become a gamble; not all those who invest in wells are successful. Many lose in the race of competitive deepening or the wells fall into disuse because of pollution. Many well owners either sell their land or become trapped in a cycle of debt as they construct new wells. As a retult, a new dimension of inequality emerges. Those who are able to keep up with competitive deepening emerge as potential water sellers; others are forced to buy water (Janakarajan 1997b; Vaidyanathan 1996).

Groundwater Pollution in the Palar River Basin In many river basins in India, there are competing demands for water across different uses and users, or between sectors such as agriculture, industry and domestic/municipal uses. This causes a tremendous stress on the limited available water resource, not only because groundwater is transported from the rural to urban areas, but also because of the re-release of a comparable quantity of water as effluents. And further, the ability of the future generations to sustain themselves on the available natural resource base is seriously disturbed. The Palar river basin3 in Tamil Nadu state is a case in point. Although tanks and spring channels have been the two most important traditional—community-based—sources of irrigation, due to their dilapidated condition and also due to several socio-economic, technological and

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institutional factors, groundwater has emerged as the primary source of irrigation in this basin (Janakarajan 1993). The net irrigated area by wells in the basin is about 75 per cent (Rajagopal and Vaidyanathan 1998). The study carried out by the Institute of Water Studies indicates that in the late 1980s there were about 132,000 irrigation wells in the basin area with a density of 0.74 to 2.82 wells per hectare. Since then, the number of wells in the basin has increased significantly. Groundwater utilisation is as high as 92 per cent of all water use in this basin. In addition to agriculture uses, groundwater has been a major source for drinking and industrial water. Quality, however, varies a great deal across the basin. The leather industry has been the most important industrial activity in this basin. At the all-India level, the leather industry contributes to 7 per cent of the country’s export earnings. The number of tanneries has multiplied since the banning of the semi-finished leather in the late 1970s. Since then, the tanning technology has also changed from eco-friendly vegetable tanning to chrome tanning. Export earnings of the leather industry shot up from a mere Rs 0.32 billion in 1965 to Rs 100 billion in 2001. This industry provides direct employment to over 2 million people in the country. Fifty-one per cent of leather exports originate from the southern states and 70 per cent of tanning industries are concentrated in this region. Of the total exports from the south, Tamil Nadu alone contributes to about 90 per cent, the value of which is Rs 50 billion; and 75 per cent of the tanning industries of the state are concentrated in the Palar basin, contributing to over 30 per cent of the country’s total exports. While these facts about the leather industry may appear quite heartening, the reality is less so.4 On average, 35 to 45 litres of wastewater is discharged per kilogram of raw skin/hide processed. The total quantity of water used by the tanneries in the basin works out to a minimum of 45 to 50 million litres per day. The quantity of effluents discharged from the tanneries (numbering 847), which are supposed to be connected to one of the eight Common Effluent Treatment Plants (CETPs) installed in the Palar basin, works out to 37,458 kld or 37.5 mld. It works out to 1,125 million litres per day or 13.5 million cubic metres per year. The total weight of the raw hides and skins processed works out to 1.1 million kg per day; for each 100 kg of raw hides and skins processed, solid waste generation works out to 38.5 to 62 kg. According to a study carried out by Stanley Associates sponsored by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and executed by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, pollution loads in the Palar river are extremely threatening: (all parameters are in kg per day) TSS: 29,938, TDS: 400,302; Chloride: 101,434, Sulphide: 3818; BOD: 23,496; COD: 70,990: Total Chromium: 474; and Cyanide: 22 (ADB 1994). More than 60 per cent of the wells in the affected villages are defunct due to water contamination; the investments that have gone into these wells are also lost permanently. Groundwater quality data collected by various government and private agencies clearly indicate a very high level of contamination in this basin.

Socio-economic Impact of Pollution The impact of water pollution caused due to discharge of industrial wastes is quite adverse. It affects the aesthetics of the region, wild life including birds and fish in the water bodies such as tanks and ponds, flora (a good number of habitats are destroyed due to water pollution),

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accumulation of pollution load in the top soil due to colour and toxic effluent discharged on land, pollution of surface and groundwater bodies, decline in the quantity and quality of water available for drinking and agriculture, decline in agricultural employment and production and, above all, deteriorating health conditions of human and animal population due to the use of contaminated water for drinking and other domestic purposes.

Impact on Area, Crop Pattern and Yield The Soil Survey and Land Use Organisation working in this region has indicated that the paddy crop is affected with poor germination, stunted vegetative growth, poor grain formation, reduced grain weight and more of chaffy grains resulting in very poor yield. The sugarcane crop’s length of internodes is reduced, the girth becomes very thin and the weight of cane is reduced. As for the coconut crop, vegetative growth of the trees is good but tender coconut water is saline; size of the nuts is reduced; falling buttons are common and in large numbers. The groundnut crop is afflicted by leaf drying and poor root formation coupled with poor pod formation. And, for all crops, the tolerance level for pest attacks is reported to have reduced significantly. The detailed sample of a survey of eight villages in the Palar basin by this author gives more evidence on cropped area, the area irrigated and on yield. Clearly, water yielding characteristics and area irrigated by wells vary between those villages which are affected by industrial effluent and those which are not. For instance, area irrigated per well is nil in about one-third of the sample wells (80 out of 253) in the Palar basin. The difference is quite sharp between affected and unaffected villages—26 per cent (41 out of 159 sample wells) in the unaffected and 41 per cent (39 out of 94) in the affected villages. While in the unaffected villages it is primarily due to over-use and depletion, in the affected villages it is primarily because of pollution. In most of the area coconut crop is now cultivated (instead of paddy) but with very poor yields. What is worse is that small operators of land who own wells operate their wells with either poor water yields or pump bad quality water; whereas, the large farmers manage to sustain better by digging new wells or deepening the existing wells or both.

Impact on Water Quality Plenty of evidence on water pollution due to leather tanneries was presented in the Second International Water Tribunal in 1992. The Tribunal discussed quite elaborately the deteriorating water quality conditions in the Palar basin. The jurists stated: As a result of the uncontrolled discharge of wastewater from the tanning industry both surface and groundwater have been seriously contaminated. The water is no longer suitable for drinking and has to be brought in from other areas at a price beyond the means of poor. In addition to the above, these practices, resulting in contamination with salt and chemicals, have rendered useless large areas of once fertile land (Second International Water Tribunal 1992: 220). The Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board (TWAD Board) conducted a study in 1997, collecting random samples of water along the Palar river for a distance of about 60 km.

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When these results were compared with a study conducted in 1968 by the Kings Institute in Chennai, it clearly indicated that TDS had increased by 79 per cent in the Vaniyambadi zone (upstream tannery cluster). The study also found that in the downstream the value of TDS value stood at 142 per cent. One of the major implications of water pollution in this basin is increasing scarcity of drinking water. In the past, when water contamination was minimal or unknown, the people used the local well water for all their domestic and drinking requirements. In the changing scenario, either they depend upon the public water supply system or are compelled to purchase water. The worst hit are the poor and marginal farmers and landless agricultural labourers.

Impact on Land and Land Value The detailed survey of eight villages in this basin indicates that the land value has come down drastically due to degradation of groundwater and land/soil salinity. Normally, value of land in this basin depended upon factors such as access to irrigation sources, dependability of water sources, soil quality, location of land from the head of an irrigation source, and so on. But in the affected zones of the Palar river basin, where land and water have been subject to severe pollution, the land value largely depends upon water quality, and its proximity to main road and industries. The nearer it is to the main road and cluster of industries, the better the value of the land. This is the type of land which is favoured by industry owners for their industrial activities. On the other hand, the plots which are located far away from the main road do not fetch a good price even though quality of water is reasonable. From this, can we conclude that even though tannery effluent has contributed to severe water pollution, farmers in these villages are still better off since their lands get a better price? The answer is ‘No’, because such a hike in the value of land benefits only a small fraction. Further, even those who sold their lands have gained only in the short run; our interviews confirm that most of those who sold their plots of land have spent their money, instead of re-investing it in land. In a few exceptional cases, properties (land) were purchased elsewhere or the farmers were living on bank interest earnings. Therefore, from the larger perspective of environmental damages that have occurred in the village and in the region, the gains that appear to have surfaced due to the hike in the land price is nothing but a delusion.

Gains in Employment and Forced Migration Due to extensive employment opportunities created in leather-related activities, there has been a drastic decline in the landless agricultural labour force even in unaffected villages. The survey indicates that it is the landless Scheduled Caste (SC) population that has gained a reasonable degree of employment opportunities in the tanneries compared to others (Millie 1998). This is a clear case of distress-induced non-farm employment because whatever prosperity the society has gained is only at the cost of severe environmental degradation, distress in agriculture, health hazards and total loss of environment and ecology for future generations. Further, it is distress for a majority and ‘prosperity’ for a few. Therefore, one of the major impacts of environmental degradation in the region is outmigration. Incidence of migration due to environmental degradation has been reported from

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majority of the 51 villages selected for the first round survey, but the number varies according to intensity of pollution. But in two villages—Gudimallur and Vannivedu—there was a bulk out-migration of 150 and 125 families respectively. These two villages were badly affected due to tannery pollution. The conventional neo-classical approach suggests that the population migration is only a natural response to interregional imbalances (either due to uneven development of or uneven endowment of natural resources leading to more economic opportunities). The population movement is generally from areas where labour is plenty and capital is poor, to a region where labour is less and capital is plenty. A number of push factors have been identified; the principal among them is population pressure. Other push factors are political instability, environmental degradation and lack of economic opportunities. The other approach criticises the neo-classical paradigm. According to this approach, the macro power structure and macro structural forces, which lie at the bottom, should be the explanation for population movements rather than placing too much emphasis on the free choice of individuals (Lonergan 1998: 8). The government’s insensitivity or lack of motivation, on the one hand, and the irresponsibility of the polluters (mainly industrialists), on the other, or the nexus between them, causes enormous damage to the environment. This has a direct consequence as the displacement of human population. This kind of forced movement or displacement of population from their traditional habitat causes enormous stress, distress and uncertainty in life. Thus, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) uses the phrase ‘environmental refugees’. If these kinds of deteriorations of environment are unchecked, they will directly lead to political instability, abject poverty and economic stagnation.5

C ONFLICTS IN THE U SE OF G ROUNDWATER AND E MERGING D EADLOCK C ONDITIONS In the most general sense, conflicts may be defined as ‘irreconcilable interests’ of individuals or groups, which are expressed in terms of hostile attitudes, or pursuing their own interests through actions that jeopardise the well-being of other parties. Although conflicts may occur for a variety of reasons and in diverse situations, in the present context we are concerned with conflicts that occur in the process of use and sharing of natural resources, in particular, water. Conflicts over use of water in the developing world are more acute; in fact such conflicts take new dimensions when seen in relation with other maladies of the developing world such as poverty, hunger and malnutrition, lack of or inadequate health care, lack of protected drinkingwater supply and high illiteracy, besides demographic pressure. In such a scenario, individual or group interests get nurtured and get more polarised due to factors such as political instability, poor governance, lack of effective law enforcement and monitoring mechanisms. This is the reflection of nothing but systemic failure. Take the specific case of groundwater use and abuse in the Palar river basin. Conflicts in this basin take place due to one critical factor, namely, scarcity. And, as stated earlier, scarcity

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in the basin has occurred due to over-use and groundwater pollution. This results in conflicting interests within rural areas, which are manifested in (i) competitive deepening of wells (conflict between individual well owners); (ii) sub-division and fragmentation of wells along with land, resulting in competitive pumping and deepening even within a well (conflicts occurring between individuals within a well which are jointly owned); (iii) expansion of well irrigation, resulting in drying up of traditional surface water bodies such as springs and tanks (what may be called occurrence of conflicts between different natural resource base); and (iv) the differentiation of farming community into those who have own wells and those who do not (the consequence of which is the emergence of conflicts between water sellers [well owners] and water purchasers [non-well owners]). The main reasons for the occurrence of conflicts in each one of these cases are the rise in the number of claimants to use this limited resource and incompatibility of interests. In particular, in a scarcity environment, when well owners exercise their unlimited property rights over land and groundwater, one encounters an outburst of conflicts. Commercial transactions in groundwater occur for non-agricultural uses also. The primary non-agricultural users are urban industrial owners and municipalities (to meet drinking water needs). The quantity of water that is consumed for industrial processing is discharged as trade effluent in the open surface, streams, lakes/tanks and rivers, thereby contributing significantly to the pollution load of surface and groundwater bodies. Therefore, the transportation of potable groundwater from villages to urban industrial uses not only aggravates the already depleting groundwater table, but also contributes to permanent damage to groundwater due to the discharge of industrial effluents. In many cases, the industrial owners have bought plots of land specifically with a motivation of installing deep bore wells—beating every other well owner in the vicinity by pitching the marginal cost of well digging or deepening disproportionately high—with a view to transporting water (this is the case in which conflicts occur between rural and urban intruding users). What’s more, sand mining from the riverbed has destroyed the riverbed aquifer and the local ecology permanently. This has caused even physical conflicts as the local people’s livelihood has been under severe threat.6 The flow chart in Figure 15.1 summarises the impacts and social analysis of these conflicts. Two important questions arise here: • What do the current water policy and water and environmental laws do? • Do we have enough laws or do we need more? The 42nd Amendment of the Indian Constitution passed in 1974 was a landmark. This enabled a series of water and environmental protection laws, the most important of which is The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act. This Act enabled the constitution of the Central Pollution Control Boards and subsequently a board for each state. While the former functions directly under the control of the Government of India, the latter is under the control of the respective state governments. Further, a separate ministry was created in the Central Government structure for environment and forests in 1980 as a specialised agency for planning, promoting and protecting the environment.

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S. Janakarajan Figure 15.1: Flow Chart Water Transportation—Water Sale—from Rural to Urban Social Analysis of Implications of Water Crises Rural Area

Urban Area

Scarcity due to over-use/depletion

Urbanisation and industrial expansion

The process of competitive deepening of wells-GW expansion resulting in prosperity for a few and deprivation for many

Effluent discharge leading to pollution induced scarcity

Net Result Differentiation of farmers/ Emergence of a new class of rich well owners/water sellers and at growth of vast majority of poor farmers

Ecology Neglect of Tanks and other Traditional Irrigation Institutions; Depleting GW Table

Socio-Economic Unemployment, migration, rise in landlessness, rise in poverty and indebtedness

Gender Gender inequity stress on women folk to water needs of the household

Industrial prosperity, rise in urban employment, development of urban infrastructure, forex earning

Ecological degradation, pollution of surface and groundwater bodies, declining land quality and decline in agricultural yield

Agricultural stagnation, high rural urban migration, rise in rural poverty and indebtedness health problems caused due to contamination of water

Therefore, the institutional mechanism and water laws do exist in the country. The best example is the strong verdict given by the Supreme Court of India against the tanners of the Palar basin. The Bombay High Court has delivered a resounding judgement upholding the powers of the Central Government to issue directions or prosecute anybody who causes damage to environment. Further, the same judgement also broadened the locus standi of citizens to approach the courts to prevent environmental degradation of any part of the country (www. goacom.com). In recent years, the Precautionary Principle (which recommends pollution prevention rather than pollution clean-up) has become a key phrase in many verdicts of the courts. The international environmental laws recommend several measures to combat the danger of pollution: the key measures among them are internalising the economic costs of pollution and adopting the ‘polluter pays principle’. What is then wrong?

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Dilip Biswas, then Chairman of the Central Pollution Control Board, Government of India, confessed, ‘Enforcement of such legislation is a challenging task because of various reasons including the inherent flaws in the laws and infirmity of enforcement machinery’ (Biswas 2001: 1). He further adds that though environmental laws and specific empowered authorities have been set up for pollution prevention and payment towards compensation, the monitoring and implementation mechanism is undefined. This is quite true in the case of the acute problem of pollution in the Palar basin: Leather tanneries, in the first instance, have been classified under the ‘red industries’ category (heavily polluting industry). This warrants, by law, the installation of treatment plants and treatment of effluent water to the prescribed standards before letting it out. This was never done, for instance, in the Palar basin until the intervention of the Supreme Court through public interest litigation (PIL) filed by the Vellore Citizens’ Forum in 1991. At present, though many tanneries have treatment plants, the effluent water is either untreated or under-treated. In other words, the Supreme Court has delivered what is regarded as an historic verdict, but the state lacks enforcement and monitoring mechanisms, good governance, and honest and committed bureaucracies. Thus, even judicial activism has a limited role under the present circumstances. This leads to a real explosive situation (see Figure 15.2). • Sporadic protests; uninformed civil society; low media attention; high government incentives to industry; and high profits—industry, government, farmers and civil society think that the available space is huge and are therefore never worried. • Affected people protest; civil society is learning; media attention is picking up, but the government continues to give incentives to industry. The available space is getting reduced. Figure 15.2: Degrees of Conflicts and Sustainable Development

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• Intensive protests, attracts lots of media attention, affected people are reasonably organised, civil society is well-informed; government tries their best to protect industry with subsidies to install effluent treatment plants; judiciary intervenes. The available space is very little; any reconciliatory measures should begin at least here if not in an earlier period. • This is a hopeless situation in which the damage to the economy, society and environment has reached an alarming proportion. The conditions are catastrophic and there is absolutely no space for any reconciliation. Before concluding this section, let me explain conflicts as they occur in different sub-systems of an economy. Water resources in any given economy may be studied in terms of three subsystems: (i) natural sub-system; (ii) user sub-system; and (iii) institutional sub-system.

Natural Sub-system The total water resources available in a given geographical region constitute natural sub-systems or what may represent the supply side of water resources. The supply side basically refers to all surface and groundwater bodies which perform a number of functions with differentiated values, for a variety of users.

User Sub-system The user sub-system represents the demand side. The main user agents/sectors who demand water include user groups/sectors like agriculture, domestic and industries. Besides, future generation of users and ecosystems also have legitimate claims on the natural sub-system.

Institutional Sub-system The institutional sub-system represents the government or its implementing and monitoring agencies, whose primary task is to keep a balance between supply and demand. The main responsibility of the institutional sub-system is to develop water resource base, regulate its use, and enforce laws wherever necessary; and, above all, to maintain equilibrium between the first two sub-systems, namely, the natural sub-system and the user sub-system. The system will have smooth sailing so long as the supply does not fall short of demand. Even if demand exceeds supply, if the institutional sub-system operates scrupulously, equilibrium may be maintained between the natural sub-system and the user sub-system. Under these ideal circumstances, there is no ground for any conflicts. But this is only a knife-edged equilibrium where, even a small disturbance is bound to result in conflicts. The kind of a system, which we encounter in the Palar river basin, is neither known for any state of equilibrium nor is it marginally disturbed. The institutional sub-system is ineffective and unimaginative when it comes to restoring equilibrium. Indeed, specific interest groups who exercise control through enormous economic and political power govern the management of the natural sub-system. The hierarchy of power is such that urban industrial owners dominate over farmers, rich farmers over poorer ones, and economic expansion over ecology. In this scheme, the water and

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environment managers are turning out to be mere spectators; tanners remain unshaken from their profiteering spree; social auditors keep raising their voices; but, unfortunately, farmers and other affected people continue to be at the receiving end. This is the social milieu in which engaging in multi-stakeholders’ dialogue (MSD) will be more useful.

M ULTI-STAKEHOLDERS ’ D IALOGUE Multi-stakeholders’ Dialogue as a Possible Policy Intervention for Sustainable Development—The Experience in the Palar Basin Multi-stakeholders’ dialogue is an approach that has immense utility precisely in such deadlock situations. This approach has emerged in response to the apparent deficiency of conventional socio-economic and institutional tools. In conflicting and (sort of) deadlock situations over the use and abuse of natural resources, the MSD approach provides an extremely useful framework and platform: (i) to find ways for preventing further degradation of natural resources in question and to work towards sustainable development with a common agenda within a framework acceptable to all stakeholders; and (ii) to find ways to turn situations of conflict and distrust into opportunities for mutual aid and cooperation. Ideally, stakeholder analysis will prove to be more effective and result oriented if it is carried out before the launching of any project in natural resource management. Nonetheless, in our present context, as stated earlier, the tool of stakeholder analysis is applied as a step before initiating MSD. In this case, it helped to identify and gain more understanding of the stakeholders, their strengths and weaknesses; to differentiate between primary and secondary stakeholders; to single out primary conflict from secondary conflict; and to strategise conflictresolving mechanisms in the right perspective. The flow chart in Figure 15.1 and the diagram in Figure 15.2 are the results of my long-term research and stakeholder analysis carried out in the Palar basin. The social dialogue approach will not yield instant results. It is a process in which all stakeholders, though initially fighting and debating, settle down after a while. What is, however, crucial is to sustain the tempo and interest of stakeholders until some tangible outcome emerges. The dialogue process may yield definite results under conditions where some threshold level of disaster has already been reached. For instance, social dialogue would be more fruitful in a river basin, the water of which is heavily used; where industrial and domestic wastes are dumped resulting in heavy contamination of surface and groundwater; where there is severe competing demand for water; where ambiguities exist in defining water rights; where water

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and environmental laws are ineffectively implemented; where official monitoring systems either never exist or have failed; and where trade-offs between competing water users are illconceived and ill-managed. Most of all, in the particular context of the Palar river basin, even the interventions made by the highest judicial authority of the country could not make much of a difference to the severe problem. In other words, ‘when everything fails’, stakeholders come forward for the reconciliatory process through dialogue; until then all stakeholders compete with each other in making use of the available space and resource. This is precisely the state of affairs in which the multi-stakeholders’ dialogue process was initiated in the Palar basin.

Multi-stakeholders’ Meeting—Some Practical Experiences Probably the most direct policy impact of my research has been through the creation of an on-going MSD process around critical water issues in Tamil Nadu. This led to the organisation of the first MSD meeting of the Palar river basin in Chennai on 28 and 29 January 2002. The meeting was attended by over 120 participants, including tannery owners—the main polluters—farmers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), bureaucrats, effluent treatment managers, media persons, lawyers, doctors and academics. The basic objectives of this meeting are given below: (i) To take stock of use and abuse of water in the Palar basin in the overall context of urban and industrial expansion, and in the context of poverty, food security and hunger. (ii) To assess and examine who are the defaulters of law, their positive and negative contributions to society and economy are. (iii) To bring together various stakeholders for a fruitful dialogue with a view to hear, debate, document and make public their voices. (iv) To find ways for preventing further degradation of water resources in the basin and to work towards sustainable development with a common agenda within a framework acceptable to all stakeholders. (v) To find ways to turn situations of conflict and distrust into opportunities for mutual aid and cooperation. To set the stage for dialogue on the first day, a series of panelists were invited to make presentations on various aspects of water use and abuse with particular reference to the Palar basin. Altogether, the various stakeholders made 12 presentations. These covered a wide variety of issues pertaining to use and abuse of water in the Palar basin. The arguments, during the dialogue sessions, were impassioned and lively. Initially, the discussion was quite intense and one of the tanners stood up with an outburst: ‘We (tanners) are treated like Afghan refugees; what sin have we committed except involving ourselves in this dirty business?’ By the afternoon of the first day, however, the variety of perspectives present was beginning to generate common points of understanding. While tanners began to acknowledge that the pollution generated by them has had huge impacts on livelihoods of the people and on the environment, farmers and other stakeholders recognised that closure of tanneries is not the solution of the problem.

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Mutual concerns were expressed which could be gathered from comments made by one of the tanners: ‘So far we farmers and tanners were meeting only in the courts; for the first time we are meeting in a same platform with a view to sharing the concern.’ In the dialogue process, remedial recourses for the problem of effluent discharge and environmental pollution were debated and discussed extensively. The dialogue centered around a series of issues, namely: (i) Legal solutions: Environmental laws—Do we need new laws? Should the group consider filing public interest litigation cases—would it help the cause? (ii) Technical Options: Can we use technologically more efficient individualised or centralised effluent treatment plants (IETPs and CETPs)? Would it be possible to use cleaner technologies in the tanning process or recycle the treated water? If we argue for more effective technologies, do we have an efficient monitoring mechanism to ensure they are actually implemented? (iii) Governmental Options: Could individuals or groups put pressure on the Loss of Ecology Authority to take action to reverse existing ecological degradation? If pressure were exercised, would the Authority really be able to do anything? Towards the end of the meeting there were signs of relief. At that time it was widely acknowledged that MSD is an on-going process and not a one-off meeting. Therefore, there was a general agreement to form a Committee from among those who were present so that the dialogue process could be carried further. The result was the birth of the Multi-stakeholders’ Committee with 24 members represented from different stakeholders. This meeting was given very wide publicity for two days by both print and visual media.

Formalising the Multi-stakeholders’ Committee of Water Users of the Palar River Basin Following the first MSD meeting, individuals participating in the committee have been working to define their objectives. At least initially, the members agreed that the objectives of this Committee will be the following: (i) To make a comprehensive attempt with an inter-disciplinary focus to document water and environmental issues in the Palar basin. In particular, the Committee will spend considerable time on water audits. (ii) To monitor pollution levels in the surface and groundwater at different strategic points within the basin. (iii) To measure the quantum of water consumed by different sectors such as agriculture, industrial and domestic users. (iv) To measure and monitor the quality of water at various inlet and outlet points from industries.

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(v) To measure the actual quantum of water that goes out of the basin for non-agricultural uses such as for domestic and industrial purposes, amusement parks etc. (vi) To develop a package for reversing ecological degradation in the basin. As currently envisioned, this package will involve the following: (a) revamping of traditional irrigation sources such as tanks and springs as a measure of providing adequate irrigation water as well as to recharge groundwater; (b) channeling water into the Palar river in order to increase water flow; (c) preventing sand mining; (d) preventing polluted water (both from industries and from domestic sewage) from entering the river—whether treated or untreated; (e) removing encroachments in the Palar river; (f ) suggesting cleaner technology for water treatment; developing a rapport with various government agencies; and (g) critically assessing the findings of the Loss of Ecology Authority and their recommendations for ecological restoration. In order to carry out these responsibilities, it was agreed to appoint/consult experts in various fields.

Major Outcomes of the Committee’s Deliberations The Tamil Nadu State Government constituted what is called ‘The Palar Basin Board’ at the recommendation of the World Bank in 2001. This Board so far has met only once and no business seems to have been transacted; whereas the Multi-Stakeholders’ Committee has already met seven times so far, during 2001–03, and has identified and addressed the following critical policy issues: (i) The Committee has unanimously agreed that the closure of tanneries is not the solution; the members have committed themselves to finding solutions not only for pollution but also for restoring the ecology of the basin. (ii) Different stakeholders have agreed to share information among themselves so that more useful and concrete decisions can be made. In particular, tanners, who hitherto were denying any access to information, have agreed to share all the details pertaining to tanneries and CETPs, and also have agreed on open access to tanneries and CETPs with a view to enabling the Committee members to visit their sites at any time. This is considered one of the best positive outcomes of the Committee in a short span of time. (iii) It was felt that the prevention of any further pollution in the basin is the first step required towards ecological restoration. (iv) The Committee explored a variety of specific potential solutions to some of the most critical water problems. These include the possibility of (i) handing over effluents to a private water treatment company and pay according to the services provided by them;

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and (ii) the use of a mobile cold storage system to collect and transport raw hides and skins from all over the country so that the pickling process (which is the main source of TDS [salt] accumulation in the effluent) could be avoided. (v) One of the main objectives of the MSD meeting was to bring together various stakeholders for a fruitful dialogue with a view to hear, debate, document and make public their voices. With a view to fulfilling this objective, the entire two days’ proceedings were recorded and transcribed. Thus, the entire proceedings of the dialogue meeting along with a long introduction on conditions of river basins in Tamil Nadu have already been published in Tamil (the vernacular language). The book has 270 pages with photographs. The Governor of Tamil Nadu released the book on 26 December 2003, which again received wide publicity in the print and visual media.

Looking into the Future—Leftover Tasks Despite its considerable successes during the first year, many tasks identified by the Committee remain underway. These include: (i) Developing rapport with the Government agencies at all levels with a view to (a) getting access to official information (database); (b) influencing the policies of the Government; and (c) executing objectives of the Committee with the endorsement and financial support of the Government. (ii) Generating data on all aspects of the basin—both primary and secondary. (iii) Developing village-level stakeholder units with the objective of (a) spreading awareness for the restoration ecology in the basin; (b) generating primary data in each village concerning crop details, water use, conditions of surface and groundwater bodies, groundwater levels, water quality characteristics, documenting water conflicts, documenting details relating to encroachments, and so on; (c) developing a monitoring mechanism for preventing further pollution, to regulate water use (both surface and groundwater); and (d) regulating water markets. The activities of village-level stakeholder units would need official sanction from the Social Committee only to prevent any unlawful activity of the stakeholder units. (iv) And sustaining the MSD process through periodic Stakeholder Committee meetings.

C ONCLUSION One of the biggest challenges in the current Indian context is to meet the growing water demands of various sectors such as agriculture, industries and urban drinking-water needs, and to sustain the ecology and environment. There exists a virtual competition between these sectors, which often results in conflicts. There is a greater need to prevent over-use of water and its degradation due to pollution. In particular, sectors such as industries and domestic water

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users (municipalities) are primarily dependent upon water supply from rural areas; but what is turned out after use is deadly, untreated waste water, which gets dumped in rivers, streams, ponds and tanks and wastelands. This contributes to severe water contamination—both surface and sub-surface. The Palar is one such typical, heavily stressed river basin where leather tanneries have played a significant role in contributing to the environmental degradation in general and water pollution in particular. Existing policy initiatives have failed to deliver goods; there were several concerted efforts to express public solidarity; but the political parties in the state, with one or two exceptions, did not take active interest in the public outrage, nor did they make it an election issue; even after assuming power the successive elected governments in the state never made any concrete efforts to resolve the issue. Judicial activism—through the Supreme Court’s intervention—in response to the public interest litigation case filed against tanners was helpful in so far as creating awareness and in pronouncing that what tanners have done to the environmental is an offence. But the remedial measures suggested by the Court could not travel too far due to fundamental flaws in the law enforcement and monitoring mechanisms. It was at this juncture the MSD process was initiated in the basin, which appears rewarding at the moment. In the absence of any other alternative solution to the vexing problem of pollution in the basin, the MSD process has helped, at least, in bringing together all stakeholders in the basin for a negotiated settlement; its success very much depends upon the active support that it deserves from the state and central governments.

Notes 1. Historically, tanks have been regarded as one of the most important common property resources in India, in the South in particular. Tanks played an extremely important role in contributing to agricultural growth until the mid-1960s in many parts of India. For details, see Janakarajan (1993) and Vaidyanathan (2001). 2. Before its publication in 2005, the third census of minor irrigation schemes surveyed during 2000–01 and the Report of the Expert Group on Groundwater Management and Ownership (see Government of India 2007), the status of groundwater resources in India by the Central Ground Water Board was published in 1995. It was primarily based on data from 1989–90; it contained no information on actual water level changes (Central Ground Water Board 1995). In most states, groundwater-monitoring data is insufficient to accurately document water level changes at a local level even if the data were made readily available (Moench 1994; World Bank 1998). This fact is also acknowledged by the expert group. 3. The Palar, one of the major rivers in Tamil Nadu, covers an area of about 18,300 sq km. Average annual rainfall ranges from between 800 mm to 1200 mm here. The climate is tropical and highly humid. Major irrigated crops in this basin are paddy, sugarcane and groundnut, and major unirrigated crops are coarse cereals besides groundnut in water scarce areas. Tanks have historically been the most important surface irrigation source in the basin. There are about 700 tanks connected to the river channels with a combined command area of 61,000 hectares. These are called system tanks. Besides system tanks, a large number of non-system tanks also exist in this basin. There were also 606 spring channels that had their origin in the Palar river or its tributaries, which irrigated thousands of hectares along the villages located on both sides of the river (IWS 2000). In many villages, even now, the spring channels remain but in a dissipated and silted condition.

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4. Most of the information provided in this section has been collected through a survey carried out during the years 1997–99 in 51 villages of the Palar basin. This was a part of the research funded by International Development Research Center, Canada. 5. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in the 1993 State of the World’s Refugees, identified four root causes of refugee flows. These were political instability, economic tensions, ethnic conflict and environmental degradation (Lonergan 1998: 1). Another study indicates that environmental refugees have become the single largest class of displaced people in the world (see Jacobson 1988). 6. See Moreyra Alejandra (2001: 4) in this context who explains in a similar fashion various types of conflicts that occur in the use of water: ‘Increasing scarcity of water in quantity and quality generate problems related to the accomplishment of the different functions assigned to the resource. Consequently, conflicts arise among actors within the same sector (upstream and downstream irrigators), among different user sectors within the same region (irrigation, drinking water, industry etc.) and among different administrative units, that share the same watershed (municipalities, states, provinces and central governments). Conflicts of interest groups can also arise between those who consume water (consumptive users) and those who don’t consume it but use it (hydro-electric power generation, tourism etc.), but also with those non-users that defend interests about the type of development they want for their locality….

References Agarwal, A. and S. Narain (1997). Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems. New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment. Asian Development Bank (1994). ‘Tamil Nadu Environmental Monitoring and Pollution Control’, Stanley Associates. Canada: Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, Final Report. Biswas, D. (2001). ‘Environmental Legislation Challenges of Enforcement’, Eastern Window E-mail, Vision 2001, 1. Bhatia, B. (1992). ‘Lush Fields and Parched Throats: Political Economy of Groundwater in Gujarat’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27(51 and 52). Central Groundwater Board (1995). Groundwater Resources of India. Faridabad: Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India. Grimble, R. and M. Chan (1995). ‘Stakeholder Analysis for Natural Resource Management in Developing Countries’, Natural Resource Forum, 19(2): 111–24. Hardin, G. (1968). ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162 (December): 1243–48. Trust Help (1992). ‘Water Pollution Due to Leather Industries in Tamil Nadu’, paper presented at International Water Tribunal, Amsterdam. Government of India (2007). Report of the Expert Group on Groundwater Management and Ownership. New Delhi: Planning Commission. Government of Tamil Nadu (2000). State Framework Water Resources Plan, Palar Bain. Chennai: Institute for Water Studies. Jacobson, J. (1988). ‘Environmental Refugee: A Yardstick of Habitability’, paper No. 86, Washington D.C: Worldwatch Institute. Janakarajan, S. (1992). ‘Interlinked Transactions and the Market for Water in the Agrarian Economy of a Tamilnadu Village’, in S. Subramanian (ed.), Themes in Development Economics: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Adiseshiah. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——— (1993). ‘In Search of Tanks’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28(6): A53–61.

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Janakarajan, S. (1997a). Conditions and Characteristics of Groundwater Irrigation: A Study of Vaigai Basin in Tamil Nadu, report of a research project sponsored by the Planning Commission. Chennai: Government of India, Madras Institute of Development Studies. ——— (1997b). ‘Consequences of Aquifer Over-Exploitation: Prosperity and Deprivation’, Review of Development and Change, 2(1): 52–71. ——— (1999). ‘Conflicts Over the Invisible Resource in Tamilnadu: Is There a Way Out?’, in M. Moench, E. Caspari and A. Dixit (eds), Rethinking the Mosaic: Investigations into Local Water Management. Kathmandu: Nepal Water Conservation Foundation and Boulder. U.S.A: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition. ——— (2001). Conflicts, Competition and Contradictions in the Use of Water Resources, unpublished draft. Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. ——— (2003). ‘Soiled Agriculture and Spoiled Environment: Socio-Economic Impact of Groundwater Pollution in Tamilnadu’, working paper No.175, Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Janakarajan, S. and M. Moench (2003). ‘Are Wells a Potential Threat to Farmers’ Well-being? The Case of Deteriorating Groundwater Irrigation in Tamilnadu’, working paper No.174, Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Lonergan, S. (1998). ‘The Role of Environmental Degradation in Population Displacement, Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project–Research Report–1’, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia. Millie, N. (1998). ‘Growing Industry and Sick Workers: A Study of the Leather Tannery Industry of Dindigul from an Occupational Health Perspective’, thesis submitted for the award of the Doctor of Philosophy, University of Madras. Moench, M. (1992a). ‘Chasing the Water Table: Equity and Sustainability in Groundwater Management’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27(51 and 52): A171–A177. Moench, M. (1992b). ‘Drawing Down the Buffer’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27(13): A-7–A-14. Moench, M. (1994). ‘Under Central Planning: Groundwater in India’, Water Nepal, 4(1): 98–112. Moench, M., E. Caspari and A. Dixit (eds) (1999). Rethinking the Mosaic: Investigations into Local Water Management. Kathmandu: NWCF and Boulder U.S.A: ISET. Moreyra, A. (2001). ‘Multiple Stakeholder Platforms for Water Resources Management: Latin America’, CWP Research Papers on Irrigation and Water Engineering, The Netherlands: Wageningen University. Rajagopal, A. and A. Vaidyanathan (1998). ‘Conditions and Characteristics of Groundwater Irrigation in the Palar Basin: Some Preliminary Results’, unpublished Draft Report. Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Rao, D.S.K. (1993). ‘Groundwater Over-Exploitation Through Bore Holes Technology’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28(52): A129–34. Shah, T. (1993). Groundwater Markets and Irrigation Development: Political Economy and Practical Policy. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board (1997). A Report on the Palar Pollution Studies. Chennai: Government of Tamil Nadu. Vaidyanathan, A. (1996). ‘Depletion of Groundwater: Some Issues’, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 51(1 and 2): 184–92. Vaidyanathan, A. (ed.) (2001). Tanks of South India. New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment. World Bank (1998). ‘India-Water Resources Management Sector Review’, Groundwater Regulation and Management Report. Washington D.C: World Bank and New Delhi: Government of India.

16 The New Institutional Economics of India’s Water Policy Tushaar Shah

I NSTITUTIONAL A RRANGEMENTS AND I NSTITUTIONAL E NVIRONMENT A recent review of institutional changes in the global water sector in 11 countries by Saleth and Dinar (2000) treats water law, water policy and water administration as the three pillars of institutional analysis in national water economies. This focus on law, policy and organisations as central themes of institutional analysis has been popular with many analysts of water resource management (Bandaragoda and Firdausi 1992; Merrey 1996; Frederickson and Vissia 1998; Holmes 2000; Saleth 2004). However, if institutional change is about how societies adapt to new demands, its study needs to go beyond what government bureaucracies, international agencies and legal/regulatory systems do; people, businesses, exchange institutions, civil society institutions, religions and social movements—all must be covered in the ambit of institutional analysis (Mestre 1997 cited in Merrey 2000: 5; Livingston 1993). In an effort to build upon existing institutional analyses of the Indian water sector, this chapter takes a broader view in attempting a preliminary analysis of water institutions in India; if anything because it helps to access the vast field of New Institutional Economics (NIE) in analysing ways the Indian society is responding to its changing water situation. I begin right away by borrowing from North (1990) the notion of institutions as ‘formal rules, informal constraints (norms of behaviour, conventions and self-imposed codes of conduct) and the enforcement characteristics of both’, and also ‘if institutions are the rules of the game, organizations are the players’. It is also useful to borrow the important distinction drawn in the NIE between institutional arrangements and institutional environment. Thus, aspects that Saleth and Dinar (2000) include in their ‘institutional analysis’ represent institutional environment in NIE. Institutional arrangements, in contrast, ‘are the structure that humans impose on their dealings with each other’ (North 1990). In the particular context of the Indian water economy, then, when I refer to institutional environment, I include various government agencies at different levels that directly or indirectly deal in water, international agencies, governments’

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water policy, water related laws, and so on. And in talking about institutions or institutional arrangements, I refer to things like groundwater markets, tube well co-operatives and Water User Associations (WUAs), formal or informal. My overarching hypotheses in this analysis are stated below: • Water institutions of nations at any given point in time depend critically upon the nature and characteristics of their water economies; and the nature and characteristics in turn are characterised in the main by level of formalisation of water economies.1 • Water sectors become more formalised as national economies grow. • The pace of water sector formalisation in response to economic growth varies across countries and is determined by a host of factors, which are not fully understood, but include some, such as the degree of population pressure on land and water resources, extent of dependence on farming for livelihoods, macro-economic policies and the nature of the ‘state’ (principally, how hard or soft it is). How much difference these make in the pace of formalisation of water sectors, it is difficult to say; however, it is clear that India cannot have Europe’s level of formalisation of its water sector at its present state of economic evolution (see Figure 16.1). The level of formalisation of a country’s water sector is best indicated by the low level of interface between its water institutions and its water institutional environment—or by what Figure 16.1: Relation between Formalisation of Water Provision and Economic Growth

Formal/Mediated service provision

Low population pressure on water and land; highly urban

High population pressure on water and land; highly rural

Informal/ Self-provision

Economic Growth

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North (1990) calls the transaction sector2 of the water economy. Informal water economies are marked by heavy dependence of water users on self-provision (through private wells, streams, ponds), or informal, personalised exchange institutions, community-managed water sources, or absent or limited use of price or user charges to recover costs of service provision, or to guide resource allocation or to clear markets. In contrast, in highly-formalised water economies, as in Europe and North America, self-provision disappears as a mode of securing water service; all or most users are served by service providers—private-corporate, municipal or others—who form the interface between users and the institutional environment. Volumetric supply and economic pricing are commonly used in highly formal water sectors for cost recovery as well as resource allocation. Here, water emerges as an industry. Just how informal India’s water economy is was recently explored by a large nation-wide National Sample Survey (NSS), the 54th round of this survey (NSSO 1999a, report 452: 46) carried out in June–July 1998. It interviewed a total of 78,990 rural households in 5,110 villages to understand the extent to which they depend upon common property (and government) land and water resources for their consumptive and productive uses. It showed that only 10 per cent of water infrastructural assets used by survey households were owned and managed by either a public or community organisation; the rest were mostly privately owned and managed by households, or owned by government/community (but not managed by either).3 The same survey also showed that over 80 per cent of rural households self-supplied their domestic water needs, and were not connected with any public water supply system. In urban households (sample = 31,323 households), the situation was the opposite; three-fourths were connected to a public water supply system. A 2003 survey (NSSO 2003: report 487) showed that of the 4,646 villages covered, only 8.8 per cent had a public/community water supply system; the rest depended on wells or open water bodies for domestic water supply to rural households. The proportion of villages with public water supply systems increased rapidly as one moved from a poor state like Bihar, where none of the 364 villages covered had a public/ community water supply, to Haryana, where over half the villages had public water supply systems, and to Goa, where every village had a public water supply system. The 1999 survey of 48,419 cultivators throughout India showed that nearly 65 per cent of them used irrigation for five major field crops cultivated by them; and, for nearly half of them, the source of irrigation was informal, fragmented pump irrigation markets (NSSO 1999b: 42) which are totally outside the ambit of water law, policy and administration. The 2003 survey of 4,646 villages (NSSO 2003: report 487) showed that 76.2 per cent of the villages reported they irrigated some of the lands; but only 17.3 per cent of the villages had access to a public irrigation system. The rest depended primarily on wells and tube wells (64.3 per cent), tanks and streams. All these surveys suggest that rural India’s water economy—both domestic and irrigation use—is highly informal, based as it predominantly is on self-supply and local, informal water institutions; it has little connect with public systems through which water law, policy and administration typically operate. Contrast this with Louis-Manso’s (2004) account of the highly formalised water economy of Switzerland. Seventy per cent of its population is urban; the country is facing continuous reduction in industrial workers and farmers. Probably 15–20 per cent of the Swiss population

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was linked to public water supply as far back as in the 18th century; today, 98 per cent of the Swiss population is linked to public water networks and 95 per cent is connected with wastewater treatment facilities. Switzerland spends 0.5 per cent of its Gross National Product (GNP) annually in maintaining and improving its water supply infrastructure; and its citizens pay an average of CHF 1.6 per 1,000 litres of water (CHF = 0.786 US $). The per capita water bill Swiss pays annually is around CHF 585, which is higher than the per capita total income of Bangladesh. All its water users are served by a network of municipal, corporate and co-operative water service providers; it has stringent laws and regulations about water abstraction from any water body which can be done only through formal concessions. However, these concessions are held only by formal service providing public agencies; as a result, their enforcement entails little transaction costs. Much discussion on the water problems of developing countries like India—and the institutional arrangements needed to solve these—arguably give too much importance to their water endowments and their characteristics. A good deal of this discussion also suggests that if countries like India were somehow to transpose water institutions (such as tradable water rights in Chile, or tradable salinity credits as in the Murray-Darling basin in Australia, or farmer associations managing irrigation systems as in Turkey or Columbia) or organisations (such as the Murray Darling River Basin Commission) from industrialised countries, their water sector would begin to operate as efficiently and productively as in the industrialised countries. As I presently show, this manner of thinking has had a powerful sway on the design of institutional interventions as well as on the thinking of multilateral agencies in their work in the developing world, including India, usually without much success. I suggest that water institutions that exist in a country or can be externally catalysed depending on, besides several other factors, the overall economic evolution of that country. I also surmise that the transformation of an informal into a formal water economy takes place not through interventions in the water sector but through a set of milestones somewhat like what I outline in Figure 16.2 Water institutions found in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—such as, pump irrigation markets—are unlikely to be found in Australia or Spain because they would serve nobody’s purpose there. Likewise, water institutions that are standard in industrialised countries—multinationals managing a city’s water supply system—would not begin to work until Dhaka as a water service market, at least, evolved to Manila’s or Jakarta’s level.4 Therefore, it is never enough to belabour the point that economic institutions are instrumental in the sense that, in balance, they must serve the purposes of the players of the game.

T HE P ROCESS

OF

I NSTITUTIONAL C HANGE

In understanding how societies adapt their institutions to changing demands, Williamson (1999) suggests the criticality of four levels of social analysis as outlined in Figure 16.3. The top level is referred to as the social embeddedness level where customs, traditions, mores and religion are located. Institutions at this level change very slowly because of the spontaneous

Figure 16.2: Transformation of Informal Water Economies in Response to Overall Economic Growth

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Tushaar Shah Figure 16.3: Criticality of Social Analysis

origin of these practices in which deliberative choice of a calculative kind is minimally implicated. At the second level—where the institutional environment of a society is involved— evolutionary processes play a big role; but opportunities for design present themselves through formal rules, constitutions, laws and property rights; the challenge here is getting the rules of the game right. The definition and enforcement of property rights and contract laws are critical features here. Also critical is the understanding of how things actually work—‘warts and all’—in some settings, but not in others. However, it is one thing to get the rules of the game (laws, policies and administrative reforms in the institutional environment) right; it is quite another to get the play of the game (enforcement of contracts/property rights) right. This leads to the third level of institutional analysis:

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transaction costs of enforcement of contracts and property rights, and the governance structures through which this is done. Governance—through markets, hybrids, firms and bureaux—is an effort to craft order, thereby to mitigate conflict and realise mutual gains; and good governance structures craft order by reshaping incentives, which leads to the fourth level of social analysis—getting the incentives right. From the viewpoint of policy analysis for action, it is also useful to recognise that institutional changes at L1 and L2 levels would be economy-wide, encompassing all aspects of social and economic life of a country. For the particular purpose of analysing water sector institutions, therefore, one must regard L1 and L2 as given. This may seem trite but sectoral interventions aiming to achieve at least L2 level changes5 are not uncommon. Discussions on institutional changes needed in the water sector often refer to reorienting the bureaucracy or modifying property rights in water; but it is virtually impossible to enduringly6 transform only the water bureaucracy while the rest of the bureaucracy stays the same. All things considered, it is practical to leave L1 as given; L2 as amenable to change at the margins; and L3 and L4 can be taken as the playing field for institutional reform. Having set out this background, I want to analyse India’s experience in recent decades in institutional interventions in the water sector. In NIE, the most interesting aspect of study of institutional change is about ‘why economies fail to undertake the appropriate activities if they had a high pay-off ’ (North 1990). India’s water sector is replete with situations where appropriate activities can potentially generate a high pay-off and yet fail to get undertaken; in contrast, much institutional reform being carried out will likely not work because it entails high transaction costs and low pay-off. In analysing the Indian institutional experience in the water sector, the key propositions are embodied in Figure 16.4. It suggests that several kinds of institutional reforms tried or suggested in the Indian water sector have tended to have either entailed high transaction costs (quadrant 2) or low pay-offs (quadrant 4) or both (quadrant 3). In contrast, institutional changes which have quietly occurred because pay-offs are high and transaction costs low (quadrant 1) are either ignored or dwarfed, or, at least, not built upon. In the following sections, I briefly analyse a sample of situations in each of these four quadrants (as given in Figure 16.4) before drawing some general implications arising from this analysis.

L OW T RANSACTION C OSTS , L OW P AY - OFFS One area in which demand for change in institutional environment in the water sector is widely and persistently aired is in creating a legislative and policy framework that facilitates orderly and effective management of the water economy and sustainable husbanding of the resource. However, in a predominantly informal water economy such as India’s, the transaction costs of enforcing a water law effectively are so high that these attempts have had to remain cosmetic, essentially setting ‘targets without teeth’. Indeed, laws and policies are often written to minimise transaction costs by progressively removing clauses that bite and are likely to

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Tushaar Shah Figure 16.4: Transaction Costs and Productivity Pay-offs of Institutional Interventions

Bounded service provider; High

Participatory irrigation management

Gujarat's public tube well transfer Community RO plants Intelligent management of farm power supply

Fishery co-operatives

Improved main system management Private RO plants + clean water vouchers 1 For the poor. Decentralized recharge movement

Low Andhra Pradesh Water and Trees Law

2 Pay offs

Transaction costs 4

3

High Community regulation of groundwater overdraft;

GoI Water Policy 2002 Metering farm power supply Maharashtra Drinking Water Protection Act Low

be extensively violated, thereby reducing the effective regulatory powers of a law. The late Anil Shah, an illustrious former bureaucrat from the Government of Gujarat (GOG) fondly tells the story about Gujarat’s groundwater bill which was passed by the assembly in 1973. When the Chief Minister was required to sign it into the gazette, he refused to do so because it required that every irrigation well be registered. His curt response to Shah was: ‘Can you imagine that as soon as this bill becomes a law, every Talati (Village Level Revenue Official) will have one more means at his disposal to extract bribes from farmers?’ This is the reason why there are no takers for the draft Groundwater Bill that the Ministry of Water Resources (MOWR) of the Government of India (GOI) has been tossing around to states since 1970. But other chief ministers were less transaction-cost-savvy. So, in 1993, Maharashtra made a law with a limited ambition of disabling irrigation wells within 500 m of a public water source during droughts with a view of protecting drinking water wells. Ten years after its enactment, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)-Tata Programme studied the enforcement of this law (Phansalkar and Kher 2003). The law provides for stern action against violation but gets invoked only when a ‘Gram Panchayat files a written complaint’ (which, at one stroke, reduces to a fraction the transaction costs as well as the potency of the law). The study found

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numerous cases of violations of the 500 m norm, yet not a single case of legal action resulted because Gram Panchayats failed to file a written complaint. It concluded that, ‘There is a near complete absence of social support for the legislation. The rural lay public as well as the office bearers of Gram Panchayats appear inhibited and reluctant to seem to be ‘revengeful’ towards those who are doing no worse than trying to earn incomes by using water for raising oranges’ (Phansalkar and Kher 2003). Instead of invoking the law, supply-side solutions in the form of upgraded drinking water facilities and water tankers during droughts are preferred by people, Gram Panchayats as well as Zilla Parishads. The IWMI also did a quick assessment of the Andhra Pradesh Water and Trees Act (Narayan and Scott 2004), which tried harder to come to grips with rampant groundwater over-exploitation in Andhra Pradesh by emphasising the registration of wells and drilling agencies and stipulating punitive measures for non-compliance. Yet, IWMI assessment of the power of this law to regulate groundwater draft was pessimistic because of high transaction costs and perverse incentives facing the farmers. A similar exercise has been the formulation of the official GOI Water Policy of 1987 and 2002. Both these pieces are an excellent example of non-sequitur, tongue-in-cheek enunciations which are not designed to change anything in any manner.7 As a result, they have low transaction costs, but also low or no realised pay-off in terms of improving the working of the water economy.

L OW P AY - OFFS , H IGH T RANSACTION C OSTS Other ideas of institutional change that have held a sway in the Indian water sector discussions have high transaction costs but even if these were to succeed, they would in the present circumstances lead to little productivity gain. A very good example is the effort to introduce volumetric pricing of electricity supply to groundwater irrigators. It was the high transaction costs of metering over 12 million irrigation pump-sets—which involved installing and maintaining meters, reading them every month, billing based on metered consumption of power, but, more importantly, of controlling pilferage and tampering with meters with or without collusion with meter readers and the like,—that obliged State Electricity Boards (SEBs) to switch to flat tariff during the 1970s. Flat tariff were succeeded in reducing transaction costs of serving a market where derived demand for electricity was confined to periods of peak irrigation requirements. It would have worked if the SEBs had been able to ration power supply to agriculture and gradually raise the flat tariffs to break-even levels. However, neither happened; farmer lobbies have managed all along to prevent upward revision in flat tariff while compelling the SEBs to maintain electricity supply to the farm sector. The invidious nexus between energy and irrigation—which has been responsible for the near-bankruptcy of the Indian power sector and rampant over-exploitation of groundwater—has been discussed in Shah et al. (2004).

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The assessment of SEBs and multilateral donors about ways out of this imbroglio is the criticality of returning to metering power, even if it means taking on farmer lobbies. Several chief ministers have tried to bite the bullet in the past few years, but farmers’ opposition has been so strong, swift and strident that they have been either felled or obliged to retract. Some, as in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, have done away with farm power tariff altogether. Recommending metering farm electricity in today’s setting is asking politicians to do hara-kiri. But even if a politician were to succeed in metering farm power supply, it would likely change nothing or little because if anything, transaction costs of metered power supply are much higher today than they were in the 1970s. Most states have at least eight to 10 times more irrigation tube wells today than they had during the 1970s; and farming livelihoods depend far more critically on electricity today than 30 years ago. If metering must work in India, one must learn from the Chinese experiments, which have focused on modifying the incentive structures (Shah et al. 2004 also see Chapter 13 of this book for details). In India, a similar experiment is being tried out in Orissa where private companies in charge of distribution first experimented with Village Vidyut Sanghas (electricity co-operatives) by forming 5,500 of them but are now veering around to private entrepreneurs as electricity retailers. Mishra (2004), who carried out an assessment of Orissa reforms for IWMI-Tata programme visited a number of these sangha’s during 2003 and noted that ‘none of the Village Committees were operational…’ These worked as long as the support organisation hired to catalyse them propped them up with constant visits and organisational work; as soon as the support organisation was withdrawn, the Village Vidyut Sangha’s became defunct. Mishra (2004) wrote ‘The situation today is quite similar to that existed earlier before the interventions were made through the Committee’. The sanghas having failed, power distribution companies appointed three private entrepreneurs as franchisees on terms similar to those facing China’s village electricians. These have resulted in sustained and significant improvements in billing and collection of electricity dues. The Orissa experiment and the Chinese experience suggest that, in principle, it is possible to make volumetric pricing and collection of electricity charges work if private entrepreneurs were appropriately incentivised. However, in Orissa, the electricity use in agriculture is less than 5 per cent. If the same arrangement were to work in Punjab, Haryana or Gujarat or several other states where electricity use in the farm sector is 30 per cent or more, farmer resistance would be greater and commensurate with the effectiveness of the volumetric pricing. Moreover, one thing that private power retailers in Indian villages would have to do without is the authority of the Village Party Leader that helps China’s village electricians to firmly pass on all costs to farmers. In the absence of such authority structures, private entrepreneurs would expect very high margins to assume the role of retailing power on a volumetric basis. This—as well as farmers’ propensity to frustrate metering—would raise transaction costs of metering very high. If the ultimate purpose of volumetric pricing is to improve the finances of electricity utilities, I doubt if this purpose will be achieved. Shah et al. (2004) have argued that in making an impossibly bad situation better, a more practical course available to SEBs and state governments is to stay with flat tariffs but rationalise them through intelligent management of power supply. Farmers’ needs for power are different

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from households’ or industries’; they need plentiful power on 30–40 days of the year when crops face acute moisture stress. However, in most states, they receive a constant 8–10 hours per day of poor quality power supply throughout the year. If the SEBs were to invest in understanding farmers as customers, it should be possible for them to supply 20 hours per day of good quality power to farmers on 30–40 days of peak irrigation need while maintaining 3–4 hours per day supply on other days. In order for such an approach to work, the nature and capabilities of the power utilities have to change; so also the thinking of donors and governments.

H IGH T RANSACTION C OSTS , P OTENTIALLY H IGH P AY - OFFS Rather than evolving organically from the unfolding situation on the ground—and therefore being demanded by stake holders—many of the reforms currently being pursued in India, such as Irrigation Management Transfer, River Basin Management and metering of electricity, are actually promoted aggressively by researchers as well as funding agencies8, and are sometimes out of sync with the prevailing Indian context. By far the most frequent are situations where institutional interventions proposed would yield high productivity pay-offs if successful; but they rarely succeed because of high transaction costs. In Independent India’s history, the ‘communitarian ideal’—the notion that villagers will instantly come together to take over the responsibility of participatory, democratic management of virtually anything (land, water, watersheds, forests, irrigation systems, river basins)—has been behind innumerable abortive institutional interventions. What has helped fuel this enthusiasm for participatory irrigation management (PIM) by farmers are occasional examples of such models having worked reasonably well either in the industrialised countries or in India itself but under the tutelage of an inspired local leader or an industrious non-governmental organisation (NGO). Its having worked in a few situations in exceptional conditions becomes the basis for designs of major programmes of institutional interventions, commonly bank-rolled by an international donor. A classic example is PIM (or its cousin Irrigation Management Transfer [IMT]), which has been, for the past four decades, the ruling mantra for improving the productivity of irrigation systems in India. What is extraordinary about this preoccupation with PIM (or IMT) is the sway it has continued to hold despite virtually no evidence of it having succeeded anywhere except on an experimental scale.9 WUAs has been tried out on small irrigation systems since 1960. Uttar Pradesh tried Sinchai Samitis (Irrigation Committees) way back in the early 1960s, on irrigation tanks and reservoirs; following it, Madhya Pradesh too tried it on thousands of its minor irrigation tanks. Other states have been trying to make Pani Panchayats (Water Assemblies) work. However, the Sinchai Samitis of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have disappeared without a trace; and so have Pani Panchayats in Gujarat and elsewhere. Yet, Orissa recently made a law that transferred all its minor irrigation systems to instantly-created Pani Panchayats. Gujarat introduced the Joint Irrigation Management Programme as far back as in 1983 but the 17 Irrigation Co-operatives lost money and became defunct. In 1991, it made another attempt, this time around with assistance from NGOs; and 144 Irrigation Co-operatives

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covered 45,000 hectares (ha) of irrigated area (Shukla 2004); however, it is difficult to see precisely in what way these areas are better off than other commands. Indeed, a core idea of Command Area Development Agencies (CADAs) in the early 1980s was to involve farmer organisations in the management of irrigation projects; and one can see no trace of CADA’s or their Beneficiary Farmers’ Associations (BFAs), including in Kerala where thousands of these were formed under a ‘big bang’ approach during 1986. An assessment by Joseph (2001) in the late 1990s suggested that even in this land of strong traditions of local governance, high education and high levels of people’s participation, BFAs were damp squib.10 A la Kerala, Andhra Pradesh overnight transferred the management of all its irrigation systems to over 10,000 WUAs created by fiat and a World Bank loan; this ‘big bang’ approach to PIM has attracted all-round interest; however, now that the World Bank funds retailed to WUAs for maintenance are over, field observers are beginning to wonder precisely what the WUAs are doing better ( Jairath 2001). The central assumption underlying PIM/IMT is that once irrigation management is transferred from remote bureaucracies to WUAs, financial viability of the systems would improve and so would the quality and reliability of irrigation; the physical and value productivity of water and land would increase, and irrigation systems would better achieve their potential for food and livelihood security for farmers in their command. PIM/IMT programmes have belied many of these expectations, even in countries like Turkey, Mexico and Philippines where they are known to have succeeded. As a result, early expectations from PIM/IMT have been increasingly moderated, and IMT is now considered successful even if it just ‘saves the government money, improves cost effectiveness of operation and maintenance [O&M] while improving, or at least not weakening, the productivity of irrigated agriculture’ (Vermillion 1996: 153). The drift of the IMT discussion, in recent times, has been more towards getting irrigation off the back of the governments than towards improving the lot of the farmers and the poor, the original goal to which much public irrigation investment was directed over the past 50 years. Some over-arching patterns emerge from a reading of the international experience. IMT has tended to be smooth, relatively effortless and successful where the irrigation system is central to a dynamic, high-performing agriculture; where average farm size is large enough for a typical or a significant proportion of the command area farmers to operate like agri-businessmen; where farm producers are linked with global input and output markets; and where the costs of self-managed irrigation are an insignificant part of the gross value of product of farming. These are the conditions—all of which either enhance the pay-off or reduce transaction costs or both—obtained in Mexico, USA and New Zealand from where emerge the resounding success stories one hears about IMT (Shah et al. 2002).11 In South Africa, the commercial farming sector, which satisfies all these conditions, took naturally to PIM through Water Boards, which are WUAs par excellence; but the same logic when applied to irrigation systems serving small holders in former homelands met with resounding failure because these met none of the conditions that the Water Boards satisfied. Even where all conditions are satisfied, researchers have presented mixed pictures on PIM/IMT impacts. An exhaustive global review done for IWMI of IMT impacts by Douglas Vermillion, a pioneer in IMT research, for example, showed that impacts are significant and unambiguously beneficial in terms of cost recovery in Turkey, Mexico, USA, and New Zealand.

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Fee collection has improved; agency staff strength has declined. The impact of management transfer on agricultural productivity and farm incomes is far less unequivocal even in these countries (Vermillion 1996: 153). In Philippines, the Mecca of IMT and PIM, recent studies show that productivity gains from PIM have not sustained (Panella 1999). None of the conditions outlined above are obtained in a typical Indian surface irrigation system. Most farmers in the command have small holdings, sub-divided further into smaller parcels. A typical major system has hundreds of thousands of small holders, making it well nigh impossible to bring them all together to negotiate. Over 90 per cent of surface irrigated area in India is under field-crops yielding Rs 15–18,000 (US$ 325–400) per ha of gross value of output, compared to US $ 3,000–7,500 per ha in high value farming in industrialised countries. Irrigation systems are at the heart of the farming economy of command areas. However, the mushrooming of wells and tube wells, and booming pump irrigation markets in command areas and in the neighbourhood of irrigation tanks have reduced farmers’ stakes in managing surface irrigation systems. Head-reach and tail-end farmers almost always have opposing motivations when it comes to management reform, with the former interested in preserving the status quo, and the latter interested in change. All these together raise the transaction costs of implementing management reform through PIM/IMT-type interventions. The prospects become worse because almost everywhere the agency’s purpose in promoting PIM is to get WUA’s to assume arduous responsibilities—maintenance, fee collection, and so on. Moreover, farmers take little time to figure out that PIM often means increased water fee without corresponding improvement in service quality. These reduce the perceived pay-offs from reform. All in all, decades invested in the hope that PIM or IMT would spearhead productivity improvements in public irrigation are decades wasted. PIM has not achieved any significant success on a meaningful scale anywhere in India. And it will indeed be a great surprise if it does in the existing institutional environment marked by hopelessly low irrigation fees, extremely poor collection and poor main system management. There are similar institutional misadventures in other spheres. In growing regions, where fluoride contamination of groundwater is endemic, governments and donors have tried setting up village-based reverse osmosis (RO) type plants or Nalgonda type defluoridation plants to control the growing menace of dental and skeletal fluorosis. Again, the management model chosen is communitarian; and these have invariably failed. In Gujarat, out of dozens of such plants set up during the 1980s and 1990s, not one has operated for more than a few months. An older experiment with the communitarian model has been with inland fishery co-operatives. Numerous local water bodies controlled by irrigation departments, Zilla Panchayats, Taluka Panchayats and Gram Panchayats can potentially sustain a vibrant inland fishing enterprise and livelihoods system. However, government policy has always been to give away monopoly lease rights to registered fisher-people’s co-operatives. Thousands of such co-operatives are registered; but probably a very small fraction—in my surmise, less than 1 or 2 per cent—operate as dynamic producer co-operatives, like for instance, the dairy co-operatives do in Gujarat. In South India, which has over 300,000 irrigation tanks, a decades-old concern has been about the break-down of traditions of maintenance of bund and supply channels, orderly distribution of water, and protection from encroachment. Several donor supported projects

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first aimed at ‘engineering rehabilitation’ and restored tank infrastructure to their original—or even better—condition. However, when rehabilitated tanks again declined and needed another round of rehabilitation, planners found something amiss in their earlier approach. Therefore, in new tank rehabilitation programmes—such as the new World Bank project in Karnataka—an institutional component is added to the engineering component. But the institutional component invariably consists of registering a WUA of command area farmers. Except where such WUAs have been constantly animated and propped up by support NGOs—as in the case of the Dhan Foundation in Madurai, Tamil Nadu—it is difficult to find evidence of productivity improvements in tanks because of WUAs on any significant scale. Besides the problem of high transaction costs of coordinating, negotiating, rule making and, above all, of rule enforcement, improving the management of tanks—more in North India than in South India—face some special problems. One of them is of aligning conflicting interests of multiple-stakeholders. Command area farmers have a direct conflict of interest with tank-bed farmers; and well owners in the neighbourhood of tanks are a potential threat to all other users because they can virtually steal tank water by pumping their wells. Then, there are fishing contractors whose interests also clash with those of irrigators, especially during the dry season (Shah and Raju 2001). Registering a WUA of command area farmers and hoping that this ‘institutional intervention’ would increase productivity of tanks is naïve to the extreme. Improved management of public irrigation systems, tanks, fishery—all represent opportunities for high pay off but have failed to be realised because the institutional models promoted have high transaction costs.

L OW ( OR R EDUCED ) T RANSACTION C OSTS , H IGH P AY - OFFS The core of the New Institutional Economics or NIE paradigm is the notion that productivity of resources in an economy is determined by technology employed and institutions. And if institutions affect economic performance by determining transaction and transformation (production) costs, then the Indian water sector is brimming with institutional changes occurring on the margins. This is happening all the time and yet is either glossed over or frowned down upon by the powers that are in the institutional environment. Most such institutions that I explore in this section are invariably swayambhoo (self-creating); they have come up on a significant-enough scale to permit generic lessons; these invariably involve entrepreneurial efforts to reduce transaction costs; they serve an important economic purpose, improve welfare and have raised productivity; and are commonly faced with adverse or unhelpful institutional environment. Crucially, these are the instrumentality of the players of the game and sustain as long as they serve their purpose. The emergence of tube well technology has been the biggest contributor of growth in irrigation in post-Independent India and the spontaneous rise of groundwater (or, more appropriately, pump irrigation service) markets has done much to multiply the productivity and welfare impact of tube well irrigation. The Indian irrigation establishment is probably

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out of touch with the changing face of its playing field. It still believes that only 38 per cent of the gross cropped area is irrigated, 55 per cent of it by groundwater wells. But the reality of Indian irrigation at the dawn of the millennium is that its tail has begun wagging the dog.12 Institutional environment in the Indian water sector has little or no interface with 75 per cent of Indian irrigation occurring through tube wells and the institution of water markets. The working of groundwater markets is now extensively studied (see Shah 1993; Saleth 2004; Janakarajan 2004; Singh and Singh 2003; Mukherji 2004 for a good survey of literature). These find and analyse myriad ways in which their working differs across space and time. But common elements of groundwater markets everywhere in the Indian subcontinent are the features I listed at the start of this section: they are swayambhoo, they operate on so large a scale as to account for over a quarter of Indian irrigated areas; water sellers everywhere constantly innovate to reduce transaction costs and create value; finally, they are the instrumentality of buyers and sellers of pump irrigation service and not of society at large or the institutional environment; as a result, water markets are unrepentant when their operation produces externalities such as groundwater depletion or drying up of wetlands. Finally, despite their scale and significance, the institutional environment has been blind towards the potential of water markets to achieve policy ends. When they take notice of their existence and role—which is infrequent—water policy makers are often unable to decide whether they are good or bad. Much the same is the case with many water institutions. In the previous section, I mentioned tens of thousands of fishermen’s co-operatives which are lying defunct; however, fishery entrepreneurs have sprung up everywhere which use paper cooperatives as a front for operating profitable culture fisheries. Why don’t fisher cooperatives exploit the opportunities that these contractors are able to? The most important reason is the transaction costs of protecting the crop. Culture fishery is capital intensive but affords a high yield. In common property villages or irrigation tanks, with multiple stakeholders, in order to remain viable, fishermen should be able to effectively defend their rights against poachers, irrigators who may want to pump tank water below the sill level during dry periods to irrigate crops, or tank-bed cultivators who want to empty the tank so they can begin sowing. Fisher communities are commonly from the lowest rung of the village society; they would not only have difficulty in mobilising capital to buy seedling and manure but also in protecting the crop from poaching from outsiders as well as from their own members. Reserving fishing contracts for fisher cooperatives is therefore the best formula for sustained low productivity of in-land fishery economy. Just how high is the transaction cost of protecting a fish crop was evident when my colleagues and I studied who precisely the fishing contractors were in two separate studies in central Gujarat and in Bundelkhand. We found that in both the regions, the key characteristics of people who emerged as successful fishing contractors was a painstakingly cultivated image of a toughie, or a ruffian capable of enforcing his rights even if by using violence. In Bundelkhand, ‘Everywhere the fishing contractors involved stopped farmers from lifting water from the tank once the last five feet of water was left. They had invested in fish production and now were making sure they get their money’s worth’ (Shah 2002: 3). In central Gujarat, a fishing contractor had to kill a poacher and complete a jail term to establish that he meant business when it came to defending his property right.13 Despite this unsavory aspect, I would not be much off the mark

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in suggesting that the explosive increase in inland fishery in India during the past 40 years is the result of two factors: the introduction of new technologies of culture fishery along with its paraphernalia and gradual emasculation by the fishing contractor of the idealised fisher cooperatives as monopoly lease holders on water bodies. Had the cooperative ideal been enforced vigorously, India’s inland fishery would not have emerged as the growth industry it has today. How does a changing policy-institutional environment unleash productive forces in an economy is best illustrated by the evolution of Gujarat’s inland fishery policy over the past 30 years (Pandya 2004). Following early attempts to intensify inland fisheries during the 1940s, Gujarat Government’s Fisheries Department began supporting village panchayats to undertake intensive culture fishery in village tanks during early 1960. However, the programme failed to make headway partly because of popular resistance to fish culture in this traditionally vegetarian state, and partly because of rampant poaching from local fisher-folk that village panchayats as managers could not control. In a modified programme, the department took over the management of tanks from the panchayats to raise fishery on a produce-sharing basis; but the department was worse than the panchayats in checking poaching. In 1973, a special notification of the Government of Gujarat (GOG) transferred in-land fishing rights on all water bodies, including village tanks, to the Fisheries Department, which has now set about forming fishermen’s co-operatives in a campaign mode. In the Kheda district of Gujarat, for example, 27 such co-ops were formed to undertake intensive culture fishing. However, the co-ops were none the better when it came to controlling poaching even by their own members; and the gross revenues could not even meet the bank loans. The members lost heart and the co-ops became defunct; a story that has been endlessly repeated in various fields in India’s history of co-operative movement. While all manner of government subsidies were on offer, what made culture fishery unviable were three factors: (i) a lease offered for only three years, a period considered too short to recoup the investment made; (ii) only registered co-ops could be given lease and the process of registration was transaction-costly; and (iii) rampant poaching. All this while, culture fishery productivity was steadily rising; although the co-ops were not doing well, culture fishery was, as entrepreneurs began using co-ops as fronts to win leases. This entailed significant transaction costs; they had to pay off the office bearers of co-ops; they had to keep the panchayat leaders in good humour so that their lease would be renewed. Even then, whenever a panchayat’s leadership changed, the new order would terminate the contract to favour a new contractor. This dampened the contractors’ interest in investing in high productivity. In 1976, the government began setting up Fish Farmers’ Development Agencies in each district to implement a new Intensive Fish Culture Programme. They began making changes in terms of lease: private entrepreneurs were, in principle, considered for giving away leases but there was a pecking order of priority. The first priority was for a Below Poverty Line (BPL) family, then for a local poor fisherman, then for a local co-operative, and if none of these were available, then for any entrepreneur who bid in an open auction. Earlier, the government paid a puny rental to the gram panchayats for using them for fish culture; now that entrepreneurs

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were allowed, gram panchayats began setting an off-set price derived as an estimate of the ‘fishing value’ of the tank, which was 20–30 times the rental panchayats received earlier from the department. Even so, as soon as leases were open to entrepreneurs, many came forward. A later change in policy gave cooperatives some discount in the ‘upset price’ and other benefits. In 2003, a series of new changes in the policy framework gave further fillip to productivity growth: the lease period was extended from three to 10 years, which reduced the contractors’ gullibility to changes in panchayat leadership and also made investment in productivity enhancement attractive. The new policy also removed the last vestiges of special treatment to co-ops, and provided for a public auction of the lease after open advertisement. During 1971–98, inland fishery output of Gujarat increased six-fold from 14,000 mt in 1971 to over 80,000 in 1998–99 (Government of Gujarat 2004). Considering that Gujarat hardly had any culture fishery before 1950, it must be said that the credit for this growth rightly belongs to the government’s efforts. The government invested in subsidies, organising inputs, bringing in new technology, extension and training and much else. All these played a role in expanding the fisheries economy. However, perhaps, the most important impact has been produced by two factors: (i) the changes made at the margins in the leasing policies of water bodies that have shaped the transaction costs of setting up and operating a profitable culture fishery business; and (ii) the high costs of controlling poaching, which has ensured that besides several entrepreneurial qualities, successful fishing contractors also have to acquire and deploy muscle power. Several less sensational examples can be offered of spontaneous institutions that operate on a large scale to serve purposes for which water establishments often promote copybook institutions such as WUAs. I briefly mentioned earlier how hundreds of defunct community RO or defluoridation plants set up by governments to supply fluoride-free drinking water to village communities have failed under community management. However, in North Gujarat, as a demand curve has emerged for fluoride-free drinking water, some 300 plants selling packed water have mushroomed in the cottage sector; over half of these were set up after 2001, mostly in mofussil towns to serve permanent customers as well as retail water in polythene pouches.14 The RO cottage industry of Gujarat was quietly serving a growing demand when the ‘institutional environment’ caught up with it. In 2001, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) made it compulsory for cottage RO plants to get an ISI mark. This entailed that each plant had to invest Rs 0.3–0.4 million in an in-house laboratory and pay an annual certification fee of Rs 84,000. This single move put paid to the emerging RO water cottage industry; 200 operators had to close their businesses because the new announcement doubled their cost of production. Yet, setting up an in-house laboratory and paying annual certification fee implied no guarantee of quality assurance because BIS inspectors hardly visit plants, if ever. Many customers Indu (2001) interviewed wondered if an ISI mark—like AGMARK ghee and honey—can by itself guarantee quality unless BIS itself puts its act together in the first place. Likewise, many state governments are struggling, in vain, to cut their losses from operating mostly World Bank funded public tube well programmes by trying to transfer these to idealised co-operatives. If the purpose of a co-operative tube well is to enable a group of farmers to mobilise capital and to install and operate a tube well for mutual benefit of members, such

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tube well groups have existed for decades in North Gujarat. The difference is that, having been created to serve the purpose of their members, their ownership structure and operating rules are designed to minimise the transaction costs of co-operating on a sustained basis (Shah and Bhattacharya 1993). The Government of Gujarat tried hard to transfer its public tube wells to idealised cooperatives, but thanks to the very high transaction costs relative to the pay-off facing potential entrepreneurs, the programme made no headway until 1998 when the terms of the turn over were rewritten.15 Basically, the requirement that a co-operative be registered under the Co-operative Act was dropped; the lease period was extended from one to five years; and changes were introduced, which made it possible for one or a few major stake holders to assume the role of tube well manager and residual claimant. These minor changes suddenly gave a fillip to the programme and over a three-year period over half of Gujarat’s public tube wells, some 3,500 in all, were transferred to farmer groups. An IWMI-Tata study of turned over public tube wells (Mukherji and Kishore 2003) showed that within a year after the turn over, the performance of tube wells, in terms of area irrigated, hours of operation, quality of service, O&M and financial results improved; two years after turn over, it improved dramatically. In the beginning of this section, I talked about the significance of groundwater markets in India’s irrigation. However, private provision of water services is also an important part of India’s urban reality. In an IWMI-Tata study of six cities—Indore, Jaipur, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Chennai—Londhe et al. (2004) found that municipal agencies supplied only 51 per cent of the demand calculated at 80 litres per capita per day (lpcd). In Chennai and Ahmedabad, formal organisations served only 10 per cent and 26 per cent, respectively, of the ‘normative’ demand, the balance being either self-supplied or served by informal sector players. The ‘tanker markets’ supply 21, 12 and 10 per cent of the demand in Chennai, Indore and Jaipur respectively. In Chennai, they have year-round operations and have an association. In other cities, tanker markets emerge during the summer and quietly disappear as monsoon arrives. Londhe et al. (2004) have estimated that some 3,000 tankers in the six cities operate a water trade worth Rs 203 crore per year. Despite being key players in urban water sectors, ‘there is no record with any government department about its size, scale and modus operandi. There is absence of any government regulation on groundwater withdrawals (except in Chennai) in other cities. Authorities do not even acknowledge the existence of such markets’ (ibid). Tanker markets operate much like any market and serve those who can pay for their services. The IWMI-Tata study estimated that 51 per cent of consumers in these six cities are from high income groups, 43 per cent from middle income groups and only 6 per cent from low income groups. Contrary to widely held belief that the poorest pay the highest for water, the IWMITata study showed the poorest pay the lowest even when transaction costs and imputed cost of labour and time in fetching water are factored in (ibid.). One more case of institutions that ‘planners propose and people dispose’ that I want to briefly discuss is is the world famous Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) on the Narmada River. SSP must be one of the world’s most-planned projects. One of SSP’s key planning premises was that the project would construct lined canals with gated structures going right up to the village service area (VSA) comprising some 400 ha of command. A WUA would be organised in each VSA, which pari pasu would construct the sub-minor and field channels to convey water from

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the pucca minor to the fields. SSP water was released for the first time in some 80,000 ha of the command just below the dam in 2001. SSP had registered WUAs as co-operatives in some 1,100 VSAs on a war footing. When the water was finally released, however, the village level distribution structure was not ready in a single village; and it will never be, as we learnt in course of a quick assessment of farmer preparedness to receive Narmada irrigation (Talati and Shah 2004). The perceived sum of the transaction and transformation cost16 of constructing village distribution systems seemed to far outweigh the benefits people expected out of SSP. There was, however, a flurry of activity as SSP water began flowing into minors. According to our quick estimates, several thousand diesel pumps and several million meters of rubber pipes were purchased by water entrepreneurs to take water to their own fields and to provide irrigation services to others. The trend for new investments in diesel pumps and rubber pipes gathered further momentum in 2002 and 2003; and we found that village communities were none the worse for having violated the SSP planning assumption. The Government of Gujarat is, however, bent on constructing ‘proper’ village distribution systems in the SSP command, never mind if it will take 50 years to complete the canal network. The swayambhoo institutions I have discussed in this section are all driven by opportunism. However, large-scale swayambhoo institutions are often driven by more complex motives including long term, collective self-interest. The decentralised mass movement for rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge that the Saurashtra region of Gujarat saw from 1987–98 when it got co-opted by the state government is a good example of such an institutional development (Shah 2000). Catalysed first by stray experiments of ‘barefoot hydrologists’ to modify open wells to collect monsoon flood waters, it fired the imagination of a people disillusioned with government programmes. Soon, well-recharge was joined by check dams and percolation tanks. With all manner of experimentation going on, a kind of subaltern hydrology of groundwater recharge developed and got energetically disseminated. Religious leaders of sects like Swadhyaya Pariwar and Swaminarayana Sampradaya helped to ennoble this work by imbuing it with a larger social purpose. The gathering movement generated enormous local goodwill and released philanthropic energies on an unprecedented scale, with diamond merchants—originally from Saurashtra but now settled in Surat and Belgium—offering cash, cement companies offering cement at discounted prices, and communities offering millions of days of voluntary labour. In neighbouring Rajasthan, Alwar was also undergoing similar mass action, but it was far more limited in scale and was orchestrated by Rajendra Singh’s Tarun Bharat Sangh. Saurashtra’s recharge movement was truly multi-centric, unruly, spontaneous and wholly internally funded with no support from government, international donors and the scientific community until 1998, when the government of Gujarat piled on and proceeded to rid the movement of its quintessentially swayambhoo and voluntary character by announcing a subsidy programme (Shah 2001; Shah and Desai 2002). It is difficult to assess the social value of this movement partly because ‘formal hydrology’ and ‘popular hydrology’ have failed to find a meeting ground. Scientists want check dams sited near recharge zones; villagers want them close to their wells. Scientists recommend recharge tube wells to counter the silt layer impeding recharge; farmers just direct floodwaters into their wells after filtering. Scientists worry about upstream-downstream externalities; farmers

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say everyone lives downstream. Scientists say the hard-rock aquifers have too little storage to justify the prolific growth in recharge structures; people say a check dam is worthwhile if their wells provide even 1000 m3 of life-saving irrigation per ha in times of delayed rain. Hydrologists keep writing the obituary of recharge movement; but the movement has spread from eastern Rajasthan to Gujarat, thence to Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Protagonists think that with better planning and larger coverage, decentralised recharge movement can be a major response to India’s groundwater depletion because it can ensure that water tables in pockets of intensive use rebound to pre-development levels at the end of the monsoon season every year they have a good monsoon. Table 16.1 offers a comparative view of six high-payoff-low-transaction cost institutions that have emerged in India’s water sector in recent years. If one judges institutions by their contribution to increasing productivity and welfare, all six can be considered successful. Each can be found to operate on a significant scale, thus permitting generic lessons. A notable aspect is that each institution has come up spontaneously and flourished as an instrumentality of its players, serving a purpose important to them. Each has devised its own methods to reduce transaction costs and manage incentive structure. Finally, each is widely viewed in the institutional environment—by government officials, NGOs, researchers, international experts and even local opinion leaders—as a subaltern alternative to a mainstream notion of an institution which is considered ideal but has not worked on a desired scale. As a result, far from recognising the potential of these subaltern institutions to further larger social goals, the outlook has been to ignore their existence and social value, or even emasculate them.

A NALYSIS

AND

D ISCUSSION

Ideas about what kind of institutional change should occur and can sustain come to the institutional environment from four sources. The first of these are theories and hypotheses about how things work. For example, implicit in the thinking of donors such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), about metering of farm power, is the neo-classical economic theory of marginal cost pricing and a slew of hypotheses and notions about the impact subsidies have on the economy. The second source of ideas is what has worked elsewhere in a similar situation. If groundwater districts in Texas have been able to rein in groundwater overdraft there, why can similar institutions not serve the same purpose here? If IMT has met with some success in Mexico, Colombia, and Turkey, why not in India? The third, and very important source, is what has worked here. The repertoire here includes numerous ‘successes’ of varied types and scales produced by exceptional leaders and industrious NGOs. By virtue of exceptional and highly scarce resources at their command—such as reputation, social status, allegiance of people, funds, goodwill, influence in the institutional environment, manpower—local leaders and NGOs are often able to drastically reduce transaction

Contributed to achieving 7–10 fold increase in inland fishery productivity during 1960–2000

Can protect fish better and therefore can invest in intensive culture fishery which co-ops cannot

Raison de etre To profit from serving emerging demand for fluoride-free water by investing in and maintaining RO plant

Add and operate water treatment capacity to serve demand for clean water

Tens of thousands Around 300 of small and large plants in Gujarat tank fishery in India

Scale of the institution

Economic contribution

Fishing contractors Reverse Osmosis using co-operatives plants in North as fronts Gujarat’s cottage industry

Institutions/ Particulars

To pool capital and share risks of tube well failure in creating and operating an irrigation source in an overexploited aquifer

Create irrigation potential where individual farmers would be unable to do.

Some 8–10 thousand companies in North Gujarat

Tube well companies of North Gujarat and Gujarat’s Public Tube well transfer programme

To profit from supply of water in cities where public institutions cannot cope with the economic demand

Fill the gap between demand and supply

Most Indian cities

Urban tanker water markets

To profit by distributing Narmada water by lifting water from canals and transporting it by rubber pipe to user fields

Private investment in water distribution infrastructure; expansion of Narmada irrigation

Several thousand new pumps installed/year

Irrigation institutions unfolding in the Narmada command

Table 16.1 Characteristics of Swayambhoo Water Institutions

(Table 16.1 continued)

Improve water availability in wells for lifesaving irrigation when monsoon makes early withdrawal

Improved greatly security of kharif crops, and chance of a rabi crop

300,000 wells modified for recharge; 50,000 check dams

Decentralised groundwater recharge movement of Saurashtra

Swayambhoo

Community RO plants

Preferred alternative in institutional environment

Registered Fishermen’s co-operatives

Negative

Outlook of the Negative; but ‘establishment’ changing in states like Gujarat

Pay-off concentration

Idealised Water User Associations

Negative

Pay-off concentration

Municipal water supply improved

Neutral/negative

Pay-off concentration

Pay-off concentration

Swayambhoo

Incentive structure

Swayambhoo

Cultivating Vesting Meet the demand annual customers management roles as it occurs in into members flexible manner with largest share in command area

Swayambhoo

Strategy of Instilling fear reducing amongst poachers transaction and transformation cost

Mode of emergence

(Table 16.1 continued)

Idealised Water User Associations

Negative/neutral

Pay-off concentration

Avoid making of sub-minors and field channels, reduce seepage, overcome topography

Swayambhoo

Narmada project; scientific recharge works

Initially skeptical; but then, it piggybacked and lessened its swayambhoo character

Self-interest was skillfully blended with missionary zeal

Swadhyaya Parivar and Swaminarayan Sampradaya reduced transaction costs of co-operative action

Swayambhoo; catalysed by religious organisations.

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costs of institutional change of a certain kind in a limited setting for a limited period. Out of hundreds of thousands of irrigation tanks in India that can produce large pay-offs from improved management, there are but a few hundred in which exceptional local leaders have established and sustained novel institutions for upkeep, maintenance, management and use of tanks to improve the welfare of the community. The IWMI-Tata Programme studied some 50 of these during 2002–03 (Sakthivadivel et al. 2004) and found that while the architecture of institutions (as rules-in-use) varied from case to case, the common aspect of all successful tank institutions was a leader or a leadership compact, which by virtue of the sway he/it has over the community is able to drastically reduce the transaction costs of enforcing an institutional arrangement that would neither work in their absence nor survive them. Successful NGOs similarly create islands of excellence by reducing transaction costs artificially and temporarily. The Sukhomajari experiment with watershed institutions in Haryana in the mid-1980s; Vilas Rao Salunke’s Pani Panchayats in Maharashtra; Aga Khan Rural Support Programme’s irrigators’ association in Raj Samadhiala; Dhan Foundation’s Tank User Federations; Development Support Centre’s WUAs in Dharoi command in North Gujarat; community-managed tube wells that came up in Vaishali and Deoria in Eastern Uttar Pradesh; Anna Hazare’s Ralegaon Siddhi; Rajendra Singh’s profusion of johads in Thanagazi, Alwar district, Rajasthan; Chaitanya’s conversion of irrigation tanks into percolation tanks in Rayalaseema (Andhra Pradesh)—all of these are examples. That the transaction cost reduction in all these was artificial is indicated by the absence of spontaneous lateral expansion/replication of these experiments despite the high pay-offs they are seen to have produced. That it was temporary is evident in that many of these institutions disappeared/stagnated/declined once the ‘transaction cost reducer’ was removed from the scene as in Sukhomajri, Salunke’s Pani Panchayats, and others. The fourth, and the most important source of ideas about what institutional change should occur and can sustain are the swayambhoo institutions that have already emerged and are thriving, as explored earlier. These have found ways of reducing transactions costs in ways that are more natural and lasting. This is evident in that these institutions multiply on their own and are able to sustain and grow as long as they serve purposes of the participants in the transactions. In my understanding, these offer six useful lessons about how to make institutional change work in the Indian water sector. • Instrumentality. The first, and the obvious, is that institutional change that multiplies and sustains is invariably an instrumentality of the exchange participants and not of the players in the institutional environment. ‘Opportunism with guile’ is the driving force even when high ideals and social goals are laboriously espoused as raison de etre. Trite as it may sound, design of incentive structures is amongst the most commonly ignored aspect in most institutional development programmes. Ideas like communitybased groundwater demand management propose organising co-operatives whose sole task would be to persuade their members to reduce their farming and incomes. Similarly, programmes to revive traditional community management of tanks commonly overlook the performance-based rewards offered to nilakatti and focus primarily on generating

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voluntary contributions of time and effort for the greater good of the community. For institutional change to work, it must serve a private purpose important to agents involved; else, they will withhold participation or even work to defeat it. • Incentive diffusion or perversion. Institutions fail to emerge to take advantage of high-payoff situations often because incentives are diffuse or even perverse, but the transaction costs of implementing change are concentrated in one or a few persons. In the fishermen co-ops I discussed earlier, members faced perverse incentives; the co-op stocked the pond but members stole the catch; the secretary had no incentive to make enemies by stopping poachers. When incentives got concentrated in the contractor as the residual claimant, he was willing to control poaching and invest in higher productivity. Gujarat’s public tube wells had no takers until the opportunity arose for incentive concentration. That only a fraction of the surplus created by management improvement needs to be concentrated in the manager was shown 40 years ago by Amartya Sen (1966). In traditional tank institutions in South India, only a portion of the surplus output was offered to the nirakatti, who absorbed the bulk of the transaction cost of orderly distribution of tank water. This principle is at the heart of irrigation reforms in China. Except where traditional PIM/IMT is supported by a donor loan, China’s strategy of making canal irrigation productive and viable consists of changing the incentive structure facing the ‘ditch manager’ (Shah et al. 2004). A pre-specified volume of water is released into a reservoir and is charged for at a certain volumetric rate. The reservoir manager’s remuneration includes a fixed component and a variable component which increases with the area irrigated from the same total volume of water. Like the Chinese village electrician who is able to perform a high transaction-cost role for a fairly modest reward, the ditch manager too is able to improve water productivity for a modest bonus, if recent studies are any guide (ibid.). • High costs of self-enforcement. Experimenting with the Indian equivalents of Chinese village electricians and ditch managers would be an interesting study. From the transaction cost viewpoint, however, there are two key differences between the Chinese and South Asian villages: first, the Chinese in general, thanks to Confucian ethic, are much more law-abiding and respectful to state authority compared to South Asians.17 Second, and more importantly, the Village Committees and the Village Party Leader in a Chinese village enjoy far greater power and authority in the village society compared to India’s gram panchayats and Sarpanch. This has great implications for transaction costs. North (1990) suggests that, ‘...institutional setting depends on the effectiveness of enforcement. Enforcement is carried out by first party (self-imposed codes of conduct), by second party (retaliation), and/or by a third party (societal sanctions or coercive enforcement by state).’ The transaction costs facing an institutional change are determined by ease of enforcement. A Chinese village electrician or ditch manager backed by the Village Committee and Party leader can enforce the new rules by retaliation as well as by recourse to coercion through the Party Leader. In India, in contrast, a fishing contractor has recourse only to retaliation to enforce his property right against a poacher. The high transaction cost of

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second party enforcement of rules is perhaps the prime reason why entrepreneurs fail to come forward to make a business out of operating a canal or tank irrigation system. • Structures of incentives and authority. Catalysing effective local institutional arrangements, management is then a matter of not only designing appropriate incentive structures that entice an entrepreneur to undertake activities with high pay-off but also of putting into place authority structures that enforce his right to do so. Here is where a community organisation has a role in establishing the legitimacy of a service provider, and thereby reducing his transaction cost of self-enforcement of rules. A self-appointed neerakatti (water manager) would face greater difficulty in enforcing rules of water distribution than one that enjoys the legitimacy in the community. • Institutional environment. The institutional environment has a profound impact on what kind of institutional arrangements are promoted or discouraged and what welfare and productivity impacts these produce. Informal pump irrigation markets, the fishing contractor and decentralised groundwater recharge movement are spontaneous and seemingly autonomous; but each of these is amenable to strong positive or negative influence from the institutional environment. Gujarat’s cottage RO industry fell to a single swoop by the Bureau of Indian Standards and the working of pump irrigation markets can change overnight if policies related to electricity pricing and supply to the farm sector were to change. Gujarat’s Public Tube well Transfer programme ploughed along without success for a decade and then suddenly took off because an actor in the institutional environment changed some key rules of the game; and the culture fishery contractor faced drastic reduction in his transaction costs of doing business when the leasing policy for water bodies was changed at the instance of some actor in the institutional environment. How well do actors in the institutional environment understand extant and potential institutions, their net welfare and productivity impacts and their backward and forward linkages determines how much they can influence or manage them. • Path-dependence. According to North (1990), institutional change is inherently incremental and path-dependent. It invariably grows out of its context; transposing institutional models that have worked in other, different contexts and therefore seldom works in catalysing institutional change. This has particular relevance to popular institutional notions such as Integrated River Basin Management, which have worked in highly formalised water economies in recent years. It is doubtful if such models would work in the same way in the Indian situation simply because by far the bulk of the Indian water economy is informal and outside the direct ambit of the institutional environment.

C ONCLUSION In conclusion, 1.

Institutional analysis of water sector normally focuses on law, policy and administration, the three pillars of water institutions; however, these constitute the Institutional

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

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Tushaar Shah environment and the analysis cannot be complete without understanding the institutional arrangements, which represent the ‘rules in use’. Institutional alternatives available to improve the functioning of a water economy depend critically on the degree of its formalisation; in informal water economies, the institutional environment has limited sweep over water transactions which are dominated by institutional arrangements; as water economies formalise, the sweep of the institutional environment expands to encompass most or all of water transactions. India’s water economy today is at the level of informality that has characterised many European water economies in the 18th century; as a result, strategies of institutional reform that would be appropriate for India cannot be what works in highly formalised water economies such as Europe today. Players in India’s institutional environment must seek opportunities for improved performance of the water economy by catalysing productivity-enhancing reform in institutional arrangements. India’s experience in doing this has been indifferent because reforms pursued have either low pay-offs or high transaction costs or both. On the other hand, we have overlooked and failed to learn from large-scale spontaneous institutional changes, which have enhanced welfare and productivity and reduced transaction costs. Analysing these suggests that induced institutional reform can succeed provided: (a) it is instrumental to its participants rather than to the actors in the institutional environment; (b) it concentrates incentives in the bearer of the transaction costs; (c) it provides effective third-party enforcement of rules; (d) failing which, it uses community consensus to create legitimacy and authority structure and designs incentive structure to entice entrepreneurs who will undertake activities with high pay-offs; (e ) institutional environment has power to stimulate or impede institutional change; and (f ) institutional change is inherently incremental and context-dependent; transposing models of institutional change that have worked in other, markedly different contexts, seldom work.

Notes 1. Formal and informal economies are a matter of elaborate study in institutional economics. Fiege (1990) summarises a variety of notions of informality deployed by different researchers. According to Weeks (1975) cited in Fiege (1990: footnote 6), ‘The distinction between a formal and informal sector is based on the organisactional characteristics of exchange relationships and the position of economic acivity vis-à-vis the state. Basically, the formal sector includes government activity itself and those enterprises in the private sector which are officially recognized, fostered, nurtured and regulated by the state.

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3.

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5. 6.

7. 8.

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Operations in the informal sector are characterized by the absence of such benefits.’ According to Portes, Blitzer and Curtis (1987 cited in Fiege 1990: foot note 6), ‘the informal sector can be defined as the sum total of income generating activities outside the modern contractual relationships of production’. According to Portes and Saassen-Koo (1987 cited in Fiege 1990: footnote 6) informal sector activities are ‘not intrinsically illegal but in which production and exchange escape legal regulation’. To most researchers, an informal economy is marked by the ‘absence of official regulation’ or ‘official status’. North (1990) defines the transaction sector as ‘that part of transactions that goes through the market and therefore can be measured’; and according to North, rapid growth in the transaction sector is at the heart of the transformation of a traditional economy into a modern one. The survey estimated that approximately 36 per cent of all rural households (which include farmers, farm labourers and households dependent on off-farm livelihoods) used some means of irrigation. Of these, 13.3 per cent (that is, 37 per cent of irrigators) use their own source (well/tube well), 15.3 per cent (that is, 42.5 per cent of irrigators) used shared tube wells or purchased water and 12.1 per cent (36 per cent of irrigators) used government owned tube well, canal or river. Less than 2 per cent used locally managed irrigation source and 6.6 per cent used more than one source, which is why the percentages fail to add up to 100. The survey also found that of 78,990 households interviewed, 48 per cent reported no ‘availability of community and government water resources in villages of their residence’; another 42 per cent reported the presence of community or government source but ‘without local management’. Only 10 per cent of households reported living in villages with access to community or government water sources ‘with local management’ by community or government or both (p. 44). Only 23 per cent of all households interviewed reported depending for irrigation on a source ‘other than self-owned’; 30 per cent using water for livestock rearing reported dependence on a source ‘other than self-owned’. If recent accounts of the travails facing global water companies like Vivendi and Thames Water who are forced to wind up even in these increasingly affluent East-Asian cities is any guide, one must conclude that South Asian cities have a long way to go before they can afford water supply systems of European or North American quality (see The Economist, 15–21 August 2004). A good example is David Corten’s work during the 1980s on reorienting the irrigation bureaucracy. A charismatic and energetic political or bureaucratic leader does often produce significant attitude and behaviour change; however, these generally fail to last for long after the leader is removed from the scene. In this sense, such change is not enduring. The 1987 Water Policy to Saleth (2004: 29) is ‘such a simple non-binding policy statement’. Saleth (2004: 30) asserts, ‘...most of the organizational reforms, including the promotion of basinbased organizations observed in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, and Uttar Pradesh were introduced under different World Bank-funded projects’. It is equally clear that Andhra Pradesh’s irrigation reforms proceeded at a hectic pace because a World Bank loan was able to kindle interest at all levels in new resources available for maintenance work. And that too only when a mid-sized NGO invests years of effort and resources in organising WUAs and using means to reduce transaction costs that farmers on their own would normally not possess. Some of the best known examples of successful PIM/IMT are Ozar on Waghad project in Nashik, Maharashtra, Dharoi in north Gujarat, Pingot and a few more medium schemes in Bharuch district. The success of farmer management in all these—and its beneficial impact—is undisputed. In each of these, however, there was a level of investment of motivation, skill, time, effort and money which is unlikely to be replicated on a large scale. In catalysing Ozar co-operatives, Bapu Upadhye and Bharat Kawale and their Samaj Pragati Kendra, and senior researchers of SOPPECOM invested years of

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Tushaar Shah effort to make PIM work (Paranjapye and Joy 2003). In Gujarat, between the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme and Development Support Centre, Anil Shah and Apoorva Oza have invested at least 30 professional staff time to organise say 20–30 thousand flow irrigators into functional WUAs. My intent is not to undermine this exceptional work but to suggest that no government agency had the quality and scale of resources needed to implement an institutional intervention that can sustainably raise the productivity of the 28–30 million ha of flow irrigated area in India over say 15 years. Some random excerpts from Joseph (2001) based on his study of Malampuzha Project: ‘It is the CADA officials who took the initiative in their formation and not the farmer groups. In most cases, membership fee of Rs 5 was not paid by the farmers concerned; payment was made on their behalf by prospective office bearers, or the potential contractors of field channel lining or the large farmers in the ayacut...86 percent (of the BFAs) were formed in these two years (1986 and 1987)... for making possible the utilization of funds...Only 57 CC meetings were held by the 8 Canal Committees during a span of 10 years...43 of them were held without quorum and 35 with zero attendance of non-official members… The level of knowledge... about CCs…and there structure and functions is very low…’ Even in middle-income countries, huge inequalities in land holdings seem to have helped IMT. In the Andean region of Colombia where IMT has succeeded, according to Ramirez and Vargas (1999), farmers ‘mostly grow crops oriented to the external markets, mainly banana and oil palm’; and while 66 per cent of the farms have 5 ha or less, 40.3 per cent of the land is owned by 2.8 per cent of large farmers owning 50 ha or more. In South Africa, numerous Irrigation Boards–Water Users Associations par excellence—have managed irrigation systems successfully for long; but their members are all large white commercial farmers operating highly successful citrus and wine orchards. In Turkey, 40 per cent of the irrigated area was in 5–20 ha holdings with a strong focus on high value commercial crops for export to Europe. Here in Turkey, it can be argued, IMT succeeded because, as with South African Irrigation Boards, in many respects, there already was a 40-year old tradition of farmer participation in the maintenance of the canal system through informal village level organisation. Equally, irrigation fees under self-management in Turkey was 2 per cent or less of the value of production per ha, 3.5 per cent or less of total variable cost of cultivation and less than 6 per cent of gross margin (Svendsen and Nott 1997). A large survey, which covered over 48,000 farming households throughout India during January–June 1998, suggested that over 66 per cent of India’s Gross Cropped Area under five most important field crops (which accounts for over 90 per cent of the Gross Cropped Area) is irrigated; only a quarter of irrigated area is served by government canals. Amongst other interesting things it suggests is that every fourth Indian farming household most likely owns a diesel or electric pump and that area irrigated through groundwater markets is as large as the area irrigated by all government canals (NSSO 1999). As North (1990: 2) aptly notes, ‘If the highest rates of return in a society are to piracy, the organizations will invest in knowledge and skills that will make them better pirates; if the pay offs are...to increase productivity, they will invest in skills and knowledge to achieve that objective.’ An IWMI-Tata study (Indu 2001) surveyed a sample of 14 such plants, which served 4,890 households. RO water in 10 and 20 litre cans is delivered daily at the customer’s door step; charges are levied on an annual basis (Rs 1,500 for a 10 litre can daily; Rs 2,500 for a 20 litre can). Plant capacities vary from 500–2000 litres/hour. In addition, most plants also retail RO water in pouches at bus-stands, railway stations and crossings and market places. Consumers of pouches are typically low income buyers; retailers are also poor youth working on commission. In sum, this institution serves a demand by transforming 800–2000 ppm [parts per million] TDS water to 150–300 ppm TDS water and fluoride

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levels reduced to 0.25–0.5 mg/litre. People had no way to ascertain the quality; but 60 customers surveyed by Indu (2004) asserted that RO water taste was distinct. Many also claimed relief in pain from skeletal fluorosis after taking to RO water. 15. Registering a cooperative itself meant great hassle and cost in time and money. The policy also required that 2/3 of the command area farmers submit a written no-objection declaration for the transfer; past defaulters on water fees must first pay up their dues. In addition, several conditions were specified the violation of any of which would qualify the government to take back the tube well. 16. Transformation cost would include the cost of labour and material in making a lined sub-minor and field channels plus the cost of acquiring land. Transaction cost would basically involve persuading farmers to give up their land for making channels and to give right of way to carry water to downstream farmers. 17. See Chapter 13 for details of the historical differences between India and China.

References Agarwal, R. (2000). ‘Possibilities and Limitations to Co-operation in Small Groups: The Case of GroupOwned Wells in Southern India’, World Development, 28(8): 1481–97. Bandaragoda, D.J. and G.R. Firdousi (1992). ‘Institutional Factors Affecting Irrigation Performance in Pakistan: Research and Policy Priorities’, country paper, Pakistan, No. 4, Colombo: International Irrigation Management Institute. Fiege, E.L. (1990). ‘Defining and Estimating Underground and Informal Economies: The New Institutional Economics Approach’, World Development, 18(7): 989–1002. Frederickson, H.D. and R.J. Vissia (1998). Considerations in Formulating the Transfer of Services in the Water Sector. Colombo, Sri Lanka: IWMI. Government of Gujarat (2004). Gujarat Fisheries Statistics 2002–03. Gandhinagar: Government of Gujarat, Commissioner of Fisheries. Holmes, P.R. (2000). ‘Effective Organizations for Water Management’, Water Resources Development, 16(1): 57–71. Indu, R. (2004). ‘Incidence of Fluorosis in North Gujarat: Mehsana and Siddhpur: An Appraisal from 15 Cases Visited’. unpublished report. Anand, Gujarat: IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program. Indu, R. (2001). Fluoride-Free Drinking Water Supply in North Gujarat: The Rise of Reverse Osmosis Plants as a Cottage Industry: An Exploratory Study. Anand: IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program. Jairath, J. (2001). Water User Associations in Andhra Pradesh—initial Feedback. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Co. Janakarajan, S. (1994). ‘Trading in Groundwater: A Source of Power and Accumulation’, in M. Moench (ed.), Selling Water: Conceptual and Policy Debates Over Groundwater Markets in India. Ahmedabad: VIKSAT and USA: Pacific Institute. Joseph, C.J. (2001). ‘Beneficiary Participation in Irrigation Water Management: The Kerala Experience’, discussion paper 36, Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies. Livingston, M.L. (1993). ‘Designing Water Institutions: Market Failures and Institutional Response’, policy research working paper 1227. Washington D.C.: World Bank. Londhe, A., J. Talati, L.K. Singh, S. Dhaunta, B. Rawlley, K.K. Ganapathy and R. Mathew (2003). ‘UrbanHinterland Water Transactions: A Scoping Study of Six Class I Indian Cities’, working paper, Anand, India: IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program.

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Londhe, A., J. Talati, L.K. Singh, S. Dhaunta, B. Rawlley, K.K. Ganapathy and R. Mathew (2004). ‘Urban-Hinterland Water Transactions: A Scoping Study of Six Class I Indian Cities’, paper presented at the Annual Partners’ Meet of the IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program. February 2004, Anand, India. Luis-Manso, P. (2005). ‘Water Institutions and Management in Switzerland’, College of Management of Technology, MIR Report-2005–2001, http://cdm.epfl.ch/pdf/working_papers/WP05_water_ switzerland. pdf, last accessed June 2005. Merrey, D. J. (1996). Institutional Design Principles for Accountability in Large Irrigation Systems. IIMI Research Report 8. Colombo, Sri Lanka: IIMI. ——— (2000). ‘Creating Institutional Arrangements for Managing Water-Scarce River Basins’, paper on ‘Work in Progress’ for research supported by a grant to IWMI from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through a contract administered by GTZ. ——— (2000). ‘Creating Institutional Arrangements for Managing Water-Scarce River Basins: Emerging Research Results’, paper presented in the session on Enough Water for All at the Global Dialogue on the Role of the Village in 21st Century: Crops, Jobs, Livelihoods, 15–17 August, Hannover, Germany. Mishra, S. (2004). ‘Alternative Institutions for Electricity Retailing: Assessment of Orissa Experiment’, working paper, Anand: IWMI-Tata. Mukherji, A. (2004). ‘Groundwater Markets in the Ganga Meghna Brahmaputra Basin: Theory and Evidence’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(31): 3514–20. Mukherji, A. and A. Kishore (2003). Tubewell Transfer in Gujarat: A Study of the GWRDC Approach. Research Report 69. Colombo, Sri Lanka: IWMI. Narayan, P. and C. Scott (2004). ‘Effectiveness of Legislative Controls on Groundwater Extraction’, Anand, India: IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program, 3rd Partners’ Meet. North, D. (1997). ‘The Contribution of the New Institutional Economics to an Understanding of the Transition Problem.’ WIDER Annual Lectures 1, 7 March, Helsinki, Finland. North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. NSSO (1999a). Common Property Resources in India (54th round). National Sample Survey Organisation, January–June 1999. New Delhi: Government of India. ——— (1999b). ‘Cultivation Practices in India’, National Sample Survey Organisation, report No.451(54/31/3) 54th round, January-June 1998. New Delhi, Government of India. ——— 2003. Report on Village Facilities. National Sample Survey Organisation Report No.487(58/3.1/1) 58th round, July–December, 2002. New Delhi, Government of India. Pandya, D. (2004). ‘History of Inland Fishery in Gujarat with Special Reference to Culture Fishery’. Anand, India: IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program. Panella, T. (1999). ‘Irrigation Development and Management Reform in the Philippines: Stakeholder Interests and Implementation’, paper presented at the International Researchers’ Conference on Irrigation Management Reform, 11–14 December, Hyderabad, India. Paranjape, S. and K.J. Joy (2003). ‘The Ozar Water User Societies: Impact of Society Formation and Co-management of Surface Water and Groundwater’. Pune: Society for Promoting Participatory Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM) paper for IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program. Phansalkar, S. and V. Kher (2003). ‘A Decade of Maharashtra Groundwater Legislation: Analysis of Implementation Process in Vidarbha’, in S. Phansalkar (ed.), Issues in Water Use in Agriculture in Vidarbha. Nagpur: Amol Management Consultants.

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Ramirez, A. and R. Vargas (1999). ‘Irrigation Transfer Policy in Columbia: Some Lessons from Main Outcomes and Experiences’, paper presented at the International Researchers’ Conference on ‘The Long Road to Commitment: A Socio-political Perspective on the Process of Irrigation Reform’, December, Hyderabad, India. Sakthivadivel, R., P. Gomathinayagam and T. Shah (2004). ‘Rejuvenating Irrigation Tanks Through Local Institutions’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(31): 3521–26. Saleth, Maria (2004). ‘Strategic Analysis of Water Institutions in India: Application of a New Research Paradigm’. International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo, Research Report 79. Saleth, R.M and A. Dinar (2000). ‘Institutional Changes in Global Water Sector: Trends, Patterns, and Implications’, Water Policy, 2(3): 175–99. Samad, M. and D. Vermillion (1999). ‘Assessment of Participatory Management of Irrigation Schemes in Sri Lanka: Partial Reforms, Partial Benefits’. Research Report 34. IWMI, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sen, A. (1966). ‘Labour Allocation in a Cooperative Enterprise’, The Review of Economic Studies, 33(4): 361–71. Shah, T. (1993). Groundwater Markets and Irrigation Development. Political Economy and Practical Policy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, India. ——— (2000). ‘Mobilizing Social Energy against Environmental Challenge: Understanding the Groundwater Recharge Movement in Western India’, Natural Resource Forum, 24(3): 197–209. ——— (2002). ‘Who Should Manage Chandeli Tanks?’ IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program Comment, Anand, India. ——— (2004). ‘Decentralized Water Harvesting and Groundwater Recharge: Can These Save Saurashtra and Kutch from Desiccation?’. Shah, T. and S. Bhattacharya, S. (1993). Farmer Organisations for Lift Irrigation: Irrigation Companies and Tubewell Cooperatives of Gujarat. Overseas Development Institute Network Paper 26. London: Overseas Development Institute. Shah, T. and R. Desai (2002). ‘Creative Destruction: Is That How Gujarat is Adapting to Groundwater Depletion?’ IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program A synthesis of ITP studies. Pre-publication discussion paper, Annual Partners’ Meet, February, Anand, Gujarat. Shah, T., M. Giordano and J. Wang (2004). ‘Irrigation Institutions in a Dynamic Economy: What is China Doing Differently from India?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(31): 3452–61. Shah, T., B.V. Koppen, D. Merrey, M.D. Lange and M. Samad (2002). ‘Institutional Alternatives in African Smallholder Irrigation: Lessons From International Experience With Irrigation Management Transfer’. Research Report 60. IWMI, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Shah, T. and K.V. Raju (2001). ‘Rethinking Rehabilitation: Socio-Ecology of Tanks in Rajasthan, India’, Water Policy, 3(6): 521–36. Shah, T., C. Scott, A. Kishore and A. Sharma (2004). ‘Energy-Irrigation Nexus in South Asia: Improving Groundwater Conservation and Power Sector Viability’. Research Report 70. IWMI, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Shukla, P. (2004). ‘Exposure Visit to PIM Project, Ahmedabad, Gujarat’, Letters, 1(3): 12–14, July, available at http://www.srijanindia.org/imgs/Letters%20July%2004.pdf. Singh D.R. and R.P. Singh (2003). ‘Groundwater Markets and the Issues of Equity and Reliability to Water Access: A Case of Western Uttar Pradesh’, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 38(1): 115–27. Svendsen, M. and G. Nott (1997). ‘Irrigation Management Transfer in Turkey: Early Experience With A National Program Under Rapid Implementation’. IIMI, Colombo, Sri Lanka, vii: 17p. (Short report series on locally managed irrigation, Report no.17).

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Talati, J. and T. Shah (2004). ‘Institutional Vacuum in Sardar Sarovar Project: Framing “Rules-of-theGame”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(31): 3504–09. The Economist (2004). 15–21 August. Vermillion, D. (ed.) (1996). The Privatization and Self-Management of Irrigation: Final Report. Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Irrigation Management Institute. Wang, J., L. Zhang and S. Cai (2004). Assessing the Use of Pre-paid Electricity Cards for the Irrigation Tubewells in Liaoning Province, China. Anand: IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program and Beijing: Chinese Centre for Agricultural Policy. Williamson, O.E. (1999). ‘The New Institutional Economics: Taking Stock/Looking Ahead’, Business and Public Policy Working Paper BPP-76. Berkeley: University of California. Zhang, L. (2004). ‘The Economics of Electricity Supply to Tubewell Irrigation in North China’, IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program, Anand, India, Draft Report.

17 The Water Resources Policy Process in India: Centralisation, Polarisation and New Demands on Governance Peter P. Mollinga

I NTRODUCTION When I left India at the end of my Ph.D. fieldwork in November 1992, having studied largescale irrigation management for almost two years in the state of Karnataka, I could not see how ‘irrigation reform’ was going to happen and where it would come from. My impression was that of a sector with major problems in terms of efficiency, benefit distribution and sustainability, but with none of the main stakeholders showing any sign of interest in a change of the status quo. The Irrigation Department seemed to be stuck in its hierarchical and technocratic mode of operation. I had been desperately seeking dissident engineers, but had not found them. The irrigator community seemed to be solidly dominated by the ‘economically and politically sound’ as the local phrase went, that is, the larger farmers who appropriate the larger part of the water. Upsetting the balance of power that continuously reproduced inequity seemed suicidal for local politicians. To my great pleasure I was proven wrong a few years later. Maybe I had been wrong and had misperceived the situation even in 1991–92, or maybe the times were changing due to the liberalisation policies pursued by the Indian Government; maybe both, or something else.1 In any case we have now had about 10 years of efforts at water sector reform in the broader context of overall economic and political reform. In the water sector2, the irrigation subsector is, of course, not the only domain where changes have been occurring. The watershed development programme took off on a large scale and there were other developments like the intensifying critique of and activism in relation to the environmental and social effects of water resources ‘development’. Not all, and perhaps only a very limited part, of this dynamic was directly related to the liberalisation thrust; but nevertheless this has been the broader process in which the beginnings of water sector transformation are set, and, arguably, by which they are increasingly influenced.3 Something started moving and some of this got incorporated in policy documents and policy initiatives. Saleth, in a recent International Water Management Institute (IWMI) paper (2004), even sees some of these movements, like the adoption of national

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water policies and other government policy initiatives, as very significant and the beginning of an irreversible process, even when some of it is largely still of symbolic nature at present. This to me seems to be the optimistic view. I would agree that there are more dynamics in the water policy domain in the last decade than in the decade preceding that; but still, from a comparative perspective, the actual reform of the Indian public water resources policy and practice is still very modest indeed. In terms of the irrigation reform, the Indian practice, even in ‘frontline’ states like Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, is nowhere near the scale of transformation that Mexico experienced from the early 1990s, for instance.4 Some would say the reforms in Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have accomplished very little at all. In terms of public policy the National Water Policy’s advocacy of an ‘integrated approach’ looks rather non-committal and weak as compared to, say, the European Union’s Water Framework Directive.5 In the sector most suitable or vulnerable (with the choice of phrase depending on one’s position) to privatisation, urban water supply, the actual movements toward privatisation of service provision or assets (by involving either foreign or domestic private sector parties) have been very limited as compared to some other places in the world6, despite, or maybe because of, heated debate on the issue. It is probably a good thing that India has ‘missed the hype’ in this respect as transnational water companies seem to be rethinking their interest in the urban water supply business in developing countries (Hall et al. 2004).7 However, it is not my objective to rank India on a global scale measuring the depth and scope of water sector reforms. Such comparison would, in fact, in some respects contradict the framework presented below. The issue I want to explore is a different one. There is a paradox in the Indian condition with regard to water sector reform. India has been a functioning political democracy for more than 50 years and is rightly very proud of it. It has a free press and a rich intellectual culture, which means that there is a lot of debate and analysis of the predicaments related to water resources management, as there is to other things. There are a large number of civil society organisations, active from the local to the global level doing work on water resources and other forms of natural resources management. This is one side of the paradox. The other side is that despite this, there is very little movement as regards the redefinition of the mandates, roles and activities of the government water bureaucracy. This conglomerate of institutions has, both at the Union and State level, been extremely resistant to change. Very few of the new demands on the sector have been internalised. I would say that so far the Indian hydrocracy has been largely successful in ignoring the societal demands for new and different approaches to water resources management and been able to keep itself to its main professional orientation: the planning, design and construction of water infrastructure—preferably largescale. Also at the level of the formulation of new public policy the changes have been very limited. Even at the symbolic and discursive level, the faithfulness to the ‘old paradigm’ is very strong and those who advocate the need for alternative approaches seem to be making very little headway within the domain of governance and policy. The dominant format seems issue-based agitation leading to certain (temporary) concessions of governments to demands of the pressure group. One could even suggest that the interlinking of rivers discussion of the past two years has put the water policy discourse firmly back into the realm of ‘harnessing available resources’.

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The Indian water bureaucracy is not alone in this defensiveness. It is a feature of many countries with large and powerful water bureaucracies responsible for irrigation and/or hydropower and/or flood control. Egypt and Pakistan are cases in point.8 But in these cases there is perhaps less of a paradox. These are not nearly as open and democratic societies as India is. At the same time there are countries that do have dynamic reform processes ongoing. Post-Apartheid South Africa is an example; Mexico has already been mentioned; Indonesia has been moving towards substantial reforms in the water sector; as well as several other countries. This paradox is only a paradox. Instead of a simple linking of the overall nature of the sociopolitical regime and the behaviour of a water resources bureaucracy, we need to ask the question: what is it about the Indian socio-political context and processes of governance and administration that explains the particular defensiveness of the water bureaucracy against the internalising of new social, economic and environmental demands that are put on it? Or, put differently, why is water sector reform such a hard nut to crack, even when we seem to have all the good reasons for reform with us on paper and in the public discourse? And, one could add, with also at hand, almost universal recognition of the importance of water as a source of livelihood and socio-economic prosperity, and acknowledgement of its proper governance and management as essential for different types of sustainability and security. I do not pretend to have a comprehensive answer to this question—this chapter is part of a search for an answer. One response to the posing of the problem would be to argue that I am simply too impatient, that 10 or 15 years is a very short period for as large a country as India, and that I am projecting a non-existing problem. When that argument would hold water so to speak, I would gladly be convinced and join the ranks of the hopeful who think we are on the right track, even if the pace of the movement is slow. However, I think such a response is somewhat escapist. Another response would be to argue that it is not worth worrying about the government policy and administrative framework and that change will come from steady expansion of bottom-up, grassroots activity. Again, this is somewhat escapist in my view. For the moment I would want to maintain that there is an important strategic question to be answered regarding how to push through some of the core requirements of water sector reform and through what process a socio-political alignment or coalition could come about to achieve this. Because, we are a bit stuck, aren’t we?9

M AIN A RGUMENT This chapter argues that there is a lack of knowledge on the Indian water sector policy (reform) process and that production of such knowledge would be of strategic value for enhancing reform in the sector. It also suggests that there are three strategic issues that are of particular importance. • Understanding the rationale, resilience and dynamics of the water resources bureaucracy, particularly the core irrigation/hydropower/flood control part of it. Strategic question: what are sensible entry points and methods for enhancing internalisation of a more ‘integrated approach’ to water resources management by government water bureaucracies?

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• Investigating whether and how advocacy and agitation for alternative approaches to the planning and decision making on water resources do or do not consolidate into institutional frameworks; particularly at the intermediate level. Strategic question: how can inclusive forms of water resources governance, management and finance practically be given shape, particularly at scale-levels above the local/village? • Understanding whether and how policies/interventions get captured and transformed at the local level by local interest groups, government officials and other actors. Strategic question: what are the opportunities for (new) forms of interaction with government agents and agencies that would enhance the efficiency, equity and sustainability aspects of water resources policy interventions and the capacity for context specific technical and institutional innovation? This argument is developed in the following steps: First, I briefly sketch the state of our knowledge on the dynamics of the Indian water resources sector—not in substantive terms, summarising available empirical evidence, but in terms of the type of understanding that we have at hand. Second, I show that the water sector is facing a new set of challenges that it will not be able to address effectively through the existing paradigm and institutional framework, and for which a local, village-focussed approach also falls short. In short, the argument is that because basins are closing and demand for water by different user groups is increasing, the allocation of water gains new prominence, while no effective institutions exist for the negotiation of such claims at the scales at which they occur. Here lies a concrete opportunity for devising new state-resource user interfaces. As a third step I look at the broader issues involved. What is proposed is not just an exercise in social engineering to fill an institutional gap. The attempt is to propose pragmatic ways forward given a certain understanding of the socio-political context of the water sector reform process. In this section I look at the features of that socio-political context. The next, fourth step is to explicate the analytical framework for the analysis of policy processes implicit in the earlier presentation. In the concluding section I summarise the argument and outline a research agenda on water resources governance.

E XISTING A NALYSIS OF THE W ATER S ECTOR AND W ATER S ECTOR R EFORM Before suggesting that we need new types of research to assist the water sector reform process, it makes sense to look at the type of analysis already available. I classify this in three categories.

Statements on Desirable Water Policy The texts under this heading present the contours or details of a new or better policy that is felt to be needed, or suggest ways by which better implementation of existing policy can be achieved. A problem analysis of the current situation is often part of the presentation.

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Several types of documents are part of this category. A first one is government commissioned reports like The Report of the Committee on Pricing of Irrigation Water (1992) and numerous other documents advising sensible things on specific elements of the water sector that would need to be altered. Another category is policy documents proper, like the National Water Policy documents or Acts. A more general category of texts are vision documents, manifestos/statements of different groups or networks that state desirable principles and features of (better) water policy. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also produce their own policy texts.10 Yet another category is the loan and project documents that stipulate what institutional changes will be implemented as part of a certain set of activities. An example is the institutional conditionalities of the World Bank supported Water Resources Consolidation Projects (WRCPs) in different states. Together these documents and their presentation and discussion in the press, Parliament, committees, workshops and elsewhere could be said to constitute the ‘formal’, that is, government-connected water policy discourse, even when not all contributions may be primarily aimed at changing government policy.

Empirical Studies on Water Resources Management India has relatively rich literature on actual water management use and management at field/user/consumer level, and its impact.11 This literature consists of several sub-sets. One set is the academic literature published in journals, such as (most prominently) the Economic and Political Weekly12 in India and a range of international journals. These studies are usually based on direct field research or secondary data and tend to conclude with a set of policy recommendations. On several issues there are ongoing debates and exchanges for shorter or longer periods and such debates are regularly published separately as edited collections. The angles from which this literature is written are the (agricultural) economics literature looking at ‘impact’ particularly, and a newer, often New Institutional Economics (NIE)-oriented, literature on the institutions and incentives that shape water resources management. The second literature is a sociological, political economy and social anthropology-oriented body of work that has a focus on the social relations of water resources management, often taking the issue of unequal social power and its impacts as a core theme.13 Part of this is also academic literature on social conflicts and mobilisation in relation to water resources management, notably around dam conflicts/issues and literature starting to report on experiences with Panchayati Raj Institutions. Together this body of work constitutes the larger part of our database on actual water management practices in India.

A Critical, Oppositional Discourse This literature points out the problems and failures of the present water resources policies and institutions, such as in environmental critiques, gender critiques and privatisation critiques, and calls for a paradigm change in the sector, often in the context of a broader ‘alternative development’ perspective. The publications often have an advocacy or even agitational purpose,

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and are thus often very explicitly ‘political’. Many academic researchers and policy actors might therefore feel that these are not objective and contain insufficient evidence. However, these might simply have been written for different purposes than academic or policy discussions. This ‘engaged’ form of writing is also producing a body of serious, studious work that tries to combine academic rigour, political focus and initiatives for social transformation.14 I would even be inclined to argue, though it is difficult to substantiate, that the more innovative research work on water resources policy and management increasingly tends to come from ‘nonconventional sources’, that is, not from universities and established research institutes. Like all classifications this classification has its limitations. The presentation under the third category of the oppositional discourse already suggests there may be clear overlaps. Moreover, not everything fits in and some research activities would explicitly try to combine the different foci. An example of the latter is the IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program based in Anand, Gujarat. It explicitly aims at the pursuit of practical policy initiatives in the water sector, with the help of and based on documented research, from a reasonably explicit standpoint about the direction of the transformation sought, and in collaboration with a wide variety of social actors, including NGOs and activists. How research relates to policy varies. As this chapter advocates doing more research on the policy process, it is relevant to look at this variation in some detail. In a forthcoming paper I classify research in connection to irrigation policy in three categories: (i) research for policy, that is, research on issues relevant to decision makers; (ii) research on the policy process; and (iii) research in policy (Mollinga, forthcoming). Each has a more reflexive/academic and a more action-oriented variant.

Research for Policy This is research analysing certain situations or phenomena and making policy recommendations about them. The reflexive variant is general academic research as referred to the above under category ‘(ii)’. The already mentioned IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program is an example of the more activist variant; pursuing innovative ideas, institutional designs and technologies, researching them and actively briefing policy makers on this. The engagement with policy makers usually consists of discussions at workshops and seminars, membership of (government) committees, personal networking, publication and dissemination of results in policy-friendly forms, and the like. The more academically minded researchers in this category tend to, implicitly or explicitly, adopt a separation between research and politics, academia and policy. Researchers provide ideas, or options or scenarios, if need be; decision makers take decisions and make and implement policies. The more activist/change minded tend to work on implicit or explicit understandings of the nature of the policy arena and how to act in it. By default or design this category of research, thus, tends to black-box the policy process.

Research on Policy Processes This is research that takes the policy process as its research object. Examples are the investigation of the negotiations between development funding agencies and state governments and how

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these affect policy priorities; at a more micro scale, how political office bearers like Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) influence policy implementation; or how an irrigation bureaucracy responds to pressure to reform; or how water users capture government policies and turn them to their own advantage; or how administrative procedures hamper flexible implementation; or how professional cultures bias implementers’ perspectives. The list of examples is potentially endless. Again there is more reflexive, academic research possible (policy studies, institutional analysis), and more activist/advocacy oriented ways of conducting the research. The latter could be labelled as ‘strategic analysis’: research that informs strategic decision making by policy actors by providing understanding of the dynamics of policy processes and the trade-offs that are part of it. Policy actors are government officials at different levels, but also NGO staff, political parties, water users and users organisations. It is suggested in this chapter that there is a scarcity of this type of research in the Indian water sector context.

Research in Policy In the third way that research relates to policy, the research becomes part of the policy process. The research activity is part of the policy process and policy actors themselves are involved in it quite directly (while in the first two ways generally ‘independent researchers’ are dominant in the implementation of the research). The more conventional mode of this research is research to get better implementation of a given programme, or research commissioned to develop a particular policy idea, or project for a policy actor. This may be bound to individual projects (like in consultancy assignments), or to national policy (re)formulation, like in the work of committees drafting reports, Acts, or other forms of policy recommendation. The more interactive forms of this type of research would be those forms of research in which different stakeholders actively participate and interact. This could be through consultation, public hearings, public debate, but also through actual designing of and participation in the execution of the research, like in the concept of action research.15 Reviewing the literature on water resources, it is clear that ‘research for policy’ and the reflexive variant of ‘research in policy’ are the dominant forms. The types of research of the first classification are easily categorised under these headings. What we have only to a very limited extent is studies on the policy process itself. We do not know very much about what happens in the water policy domain: how new policies are articulated, how the hydrocracies precisely work, how policy elites and their networks operate, how lobby and agitation is dealt with by the government administration, how the negotiations between government and international donors takes place, and so forth. One could ask—where are the political scientists in the water sector; who is looking in detail, as a researcher, at the internal dynamics of India’s domestic hydropolitics? 16, 17 To give just one example, since Robert Wade’s seminal paper on the system of political and administrative corruption (published in 1982), there has been to my knowledge no additional substantive work on this topic in the water resources domain. Additionally, even for the less sensitive or ‘sensational’ topics, there is a scarcity of analysis. I know of no studies, for example, of the strategic configuration of interest groups or the dynamics of the state level network of ‘senior’ water resources ‘experts’ involved in policy making that might or might not further

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irrigation reform in a state like Karnataka. And even if one would be able to find one or two relevant studies on such topics, there is no ongoing debate and no collective evolution of understanding. To further illustrate this point, it is worthwhile to look at the recent collection of papers from the IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program published in the ‘Review of Agriculture’ of the Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 39, No. 31, 2004). In these 11 papers there is a lot of very interesting material on actual water management practices and their impact, and experiments with new approaches; there are many critical observations on, if not outright condemnations of, the flaws of government policies and their implementation—there is a clear statement in the first paper that ‘we are stuck’ as regards water policy reform, with which I very much agree, as exhibited in the introduction. However, there is not a single analysis of the internal dynamics of the government organisations involved and strategic analysis of how they might be enrolled in a more constructive policy transformation process. There are a series of statements on what a good or better policy should involve and of examples that might be instructive, but no analysis of how exactly one might get from the present to that better future. If indeed ‘we are stuck’, more explicit reflection on the process of (policy) transformation might be a useful addition to the water policy research agenda.18 There is a paradox again here. At the anecdotal level and the level of day-to-day experience many people do have knowledge of the internal dynamics of policy processes and ideas on how to get from A to B, including academics. India is a country where substantial numbers of the academically active are involved in policy processes. Nevertheless, there is little systematic reflection on this involvement. Or is it because of this? I will repeat the question: where are the political scientists, public administration scholars and other disciplines looking at the internal institutional and organisational dynamics of the water sector? One might ask what would be the use of such analysis of institutional and organisational dynamics? It is always dangerous to give Wade’s (1982) paper on corruption as an example, because it suggests one is aiming for exposure, sensation and condemnation. That is, however, not the case. I believe we need such analysis to understand better the structural dynamics of the sector, which includes the systemic features of corruption and many other issues, to engage more effectively with the policy process, to further it, to move beyond oppositional for/against positions and beyond preaching to the government on what they should do but probably won’t, and to establish more constructive engagement among the interest groups concerned.19 The most convincing argument in favour of such research, in my view, is that it tends to yield unexpected results. Such studies take us from general and grand schemes to the practicalities of institutional transformation. Close studies of policy processes tend to yield not only a more fine-grained understanding allowing for more ‘contextual’ designs of intervention, but also unimagined ideas for the transformation of policy and practice. Some examples can illustrate this. One example from my own research is the study of main system management in the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal and the picture this yielded of the management practices of the Irrigation Department bureaucracy. Given that Wade’s research, referred to above, had been

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done on the other side of the river and partly in the same system, though in a different state, I had imbibed a certain ‘rent-seeking’ bias in a priori understanding of the irrigation bureaucracy. This was confirmed as far as the ‘works’ were concerned, but contradicted for water management (see Mollinga 2003 for a full account). The Irrigation Department had far less power in day-to-day water distributions in 1991–92 than in Wade’s description of more than 10 years earlier, in which the Irrigation Department could elicit bribe payments from ‘water’ by rumour mongering and other means. I found that institutional practices had emerged and been consolidated at all levels of the system amounting to different forms of rotational water distribution negotiated between the Irrigation Department and different irrigator groups. These negotiated patterns were a far cry from the officially planned water distribution schedule and instrumental in the reproduction of unequal distribution, but still a regularised pattern and no ‘syndrome of anarchy’. Interestingly I found that such negotiation processes also took place within the Irrigation Department, between different divisions managing different sections of the main canal. This had produced an informal ‘gauge table’ regulating supply from division to division. It was informal, in the sense that it diverged considerably from the official operational plan, but had much more practical value. The point is that the Irrigation Department officials exhibited much more agency in water management than the ‘rentseeking’ perspective allows for. This has also been shown in other cases like the Philippines (Oorthuizen 2003). The (incentive) structure of the Irrigation Department makes that such activity happens largely ‘subterranean’, but it does suggest that there are starting points for reforming main system management that are usually overlooked. It also suggests that there might be ways to enrol the bureaucracy in reform. A rich example, though not situated in the water sector, of the unexpected results and new avenues for reform that grounded research on the actual dynamics of policy processes (an ‘anthropology of the everyday state’) might yield is illustrated by a two-part report on an investigation of the working of the local state in rural Bihar, Jharkand and West Bengal (Corbridge et al. 2003a, 2003b). The research investigates the working of the Employment Assurance Scheme to understand the governance performance of these states, looking at four main functions of governance: developmental, empowermental, protective and disciplinary. The research documents the complexity and divergence of state action, the conflicts within and between different agencies of the state and the challenges posed to these agencies by civil and political society groups. One finding is that under certain conditions district-level personnel acted to restrict opportunities for rent-seeking, a counter-intuitive finding in this context. The way state and civil/political societies interact diversely in different places creates different opportunities and constraints for it to work as a developmental state enhancing ‘pro-poor governance’. Despite a rather gloomy picture of the state’s ability to refocus in this direction, the action research approach that the research followed20 came up with a detailed list of concrete suggestions for change under five rubrics: encouraging political parties to increase the awareness and empowerment of the poor; changing the negative linkages between politicians and middlemen; bringing development issues to the top of the agenda; changing the ‘I win-you lose’ culture; and engaging local intermediaries more constructively (Corbridge et al. 2003b: 2568). Whatever the exact suggestions, the point in the context of this

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chapter is that close study and engagement with the day-to-day practice of state governance and policy implementation may suggest concrete courses of action that more generalised accounts are likely to miss.

N EW I NSTITUTIONAL C HALLENGES

TO THE

W ATER S ECTOR

When water sector reform is discussed at a sufficiently general or abstract level, there is nothing new in the present situation. For example, discussions on volumetric supply and pricing of water can be found in the 19th century documents (Stone 1984). The recommendation to involve water users in management and to set up user organisations is at least as old as the report of the first Indian Irrigation Commission (1901–03). Basin level approaches to water management were tried in the 1950s. Water scarcity and drought seem to be eternal themes. However, when looked at in more detail there is a trajectory of transformation of issues and approaches to them. The scarcity of the 19th century was a rather different scarcity than today’s; the water users involved in local organisations live in a very different society now than in the early 20th century; the basin approach of the 1950s aimed at different problems than the present advocates of river basin organisations have in mind. What is characteristic of water resources management of the early 21st century is the need for an ‘integrated approach’ as articulated in the present water policy discourse, particularly through the notion of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). The idea of ‘integration’ has many sources and meanings and some would argue that it has already lost its sharpness and usefulness before serious implementation of it has even started. Indeed, the notion seems to be a catch-all, bringing under one semantic roof things like coordination of sectoral water use and management organisations, forging new linkages between upstream and downstream water users, interdisciplinary analysis of water resources problems, incorporation of environment and human development concerns into water resources policy, and quite a few more. The notion of ‘integration’ also has a problematic history through the historical experience with ‘integrated rural development’ programmes. Amendment is also ongoing. It has been convincingly argued that a focus on water only does not make much sense and that at least there should be ‘land and water’ instead of water only. This logically leads to notions of integrated natural resources management or even more general ones and analytical or policy sharpness evaporates accordingly. The Indian water technocrats have insisted on a notion of IWRDM, where the D stands for ‘development’, in the sense of planning, design and construction of water infrastructure (see above), and thus probably try to neutralise the notion’s call for paradigmatic changes in approach. IWRM is thus a truly ‘loose concept’ and a ‘boundary concept’.21 It signifies different things for different people and has been appropriated by a variety of actors for a variety of agendas after its ascendance to discursive prominence through the emerging global water policy discourse in the second half of the 1990s. Nevertheless, I will maintain that this does

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not make it vacuous or useless, but makes it a concept that creates a space for exchange and encounter. The empirical underpinning of the idea of ‘integration’ and its material ‘solidity’ is that a real set of issues is emerging in the daily practice of water resources management that makes it necessary. These issues are those that show that the dominant ‘supply enhancement’ approach to water resources management (the water resources ‘development’ agenda referred to above) is nearing its limits, if it hasn’t already crossed them; as well as that approaches exclusively focussing on local-level solutions to water resources management problems have fundamental limitations. Through ongoing population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation, competition over the quantity and quality of water available for different uses and users is increasing. There are many dimensions to this issue. When there are availability problems in terms of quantity and quality it is becoming increasingly difficult to find ‘new sources’ and to tap them without affecting other users. Basins are closing and water management is becoming more of a zero-sum game than it was in the past. A second aspect is that slowly the environment has developed a voice that is heard in the policy domain. Very slowly (far too slow in the eyes of many), the notion of ‘environmental flow’ is coming into the discourse as a sign of the policy legitimacy of ecological concerns and the livelihoods associated with such concerns.22 The expansion of watershed development and other water conservation programmes implies a spatial redistribution of water that, when implemented on a sufficiently large scale, will affect ‘existing rights’. This is manifesting itself as increasing occurrence of upstream user/downstream user controversies at catchment or sub-basin levels. Urbanisation is causing additional claims on water in the surrounding rural areas, creating new forms of competition. Generally speaking, the development towards closure of basins, the proliferation of stronger demands from a variety of user groups, the spatial implications of changing water-use practices, and other factors point to an increasing importance of the issue of allocation of water, that is, the definition of water rights or entitlements for different users, uses and areas. Allocation of surface water at macro scale used to be done through allocations at the river basin level to different irrigation and hydropower projects and for some other uses. This procedure determines available flow at 75 per cent dependability and allocates water in bulks of thousand million cubic feet (TMCft) . This is a very static allocation method. The problems with it are highly visible in the Cauvery case. In below average rainfall years in this basin, the allocation of water between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu is increasingly problematic. What is needed is an allocation mechanism that is able to allocate water under conditions of scarcity in low rainfall years. This should not work on the basis of a block quantity allocation but should involve a sharing mechanism that can be used operationally in varying and evolving circumstances. It is to be hoped that the ongoing tribunal process will deliver such a workable sharing procedure.23 Put more generally, what is required is a move to a system that provides rules and procedures for negotiating allocation and distribution of water among interest groups (in terms of quantity, quality and timing), rather than ‘final’ quantitative allocations. As long as there is uncommitted

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water in a river (and the ecological dimension is ignored) problems can be ‘solved’ through supply enhancement (additional allocations). In an increasing number of cases this is no longer possible, and this number of cases is increasing given urbanisation, economic growth and demographic growth. These problems are poignantly felt around large cities as these have a large, geographically concentrated demand for water, but they apply generally. Groundwater exploitation has never had a government controlled macro-level allocation mechanism (or effective micro-ones for that matter), but over-extraction from aquifers poses the same problem of allocation and regulation as does over-extraction from rivers. In the drier parts of India, most groundwater use is in the ‘dark zone’, that is, exhibiting over-extraction or approaching that. In flood management, the allocation and scale issue manifests itself in a different manner. The dominant post-Independence approach has been embankments, that is, controlling floods and confining the water to riverbeds and reservoirs. The alternative ‘living with floods’ approach recognises the limitations of such approaches and looks at the ‘allocation’ of water over different parts of a floodplain and the related costs and benefits across space and groups of people. Flood management requires regional planning. The negotiated allocation of water that is required is not just a water-game. Linked to water are livelihoods and other interests. The contestation of water is intensifying and new issues around which this contestation takes place are emerging.24 The empirical assertion of this chapter is that there is a lack of institutions and organisations at the medium or regional scale level that can effectively deal with these emerging issues and contestations. They cannot be addressed at local/village levels only because many of them are about the relationship between localities/villages. The prescriptive, legalistic and administrative approach of the government agencies is also very unlikely to be able to address these issues. One reason for this is that the problems and their solutions are context specific and cannot be addressed with standardised packages, an approach inherent in the present style of government agencies. Moreover, there are no single scientific, ‘best solutions’ for a given problem. The ‘optimum’ solution depends on the weighting of different interests and concerns. One can make rules and procedures for how this weighting and the related negotiation should taken place and define boundary conditions, but one cannot predict or prescribe the exact outcome of such processes. For such processes to be effective and to have sustainable outcomes the interaction process needs to produce some form of shared understanding and compromise. That is, both the content of the decisions taken and the process of decision making are important. In some respects, there is nothing new in this insight that medium-scale level institutions are required. In 1980, Wade and Chambers argued that for large-scale irrigation systems, participatory approaches focusing on the local (tertiary/village) level only were likely to be unsuccessful as long as water management at the main system level would not be addressed (Wade and Chambers 1980). The operational plan for main system management of a canal irrigation system is an allocation decision. It defines entitlements for different areas (secondary canals and lower). When these entitlements are not realised, variable and/or uncertain, local level management becomes very difficult. The structure of this macro-micro dependency relation is very similar in multiple bore wells tapping a single aquifer, or multiple water conservation

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structures doing local water conservation in a catchment area, even when these different situations also have their specificities. What is new is that such issues are proliferating. This is meant as an empirical statement of fact, rather than as a conceptual argument for complexity and interconnectedness.25 Reality makes that we have to take ‘integration’ seriously, even if some would prefer to use a different word.26 Before moving to the broader setting of this problem, I note that this emphasis on medium/ region scale and institutions required at this level by no means necessarily implies support for the idea of setting up river basin organisations and organised water resources management following hydrological boundaries. The issues of ‘fit’ (of administrative boundaries for water management with hydrological ones), of ‘interplay’ (of water management organisation with other domains of governance and management based on different units) and of ‘scale’ (what is an appropriate level and how do different levels connect) are complex, and a standardised approach is unlikely to be appropriate.27

T HE B ROADER C ONTEXT : C ENTRALISATION , P OLARISATION AND D EMOCRACY This is not the place to enter into a general and broad ranging discussion of the nature of Indian democracy and state governance, but water sector reform—obviously—happens in this context and is shaped by it.28 The question ‘what is specific about the Indian context and processes that can explain the tardiness of the water sector reform?’ needs to be answered in this broader framework.29 The point I want to focus on is the state-village dichotomy in the practice of thinking about the relations between the state political and administrative machinery and local communities, derived from Kaviraj’s analysis of the modern Indian state (Kaviraj 1996, 1997, 2001). The western form of political democracy that India adopted after Independence was an elite project implanted on Indian society ‘from the top’ and not a system whose design emerged out of local struggles. The ingestion of these ideas and formulation of political practices in their terms also introduced a fatal flaw in the structure of Indian politics. As these concepts and advantages remained more readily apprehended by middle class elites, and largely unexplicated to the ordinary Indian voter, who was nonetheless given the ceremonial sovereignty of popular representative government, this meant that a problem of intelligibility of the political institutions of the state remained at the heart of the Indian democratic system. Democratic institutions in India did not have a historical preparation through a political discourse which debated, in the vernaculars and in terms which reached the ordinary Indian citizen, why the state structures of republican, democratic, secular authority were better than other

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competing forms. They remained, more crucially, unenlightened about the meaning and implication of the fundamental gesture of constitutional subjectivity, of their having given that form of government to themselves (Kaviraj 1997: 232–33). The political and administrative institutions of the state have, as a result of this, in some respect been treated by people in the same way as the colonial and pre-modern states were. The post-Independence emancipation process and economic development allowed new groups to access state resources, using redistributive rhetoric. At a certain point non-elite social groups entered into politics, including: a new class of aggressive, politically ambitious and illiberal rich peasants. They wished, by virtue of their increasing prosperity, not to reform rural society and introduce new measures of equity, but to retain the traditional structure of irresponsible power of the landed elite and rightlessness of the poorer peasantry, and replace the old zamindars in the rural hierarchy. They looked at the concentration of resources in the agencies of the state with approval, since it was evident that they could exercise control over their disbursement through their influence over electoral politics (ibid.: 238–39). Typically, the supporters of policies of reverse discrimination in favour of lower castes are not concerned about more equitable distribution of educational opportunities or material necessities. For them, getting a share of bureaucratic control is vital. They do not want to destroy a system of inequality, but only demand their fair share in the privileges (ibid.: 246). This reproduces a structure in which the state is exterior to the local social dynamics and is seen as a whimsical tyrant with which one enters into relations of patronage but never considers as one’s own, and parts of which one tries to control or influence for one’s own benefit. This has historical roots in the way the pre-modern and colonial states operated, as Kaviraj eloquently shows. A second point is that independent India decided to inherit British colonial administration. In the politically unstable situation after Independence the new leadership found that a ‘strong state’ needed to be established, implying: a major recourse to the structures of army and bureaucracy the colonial administration had left behind. […] The national state was an inheritor of two distinct and some ways, incompatible, legacies. It inherited the colonial state’s systems of internal command and control, its administrative ethos, its laws and rules, and its three predominant characteristics to the popular mind: its marginality, its exteriority, and its persistent repressiveness against the lower strata of the people who, at least in constitutional formality, were made the repository of sovereignty. At the same time, it was the successor to a triumphant national movement whose principal objective was to contest the culture of that state. […] Was the national movement a struggle to achieve an untrammelled version of the Western state, a purer form of Western political modernity than colonialism had permitted, or to reject the entire model [which was Gandhi’s view]? (ibid.: 233, 234).

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This was decided in favour of the first option, accompanied by a massive expansion of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy, though now manned by Indians, was still the unreconstructed bureaucracy of a colonial state: irresponsible, unresponsive, insufficiently used even to the rhetoric of serving the people, being habituated for so many decades to being their lords and masters. It was also eminently unsuited, in its original form, to performing modern welfare functions. […] its lower orders translated these policies into unrecognisably travestic forms. […] Local administration was inextricable from local power. […] Long-term historical memories and time tested ways of dealing with power of the political authority took their revenge on the modern state, bending the straight lines of rationalist liberal politics through a cultural refraction of administrative meaning. [….] (Kaviraj 1997: 234, 235). What can be derived from this analysis30 is that India’s bureaucracies tend to be highly centralised in how their powers are defined and largely working on a ‘command and control’ administrative style; that has, however, become embedded in a political system often described as competitive populism. This is not just a ‘choice’ for a particular institutional structure, but a phenomenon that has its roots in pre-modern, colonial and post-colonial history, in which the pre-modern state-village relation has been reincarnated in new forms, but retaining some basic characteristics. Kaviraj, for pre-modern states in India, argues that: power at the level of the village community tended to be exercised through the paradoxical logic of the caste system. Its specific manner of allocating productive functions and rewards maintained a system of social repression without making specific individuals the agents of these relationships of disdain and resentment. The global human world, its essential principles of ordering, were not subject to individual or collective construction. […]The political implication of this feature of caste society is important. Under this arrangement, it is impossible for the state to aspire to become the site of universality and sovereignty; the state could not claim a Durkheimian majesty by becoming the symbol of society as a whole, and a preserver of its form and continuity. That was lodged in a self-maintaining moral; order to which the state was normally subordinated. […] [The state’s] primary function was to police possible infringements, not to make rules affecting the fundamental order of social relations. […] The state, or the ruling power did not have any fundamental legislative authority in the modern sense, precisely because society did not function on the assumption of basic plasticity of the political and social world. […] The allocation of resources to various social groups on a permanent or stable basis, was beyond the recognised domain of authority of the traditional state. […] Empires, however large, powerful, ambitious, never aspired to overcome the marginality to the daily existence of the villager: and this was formally sanctified by the typical rent receiving relation between the empire and the village. […] Thus, the precolonial type of political authority seems strikingly devoid of two features that social struggles of European modernity imparted to the modern state. It was

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not an authority for appeal against widespread structural injustice, oppressions, iniquities, irrationalities of social processes. […] To apply the state/civil society distinction to traditional India therefore would be to invite a serious conceptual misunderstanding (Kaviraj 1997: 227–30). There is now a civil society in India, and a very active one as mentioned above, so there cannot be a simple argument of continuity. However, the (central) state-village dichotomy seems still to be very much part of the Indian polity. The networks of institutions that characterise, for instance, Western Europe’s social democracy, in addition to the institutions for political representation and decision making, have emerged only to a limited extent in the Indian context, not ‘filling in’ the institutional gap between ‘state’ and ‘village’.31 In his discussion of the constitutional arrangements for water resources management, Iyer (2003) confirms this point. He describes how the Indian Constitution defines governance at the Union and State levels but not below that, until the Panchayat Raj amendments. These jump to village/municipality level. He also discusses how the efforts at river basin organisations and the water disputes tribunals are expressions of a centralistic approach.32 In terms of centralistic state organisations, the water resources bureaucracy is one such centralistically framed apparatus. Very few people would be surprised by or object to a description of this set of organisations as being hierarchical in structure and process, as working in a top-down fashion and as tending towards centralisation of administrative power. A specific feature of this bureaucracy is that it is mainly populated by one single discipline, that of civil engineering. The water bureaucracy was a very powerful element of the Nehruvian development strategy and engineers considered themselves literally as nation builders at that time, with M. Visvesvaraya as perhaps the most famous example (see Visvesvaraya 1951, Memoirs of My Working Life). How the irrigation bureaucracy got integrated in the competitive populism of the 1970s and 1980s has been described in his now seminal paper on the system of political and administrative corruption (Wade 1982). On the one hand, this has generated collusion between politicians, bureaucrats and rural elites, with substantial material benefits to all, but on the other hand, it has generated a lot of dissatisfaction and de-motivation within the irrigation department and an erosion of professional standards (see Mollinga 2003 for a case study). The authority of field-level water managers, such as the staff of the irrigation department, has been challenged and eroded by the aggressive lobby of rich peasants and their representatives, but the whole approach of the water resources bureaucracy has been challenged most fundamentally by the social movements around the negative environmental and social effects of the construction of large dams. This has led to extremely polarised positions, leading to a Supreme Court case to decide the issue in the case of Narmada/Sardar Sarovar dam. In some respects this is a replay of the choice between the Nehruvian and Gandhian development trajectories: the first very modernist, large-scale infrastructure oriented, and the second advocating a local/village based approach to social and economic transformation.33 This confrontation has not led to a constructive outcome. The water resources bureaucracy has ‘dug in’ and become very defensive. In ideological/discourse terms, the winning of the

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court case regarding Narmada, the World Commission on Dams exercise and the Interlinking of Rivers scheme seem to have strengthened the technocratic paradigm in recent years. A recent paper by Goel and Patel (2004) is a telling illustration of the centralisation, construction, supply enhancement and nationalistic orientation. However, this is likely to be a temporary situation given that ground level processes are pushing the discourse in another direction. The social movements seem to have ‘dug in’ equally with a very strong emphasis on the local/grassroots level of activity as the starting point for social transformation.34 ‘Big is beautiful’ and ‘small is beautiful’ have become a true dichotomy in political practice. The commitment and emotion invested is enormous, by both polarities. Efforts to define a middle ground for negotiation and compromise, and innovative new options for water resources planning seem to fall on deaf ears on both sides.35 It is not my intention to argue out the concrete merits of these cases, but to suggest that it may be warranted to interpret this deadlock as an instance of an old, persistent opposition or form in the Indian polity, that of a particular relationship between the state and the village, and, in a policy sense, as indicating a need for the establishment of new institutions to create a more constructive interface between ‘state’ and ‘society’. Put somewhat dramatically, such conflicts offer the possibility (and define the necessity) to conceive in new ways the democratisation of water resources management in connection with a rethinking and reshaping of the forms and institutions of political democracy in general. This would involve an assessment of the limitations of panchayati raj institutions also. Though these are very important in some respects, they will be unable to address certain emerging issues in water resources management, and can, at best, be an element of the democratisation of water resources governance. They will not be able to address the regional dimension of water resources management, for which institutions between the ‘state’ and the ‘village’ are required.36 When this analysis is correct, the paradox I started with is no longer a paradox. It is now intelligible what some of the structural characteristics and limitations might be of water resources governance as an instance of Indian state governance in general. This is largely an argument by association: the state-village dichotomy has been a defining characteristic of Indian governance over time, in forms specific to certain historical epochs, and the water sector should be seen as an instance of this. Subsequently, it needs to be shown how this dichotomy exactly operates—what are the mechanisms active in it? It has already been suggested that it is enshrined in the formal legal set up of water resources governance and management. Similarly, it has been suggested that it is part of the water bureaucracy’s disposition and organisational ethos. In a general sense, it has been suggested that the gap is not a void but a space actively reproduced by different political actors. Also, the community participation discourse and practice may have contributed to the reproduction of the divide. More difficult to catch is the idea that this ‘thought structure’ has gone into the very fabric of India’s political democracy and the caste system as an enabling condition for the relative absence of vertical solidarities and the thwarting or non-emergence of intermediate institutions. My guess is that the water sector will provide ample evidence for further development and adjustment of this perspective when it would be researched from a ‘politics of policy’ perspective.

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A NALYSING

THE

P OLICY P ROCESS

Following the argument above, I suggest that an important contribution that social science research could make to the democratisation of water resources governance and management is to analyse and interpret water sector reform more than is done at present as part of the overall problematic of the Indian state form and nature of political democracy. To make a practical contribution to water sector reform, I suggest focusing this analysis on the water resources policy process, as this is where the political contestation of water resources can both be studied and influenced. In this section I therefore outline an approach to analyse the water resources policy process. I present it as an answer to the following questions: • • • • •

What kind of a process is water resources management? What are the different kinds of ‘politics’ associated with water resources management? How should we understand policy” What are the main themes and approaches in the ‘policy as process’ literature? What is the specific context of the Indian policy process, particularly that of the water sector?

For canal irrigation, I have argued that water control (technical/physical, organisational/ managerial and socio-economic and political control) should be understood as an instance of politically contested resource use (Mollinga 2003). What this means is that for a comprehensive understanding of water-related processes, the issue of social power needs to be explicitly addressed. This does not reduce water resources management to politics, but simply makes it an inherent part of it. Daily life and the newspapers are full with evidence supporting this contention; academia has not internalised it into its analytical frameworks very widely so far. The ‘politics of water’ is not a single thing, but can be subdivided into different types, or rather domains or arenas where it is played out. I distinguish the following four arenas (see Mollinga 2001). • The everyday politics of water resource management refers to the contested nature of the day-to-day use of water resources (see Kerkvliet 1990 for the ‘everyday politics’ concept). Socio-political analyses at this level looks at the way the local social relations of power shape and are shaped by water resource use practices. This is a vast terrain, in which there are many case studies available from across the globe. The central issue in many of these studies is (in)equity and poverty, what it means, how it occurs and what can be done to change/achieve it, and who has a say in the decision making over water resources. Conceptually two-related-focus points are (a) the concept of hydraulic property, and property rights more generally; and (b) the understanding of collective action. Arguably, many ‘localised’ case studies fail to link their analysis sufficiently with the broader context of cultural, political economic dynamics, but this was truer 10 years ago than it is now. There is a growing linkage of studies of local cases and processes with broader issues like ‘environmental justice’.

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• The politics of policy on water resources is the level of water resources policy formulation and implementation within nation-states, usually with a central role of the state government (for the ‘politics of policy’ concept see Grindle 1977 and her subsequent work; also see Long and Van der Ploeg 1989). Many countries have overall and sector water policies, which imply investment programmes for infrastructure creation and maintenance and the establishment of institutions for the management of the infrastructure and the resource. In a conventional approach the politics of this are thought to lie only at the level of policy formulation: politicians working within a parliamentary or other framework make decisions on policy priorities and programmes based on scientific advice of natural scientists (mostly hydrologists and technical engineers), after which the administration implements. In practice, both formulation and implementation of water resource policies can be highly contested. Different interest groups attempt to influence both, through official legal-institutional and through other means. Policy is negotiated and re-negotiated at all levels and often transformed on its way from formulation to implementation. The nature, intensity and effects of this process differ from case to case. This political struggle takes place within state apparatuses, but also in the interaction of state institutions with the groups directly and indirectly affected by the policies.37 This field of inquiry could also be phrased as the investigation of actual governance practices regarding water resources, with themes like democratisation, decentralisation, transparency, privatisation, public good functions and institutional interplay. Theories and empirical work on policy formulation, stakeholder supported decision making, agenda setting and implementation of environmental policies, and economic theories on policy implementation, with a particular focus on provision of services from public bureaucracies, would be useful approaches. • Hydropolitics is the level of inter-state politics regarding the allocation, distribution, control and quality of water resources (see Waterbury 1979; Ohlsson 1995; Turton and Henwood 2002 for the ‘hydropolitics’ concept).38 The state in hydropolitics is usually a national state, as in, for example, water resource issues between Egypt and Sudan, Mexico and the USA, or India, Nepal and Bangladesh. However, it can also refer, in a federal structure, to inter-state water resources issues within a nation state. An example is water allocation between upper and lower riparian states within countries like Germany, India and the USA. A water transfer between basins located in different states is another instance. In all these cases, more than one political entity controls territory in a hydrological basin (or basins in case of inter-basin transfer), which, for optimal use, would require an integrated approach to resource management. The core issue at this level is how states do or do not reach an agreement on sharing the development and use of the water resources they jointly depend on. How conflicts can be avoided and cooperation achieved is the main focus of the hydropolitics literature. Most of the discussion concerns the substantive and strategic dimensions of negotiation and mediation. This not only regards water, but as in cases like the Middle East, also regional (and global) security issues. Possible research foci are: the role of institutions in settling conflicting issues and actual management of water

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resources; analysis of development paths of trans-boundary river basin organisation, their relation to national actors, the role of international actors, and the benefits and costs of cooperation and their distribution. • The global politics of water resources refers to the emerging set of organisations, agreements, declarations and the like, already referred to above, that jointly constitute a new sphere of a global policy discourse on water resources. The Rio and Dublin conferences in 1992 have been highly instrumental in generating this process (which on closer study would undoubtedly turn out to be the acceleration of an already ongoing process). The IWRM debate is a case in point: global agenda setting gets translated into national and subnational policies through ‘vision documents’ and ‘frameworks for action’. These translations are not simple ‘operationalisations’ but involve transformation, appropriation and redirection, the subject matter of the ‘politics of policy’ perspective. Water has also entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) debates, particularly around the issue of privatisation. A large global civil society network around water resources issues has grown up in the past decade. The World Commission on Dams is another example of the emerging global politics of water. To my knowledge, there is as yet no review of the emerging global politics of water, or an articulated approach to study this new dis-course and arena. This typology already indicates the understanding of policy that is adopted. It is seen as a process through which different interest groups (consciously and at least partly publicly) negotiate the modalities of societal governance and consolidate this into institutional and organisational arrangements, projects, programmes and procedures for, in this case, water resources management.39 Policy has a functional, that is, purposive and strategic element, otherwise it would be difficult to call it policy;40 but it is not only functional or instrumental. It carries wider meanings also, as discussed above. Mooij and De Vos (2003), in an introduction to a bibliography on policy process literature, assess the Indian situation as follows: Within India, the study of policy processes is not very well developed. This is so, despite the fact that many Indian social scientists are involved in policy relevant research and aim to contribute, through debate and research, to policy formulation and implementation. These debates are, however, almost entirely dominated by economists, and insights from other social sciences have hardly entered into them. There are very few political scientists, sociologists or anthropologists focusing on public policies. As a result, some aspects of policy studies are relatively well developed (such as measuring policy effects), but others much less. The issues and questions, for instance, of why policies are formulated and designed in particular ways in the first place, and the political shaping of policies ‘on the ground’, do not receive much attention (ibid.: 5). They go on to describe four themes that are important in the global literature on policy processes. These are: (i) the critique of linear models of the policy process; (ii) actors interact and

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bargain with each other, and thereby produce a particular (albeit temporary) policy outcome; (iii) policy discourses; and (iv) the role of politicians and political parties in policy processes (which is of particular importance in the Indian context). Arora (2002) seems to be in agreement with the assessment of Mooij and de Vos. About the discipline of political science, she states that ‘[p]olitical scientists have been engrossed in the study of political institutions and processes, which resulted in a sheer neglect of the systematic study of public policy’ (ibid.: 46). She suggests three principles for the study of public policy processes. • It encompasses more than decision making—policy spaces are more complex than that (she refers to policy evasion, symbolic policy and the unaccounted/unanticipated consequences of policy). • Policy needs to be seen as an ongoing process. • A political economy perspective is required for holistic analysis that addresses complexity, including the question, how globalisation affects the autonomy and capacity of national policy processes. There are five elements specific to the Indian situation that need to be taken account of in analyses of Indian policy processes (ibid.: 50, and subsequent discussion): (i) extreme resource disparities; (ii) uneven representation in governance; (iii) how knowledge power networks reproduce inequality in the policy process, for instance, by delegitimising local knowledge; (iv) the context of policy discourse: the nationalist framework of the post-Independence period and the influence of global discourses more recently; and (v) the institutional relations: dominance of state institutions post-Independence and the swing to a state failure perspective with support of market mechanisms. The accounts of Mooij and de Vos, and of Arora would both probably fall in Grindle’s (1999) category of ‘comparative institutionalism’, that is, a sociological approach, rather than her second category of approaches: those based on economic rational choice frameworks. I summarise Grindle’s discussion of the differences between these two clusters of frameworks in Table 17.1. Grindle does the comparison on four points, phrased as questions. Grindle (1999: 11) also observes that adherents of the two schools ‘have been outspokenly harsh about the other’: Those who favor the elegance and parsimony of economic models of political behavior accuse comparative institutionalists of avoiding rigorous theory and scientific methodology and of producing primarily descriptive studies. Those who work from within the sociological tradition retort that economic models produce political banalities and historically inaccurate analyses that ignore empirical evidence. Another site of polarisation; or so it seems. Grindle is of the view that both schools are deficient in important ways. The ‘political economy of public policy’ perspective has been developed particularly, though not exclusively, with reference to European and North American policy processes. It carries several biases as a result; one being the strong assumptions about societal groups actively contesting government

Source: Based on Grindle (1999: 3–11).

What are the consequences of new rules Consequences generate new strategies for of the game for economic and political achieving first order preferences, towards a interaction? new equilibrium

Criticise apolitical explanations of Intrigued by the creation of new institutions institutional change; new institutions that constrain the power of politicians The behaviour of reformist politicians: how long- are the result of historically embedded conflicts about the distribution of power term interest and short-term interest relate and benefits in society Transaction costs in political life to explain change Principal-agent problems; role of institutional designers

How are new institutions created or transformed?

More dynamic approach: institutional change creates new sources of conflict, new claims for resources, new spaces for contestation

Institutions have histories, which shapes preferences, orientations, values and strategies of collective actors

Institutions are strategic arenas for individual choice

How do political institutions affect the choices made by politicians?

Strong emphasis on institutions and collectivities, rather than individual choice (‘statecraft’ as theme) Larger role of contingency Conflict over policy is the ‘normal stuff’ of politics; emphasis on social interaction in economic, social and policy arenas in relation to social power ‘Context’ is a complex environment with history, shaping perspectives, references and values

Comparative Sociological Approaches (comparative institutionalism)

Rational choice explanations of politicians behaviour in a ‘political market’ with votes as the currency and access to public resources as benefits Capture of politicians by interest groups and rent seeking ‘Context’ is a strategic decision-making arena

Approaches Based on Economic Frameworks (rational choice theory)

Why and how are politicians interested in shaping policy change?

Particulars

Table 17.1: Rational Choice and Comparative Sociological Approaches to the Analysis of Policy Processes

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policy and thus being involved in policy formulation. Grindle shows that developing countries may be characterised by state-centred policy processes, while these approaches are societycentred. In developing and transitional countries, policy may be generated primarily in elite (government) circles. This is an element of Indian policy making also and contributes to the state-village dichotomy. Perhaps the paradox phrased at the beginning means that India has state-centric policy making despite a very active civil society. Also, according to Grindle, the institutional setting of developing and transitional countries may be very unstable and institutional and policy evolution a different process as a result. This seems to apply less to the Indian situation. Another strong assumption is the sovereignty of the voter in electoral processes, which may not apply elsewhere. Such differences suggest a general point in terms of an analytical approach: that the study of the process of policy needs to be contextualised historically and geographically. Grindle also identifies three factors that are, in her view, under-explained: leadership, the role of ideas and successful policies.41 She concludes her review and assessment with a call for more ‘grounded’ research on actual processes of institutional transformation while ‘seeking to stretch theoretical models’ (Grindle 1999: 21). This somewhat lengthy highlighting of themes and approaches in the ‘policy as process’ literature means to illustrate that there is a lot to start from when undertaking such an analysis in the water resources domain. The next step would be a review of the literature on Indian water resources policy and management with these frameworks in mind. A research agenda is outlined for this in the concluding section.

A R ESEARCH A GENDA FOR W ATER S ECTOR G OVERNANCE R EFORM A premise I start from is that research on water resources governance should not only generate ‘knowledge for understanding’ but also ‘knowledge for doing’. This is a major reason to promote research on policy processes in the water resources domain. If it is true that ‘we are stuck’ as regards water sector reform, it may perhaps pay off to focus more analytical attention on the institutional processes themselves. Grindle phrases this point as follows. To be relevant in the real world, political economy theory ought to be useful in at least one of two ways. It ought to be able to model reality by reflecting dynamics of political interactions in the design and implementation of development policy and in the creation or transformation of institutions. If it can do this, it can inform the political strategies of those actively engaged in promoting policy and institutional change. Additionally or alternatively, theory ought to be able to predict the behavior of political agents in designing, adopting, and implementing policy change or predicting the political consequences of alternative policy and institutional choices. This is another way of informing the strategic choices that policy reformers make (ibid.: 12). I have tried to show that this does not amount to a simple exercise in social engineering and institutional design to fill a perceived gap, but requires contextualisation of institutional

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dynamics in broader processes of social transformation, notably the process of democratisation. Without an understanding of the structure and dynamics of India’s political democracy and incorporation of such insights into reform strategies, it will, in my opinion, be difficult to get ‘unstuck’. At the substantive level the thrust of this chapter is that the water sector is facing challenges that cannot be addressed in the current policy and political framework. Reform is not only to include a re-orientation of policy priorities and approaches, but also the restructuring of institutional frameworks away from the state-village dichotomy, which I have argued to be a central feature of the present predicament. New ‘intermediate’ or ‘meso-level’ institutions are required that allow a negotiated approach to water resources governance. Their absence is a constraint for reform, but the need for such institutions is an opportunity for getting ‘unstuck’ and contributes to the ‘deepening’ of Indian democracy. At the level of scientific discourse, a problem is that dichotomous thinking has also crept in. There is a large intellectual challenge in trying to overcome this. In this regard it is not enough ‘to be aware’ in the abstract; solid research is needed to understand it better. The rationale of focussing on the three issues and questions for the transformation of public policy and its organisational framework that were listed in section two should now be clearer. How to enrol the water bureaucracy (more constructively) in a reform process, how negotiated water resources planning and management can occur through institutions that bring together the different interest groups involved, and how to make progress with the often so poor implementation of public policy and achieve less skewed benefit distribution, seem to me to be the three core issues for a trajectory of transformation that does not rely on state-directed development, or market-directed development, or community directed development only, but acknowledges the need of institutional and organisational diversity adapted to the issues and contexts concerned. Research alone can obviously not achieve institutional transformation, but research can contribute to the identification of opportunities and methodologies to engage in such exercises more effectively and/or identify the conditions of (im)possibility for certain initiatives or approaches for change. For this, the simplified images of ‘the state’, ‘the bureaucracy’, ‘the environmentalists’, ‘the civil engineers’, ’the NGOs’, ‘the international funding agencies’, and other black boxes that are so frequently used in the debate on water resources policy need to be unpacked. Such simplifications may be unavoidable in political struggles, but do not help in understanding when they are taken to be adequate descriptors not requiring further reflection. I suggest the following concrete themes and questions for further research to push our understanding of the politics of Indian water resources policy.42

I—The Rationale, Resilience and Dynamics of the Water Resources Bureaucracy (a) What are the cultural characteristics of irrigation/water resources departments? How to understand the demise of field-level technical innovation capacity in the water resources administration?

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(b) How do rent-seeking and the professional bias towards construction shape the behaviour of water resources bureaucracies? (c) What would be implications of different forms of ‘privatisation’ of water resources bureaucracies? (d) Which professional challenges would an ‘integrated perspective’ offer to water resources bureaucracies?

II—Whether and How Inclusive Water Resources Governance is/can be Consolidated into Institutional Frameworks, Particularly at the Intermediate/Meso Level (a) What can be learnt from examples of multi-stakeholder/participatory planning initiatives in the water resources sector? (b) Why did the Narmada/Sardar Sarovar conflict not generate more constructive interaction between state and civil society? (c) What can be learnt from experiments with intermediate/meso-scale units of water resources management like basin-level organisations? (d) What kind of state-water users/civil society policy interfaces have emerged in government water sector programmes, like watershed development, rural and urban drinking water supply and sanitation programmes and participatory irrigation management programmes, and how have these translated in policy transformation/evolution? (What kinds of processes of social and institutional learning are taking place in the water sector and how do these affect new policy initiatives?) (e) What role have political office bearers played in the enhancement or obstruction of water sector reform? (f ) How are the international water policy discourse and policy priorities being incorporated into national, state and local level policies and programmes, and what is the meaning of this?

III—Whether and How Policies/Interventions get Captured and Transformed at the Local Level by Local Interest Groups, Government Officials and Other Actors (a) What can be learnt from case studies of successful outscaling and upscaling of ‘grassroots’ initiatives (like for instance in watershed development)? How does bottom-up institutional and technical innovation take place in such instances? (b) What are the dynamics of bureaucrat-local elite networks in implementation of water resources policies and programmes? (c) What is the importance of social and political mobilisation in countervailing policy capture by local elites? (d ) What are the multiple agendas and meanings of water policy intervention?

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Notes 1. The year 1992 was also one in which the Report of the Committee on Pricing of Irrigation Water was published. The committee is usually referred to as the Vaidyanathan Committee, after its chairman. Many active in the sector consider this as a comprehensive and authoritative statement on the ills of the irrigation sector and their possible remedies. Whether or not, and how, this triggered the new initiatives in the case of Karnataka is not clear. 2. ‘Water sector’ is very loosely used here to indicate the collection of organisations involved in water resources ‘development’, governance, management and finance. The core of this network of organisations from a public policy perspective are the organisations involved in water resources ‘development’ as conventionally understood: the planning, design and construction of water infrastructure. As regards government organisations no coherence is implied—one of the issues actually is organisational and policy fragmentation. 3. In times when change is easily attributed to globalisation it may be important to explicitly make the point that ideas for water sector policy reform originate from well before the early 1990s, also within the government. The latter is clear from the 1987 National Water Policy for instance. 4. On Mexican irrigation reform see Kloezen (2002) and Rap (2004); its possible relevance for India is discussed in Shah, Scott and Buechler (2004). 5. For critiques of India’s most recent National Water Policy see Iyer (2003), Fouzdar (2003), Bandyopadhyay (2006). Shah, Scott and Buechler (2004) identify the lack of an operational component as the main weakness of the National Water Policy, as does Iyer (2003). 6. And also, domestically, less far reaching as compared to the electricity sector. 7. This report is available at http://www.psiru.org/reports/2004-12-W-Asia.doc and gives a recent assessment of privatisation of urban water supply in the Asia-Pacific region. In summary it states that ‘The [multinational] companies are struggling with existing contracts, have policies to withdraw, and show no enthusiasm for expansion except in China’ (p. 3). 8. For some analysis of this see contributions in Mollinga and Bolding (2004). 9. Interestingly, Anthony Bottrall, Programme Officer at the Ford Foundation New Delhi around 1990 in charge of water resources/irrigation, wrote the following about irrigation reform in 1992. ‘[T]here could be a possibility of [an irrigation reform] agenda being incorporated into–and thereby reinforcing– broader-based movements for democratic reform’ (Bottrall 1992: 245). ‘Those currently opposed to the status quo, or with good reasons to oppose it, include finance ministries (concerned about ID’s never-ending demands on public funds); politicians and their constituents in regions disadvantaged by present patterns of water development (either through direct damage, as in waterlogged areas, or through long neglect, as in tank areas); environmental action groups; local issue-based groups (such as opponents of state water policies in Maharashtra); and non-agricultural water users, including urban domestic and industrial users, who suffer from the absence of efficient methods of inter-sectoral water allocation’ (ibid.: 244). This coalition has not materialised so far. 10. See for example vision statements, outlines of strategies, evaluation documents, annual reports and publications on the websites of NGOs like WaterAid, WOTR in Maharashtra, Dhan Foundation in Tamil Nadu, and many others. 11. ‘Relative’ is included in this formulation because it very much depends on what one takes as comparison or standard. Given India’s population size it could be argued that there is not very much research, while some areas (both in the geographic and thematic senses) are definitely under-researched. Nevertheless, there is a large body of literature from which conceptual and policy ideas can be

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13.

14.

15.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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derived. The richness of Indian scholarship and scholarship on India is illustrated by its importance in development studies as a whole. This importance is also visible in water resources research. Other Indian journals that regularly publish on water resources issues on topics relevant to the theme of this paper (that is, on governance and policy) are the Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics and the Indian Journal of Public Administration. A regional journal that contains many good papers on Indian water resources issues is Water Nepal. In her review of the economics literature on irrigation published in 1990, Krishna Bharadwaj states that literature lacks a ‘social relations’ focus (Bharadwaj 1990). With the rise of New Institutional Economics (NIE) this is probably less true now than it was in the 1980s, but explicit discussion of the relations of social power is still rare in economics oriented papers. Examples are some of the publications of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) like the wellknown Dying Wisdom collection on indigenous water resources technologies and institutions. Another is the Rethinking the Mosaic publication by a collaboration group of Indian and Nepalese scholars (Moench et al. 1999), and yet another D. K. Mishra’s publications on floods in Bihar (see Mishra 2002). In India ‘action research’ is generally loosely used for any research in the context of implementation, but it can also have a more political and interactive meaning in relation to emancipatory projects (for a discussion of the concept see for instance Noffke 1994 and the editorial of the recently established journal Action Research (Brydon-Miller, Greenwood and Maguire 2003). Ramaswamy Iyer has done a great service to water policy studies with his 2003 book Water: Issues, Perspectives, Concerns, in which he describes, among other things, the history of certain administrative and policy processes in the water sector. It can very well be used as a basis for further enquiry into the dynamics of the India water resources policy process. Hydropolitics at the level of the South Asia region is reasonably well researched (see a.o. publications by Nepali scholars like Dixit and Gyawali, also see Crow (1995) and Iyer (2003)). These publications give interpretations of the motives and strategies of the different national government. In the politics of water the study of hydropolitics is in general one of the better-researched levels. This may be because it is a very public phenomenon, involving parliamentary debates, discussions in the national press, formal meetings between delegations of different kinds, and the like. As it is about the relationships between nations it is also an acceptable topic for political scientists. The authors of these papers may well take a different view. This may have to do with the different ways in which ‘process’ is understood in different approaches to policy analysis. See the discussion of Grindle (1999) below for some elaboration. It may also be noted at this point that such research is well established in some parts of the world and actively mobilised by corporations and governments to do ‘change management’. The report also has interesting things to say on the methodology of action research, which are not entered here. For the notion of ‘loose concept’ and their potential relevance for interdisciplinary research, see Löwy (1992). On the idea of boundary objects see Star and Griesemer (1989). Still, the notion of ‘not letting go a drop of water waste to the sea’, which signifies an absolute neglect of environmental concerns, seems to be the more generally held idea. And, I will add, what is needed is not some ‘formula’ that can be mindlessly applied whenever the need arises, but an ‘algorithm’, a procedure for decision making that allows flexible responses to ever-changing conditions within a given (agreed) framework. For one thing, this would require a public information and database, and sound river basin level hydrological modelling.

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24. I use the word contestation as a general term to refer to a variety of processes through which the allocation and distribution of water takes place. Contestation is meant to convey the inherently political character of water resources allocation and distribution. Through which institutions and organisations contestation is and should be taking place is the core question of a ‘governance’ perspective on water resources management? 25. The empirical evidence for this statement can be found by looking at the type of problems that are being reported from the field: the problematics of the Water Disputes Tribunals, the new issues in watershed development, the increased sectoral competition over water, the continuing problem of improving large-scale irrigation system management, the unsolved problem of the regulation of groundwater over-extraction, and the like. 26. I hope it is superfluous to remark that this does not mean that all the ‘old’ issues have ceased to be relevant. They, obviously, continue to be relevant but there is a new agenda to be added that, so it is suggested, opens new perspectives and opportunities for democratising water resources management. 27. For an illuminating discussion of these issues in the European context and in the context of a federal state (Germany), see Moss (2003). 28. I do not think, but this is speculative reasoning, that the vice versa applies very strongly. The overall dynamics of political democracy and transformation is state governance and administration since the 1990s seems to be driven much more by broader economic and social reform than by water sector reform. This indicates the declining importance of the water resources bureaucracy in the overall polity as compared to, say, the first two-three decades after independence. 29. Sheer reference to general categories like the ‘top-down’, hierarchical and prescriptive characteristics of the state machinery do not suffice as they are unable to account for different dynamics of bureaucracies with similar characteristics in different contexts. 30. Given only a few short quotations makes this sound like a rather crude statement on the nature of Indian democracy and the state. This does not do justice to Kaviraj’s rich and nuanced discussion, to which I refer for context and detail. The point I want to convey is that we need to mobilise such broader understanding of the state and democracy to make sense of water sector reform processes. 31. This sounds rather evolutionary, but needs not to be understood so. Kaviraj also argues that the form of political democracy that India has embarked upon is there to stay having entrenched itself in the way it has. Practically speaking there are a few other options than improving its functioning and expanding it. This can, of course, not be done by the simple copying of other trajectories, if only because these have their own serious difficulties. 32. There have been efforts in some states to establish intermediate level governance/planning institutions, for example at the district level. These generally seem to have been thwarted by a series of factors, including the unattractiveness of such intermediate structures to MLAs because they are seen to be competing power centres. There are several examples, also in the water sector, of how MLA membership of such bodies ‘neutralises’ their governance capacity. The Water Users Associations in Andhra Pradesh may be going this way also. The state-village dichotomy and the institutional gap is thus actively reproduced in some ways, and thus is not a gap in the sense of empty space. 33. Both sides may feel such a statement is far too simple and crude. However, my point is not about the details of the respective substantive concerns and arguments, which need to be taken very seriously indeed, bur about the, for lack of a better phrase, ‘underlying pattern’ acted out in such conflicts. 34. I discuss this issue in more detail in a paper called ‘Sleeping with the enemy’, published in Water Nepal (Mollinga 2005).

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35. Exemplary is the alternative proposal published by Paranjpye and Joy (1995), which could have been a very good basis for a negotiated compromise, but did not catch the imagination of either of the parties and didn’t make it to the policy agenda. This again suggests that the dichotomy or gap is not just an oversight or a void, but is actively reproduced through the current dynamics of the system. 36. The danger of this formulation is that the problem is reduced to one of geographical scales or levels. More is the matter, however. There is definitely a ‘unit of governance’ issue in a geographical sense, but this unit actually has many boundaries, including political, economic, socio-cultural, and others. A more proper image would be that of the ‘problemshed’ as the unit of analysis and intervention (rather than the simple geographical notion of ‘watershed’). For an application of this insight see the USBR Decision Process Guide http://www.usbr.gov/pmts/guide/probshed.html 37. See Mollinga and Bolding (2004) for a series of papers on the politics of irrigation reform. 38. This concept is evolving to areas outside the domain of inter-state water politics. Turton and Henwood propose to widen it to a ‘growing discipline in its own right’ (p. 245) focusing on ‘the study of the authoritative allocation of values in society with respect to water’ (p. 239)—basically, therefore, water governance or water and politics broadly understood. 39. My focus is on public policy/state policy here. 40. There are cases where policies are introduced without any expectation of implementation of stated objectives, but to serve other purposes. 41. Grindle makes no reference to the literature on policy discourses and policy narratives, which in my view have a lot to say on the power of ideas in policy processes. She does make the observation that ‘ideas may be important means through which international actors become players in domestic policy debates’ (Grindle 1999: 17). This seems to be very applicable to the water resources domain and is perhaps what the global politics of water is largely about. 42. My argument should not be misunderstood as an implicit disqualification of other types of research on water resources reform processes. The only suggestion made is to complement existing research and perhaps re-orient some of that towards the strategic questions outlined in this chapter.

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Corbridge, S., G. Williams, M. Srivastava and R. Veron (2003a). ‘Making Social Science Matter-I. How the Local State Works in Rural Bihar, Jharkand and West Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 38(24): 2377–89. ——— (2003b). ‘Making Social Science Matter-II. How the Rural Poor See the State in Rural Bihar, Jharkand and West Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 38(24): 2561–69. Crow, B. (with Alan Lindquist and David Wilson) (1995). Sharing the Ganges. The Politics and Technology of River Development. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Fouzdar, D. (2003). ‘National Water Policy-2002–System of Nature’s Water at the Receiving End’, Social Action, 53(3): 256–69. Goel, R. S. and V. B. Patel (2004). ‘Governance and Institutional Mechanism for Integrated Water Resources Management’, Indian Journal of Public Administration, 50(1): 174–89. Government of India (GOI) (1992). Report of the Committee on Pricing of Irrigation Water, New Delhi: Planning Commission. Also in GOI (1994). ‘Report of the Committee on Pricing of Irrigation Water’, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 49(1): 107–33. Grindle, M.S. (1977). Bureaucrats, Politicians and Peasants in Mexico. A Case Study in Public Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— (1999). ‘In Quest of the Political: The Political Economy of Development Policy Making’, working paper No. 17, Cambridge MA: Center for International Development, Harvard University. Gyawali, D. (1998). ‘Patna, Delhi and Environmental Activism: Institutional Forces Behind Water Conflict in Bihar’, Water Nepal, 6(1): 67–115. Hall, D.,V. Corral, E. Lobina and R. de la Motte (2004). Water Privatisation and Restructuring in Asia-Pacific. Research report. Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU), Business School, University of Greenwich. Iyer, R.R. (2003). Water. Perspectives, Issues, Concerns. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Kaviraj, S. (1996). ‘Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India’, in A. Leftwich (ed.), Democracy and Development. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— (1997). ‘The Modern State In India’, in M. Doornbos and S. Kaviraj (eds), Dynamis of State Formation. India and Europe Compared. Indo-Dutch Studies on Development Alternatives 19. New Delhi: Sage Publications. ——— (2001). ‘The Culture of Representative Democracy’, in N.G. Jayal (ed.), Democracy in India. Themes in Politics Series. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kerkvliet, B.J. Tria (1990). Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations in a Central Luzon Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kloezen, W. (2002). ‘Accounting For Water, Institutional Viability and Impoacts of Market-Oriented Irrigation Interventions in Central Mexico’. Ph.D. thesis, Wageningen University. Long, N. and J.D. Van der Ploeg (1989). ‘Demythologizing Planned Intervention: An Actor Perspective’, Sociologia Ruralis, 29(3/4): 226–49. Löwy, I. (1992). ‘The Strength of Loose Concepts–Boundary Concepts, Federative Experimental Strategies and Disciplinary Growth: The Case of Immunology’, History of Science, Vol. 30, Part 4, No. 90: 371–96. Mishra, D.K. (2002). Living with the Politics of Floods: The Mystery of Flood Control. Dehradun: People’s Science Institute. Moench, M., E. Caspari and A. Dixit (eds) (1999). Rethinking the Mosaic Investigations into Local Water Management. Kathmandu: Nepal Water Conservation Foundation and Boulder, Colorado: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition.

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Mollinga, P.P. (2001). ‘Water and Politics. Levels, Rational Choice and South Indian Canal Irrigation’, Futures, 33(8): 733–52. ——— (2002). ‘Investigating Irrigation Reform in India. Towards a Water Users Research Facility’, paper presented at the IWMI-SaciWATERs, Water Policy Futures in India, workshop, Hyderabad, India, October. ——— (2003). On the Waterfront. Water Distribution, Technology and Agrarian Change on a South Indian Canal Irrigation System. Wageningen University Water Resources Series. Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman (orig. 1998). ——— (2004). ‘Sleeping with the Enemy. Dichotomies and Polarization in Indian Debates on the Environmental Effects of Irrigation’, Water Nepal: Journal of Water Resources Development, 11(2): 73–101. Mollinga, P.P. and A. Bolding (eds) (2004). The Politics of Irrigation Reform. Contested Policy Formulation and Implementation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Global Environmental Governance series. Aldershot: England: Ashgate. Mooij, J. and V. de Vos (2003). ‘An Annotated Bibliography on Policy Processes, with Particular Emphasis on India’, working Paper, Sussex: Institute of Development Studies. Moss, T. (2003). ‘Solving Problems of ‘Fit’ at the Expense of Problems of ‘Interplay’? The Spatial Reorganisation of Water Management Following the EU Water Framework Directive’, in H. Breit, A. Engels, T. Moss, M. Troja (eds), How Institutions Change. Perspectives on Social Learning in Global and Local Environmental Contexts. Opalden: Leske + Budrich. Noffke, S. (1994). ‘Action Research: Towards the Next Generation’, Educational Action Research, 2(1): 9–21, available at http://www.triangle.co.uk/pdf/viewpdf.asp ?j=ear&vol=2&issue=1&year=199 4&article=ear-21sn&id=82.168.108.177, last accessed 28 September 2007. Ohlsson, L. (1995). Hydropolitics: Conflicts Over Water as a Development Constraint. London: Zed Books. Oorthuizen, J. (2003). Water, Works and Wages. The Everyday Politics of Irrigation Management Reform in the Philippines. Wageningen University Water Resources Series. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Paranjape, S. and K.J. Joy (1995). Sustainable Technology. Making the Sardar Sarovar Project Viable. A Comprehensive Proposal to Modify the Project For Greater Equity and Ecological Sustainability. Environment and Development Series. Ahmedabad: Centre for Environment Education. Rap, E. (2004). ‘The Success of a Policy Model. Irrigation Management Transfer in Mexico’. Ph.D thesis, Wageningen University. Saleth, M.R. (2004). Strategic Analysis of Water Institutions in India. Application of a New Research Paradigm. IWMI, Colombo, Research Report 79. Star, S.L. and J.R. Griesemer (1989). ‘Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science, 19(3): 387–420. Shah, T., C. Scott and S. Buechler (2004). ‘Water Sector Reforms in Mexico. Lessons for India’s New Water Policy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(4): 361–70. Stone, I. (1984). Canal Irrigation in British India. Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy. Cambridge South Asian Studies No. 29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turton, A. and R. Henwood (eds) (2002). Hydropolitics in the Developing World. A Southern African Perspective. Pretoria: African Water Issues Research Institute, University of Pretoria, available at www internationalwaterlaw.org/Articles/hydropolitics_book.pdf, accessed 3 July 2007. Visvesvaraya, M. (1951). Memoirs of My Working Life. Bangalore: Self-published.

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Wade, R. (1982). ‘The System of Administrative and Political Corruption: Canal Irrigation in South India’, Journal of Development Studies, 18(3): 287–328. Wade, R. and R. Chambers (1980). ‘Managing the Main System: Canal Irrigation’s Blind Spot’, Economic and Political Weekly, 15(39): A107–12. Waterbury, J. (1979). Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley. New York: Syracuse University Press.

About the Editor and Contributors

E DITOR Vishwa Ballabh is Professor of Economics and Coordinator for the Centre of Rural Management at the School of Business and Human Resources, Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur. Prior to joining XLRI, he was Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. Professor Ballabh graduated in Agriculture from Pant Nagar and holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and was a visiting scholar at Indiana University, USA, and a visiting scientist at the International Rice Research Institute, Philippines. He has over 20 years of teaching and research experience. His research interests include institutions and natural resource management and agricultural development. He is a member of several national and international professional societies in agricultural and natural resource economics. He was vice president of the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics in 1996–97. He has participated in several national and international conferences and has been consultant to several national and international development organisations such as the Ford Foundation, Royal Netherlands Embassy, UNICEF and International Water Management Institute. He has published widely and edited/co-edited books: Farm Forestry in South Asia, Co-operative Management of Natural Resources and Institutional Alternatives and Governance of Agriculture. He is presently co-editing a book (with Jasveen Jairath) — Droughts and Integrated Water Resources Management in South Asia: Issues, Alternatives and Futures. He has also co-authored a monograph titled Organising for Rural Development.

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C ONTRIBUTORS Kameshwar Choudhary is currently Professor of Sociology at the School of Rural Management, KIIT, Deemed University, Bhubaneshwar. Prior to this he was Professor in the Department of Sociology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He has also taught at the Department of Sociology, Institute of Social Sciences, Agra, and the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He has contributed several papers to a number of reputed journals on socio-political, educational and development issues. He has also worked in the area of natural resource management. He has held an associate-ship of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He was also visiting fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His publications include: Intellectual and Society and Globalisation, Governance Reforms and Development in India. Ashok Gulati is currently International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Director in Asia based in IFPRI’s New Delhi Office. He has served as Director of the Markets, Trade and Institutions Division of IFPRI in Washington D.C., from January 2001 to February 2006. Before joining IFPRI, Dr Gulati was a NABARD Chair Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, and a member of the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister of India. His special areas of research include analysis and policy advice on issues related to agricultural markets and development of value chains; agriculture trade liberalisation and negotiations in WTO with a focus on the likely implications on developing country interests, etc. Dr Gulati has published widely in national and international research journals, rendered policy advice to the Government of India, and interacted closely with the corporate sector involved in agribusiness, the farmer groups, and the civil society organisations. His publications include: WTO Negotiations on Agriculture and Developing Countries (forthcoming 2008) with Anwarul Hoda; The Dragon and the Elephant: Rural Development and Agricultural Reform Experiences in China and India (2007) co-edited with Shenggen Fan; and Agricultural Diversification and Smallholders in South Asia (2007) co-edited with P.K. Joshi and Ralph Cummings. Ramaswamy R. Iyer is Honorary Research Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. A former civil servant, he was Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources in the Government of India from 1985 to 1987. After leaving the Government, he worked as Research professor in the Centre for Policy Research from 1990 to 1999. He was a member of important review committees on the Sardar Sarovar and Tehri Projects (1993–97); of the National Commission on Integrated Water Resources Development Plan of the Government of India (1997–99); and of a Panel set up by the Government of India to assist it in its work in the context of the examination by the Neutral Expert of the India-Pakistan differences over the Baglihar Project under the Indus Waters Treaty (2005–06). He has been a consultant on different occasions to the World Bank, World Commission on Dams, UNDP, IWMI, and the European Commission, among others. He has been closely associated with the efforts under the aegis of the Madras Institute of Development Studies to bring the farmers of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka together

About the Editor and Contributors

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in a ‘Cauvery Family’ for the promotion of understanding and cooperation. He has written extensively on water-related issues. He has also published two books—WATER: Perspectives, Issues and Concerns and Towards Water Wisdom: Limits, Justice, Harmony—written numerous papers and articles, as well as contributed chapters to several edited books. Jasveen Jairath is currently Regional Coordinator South Asia CAPNET Programme based at Hyderabad. She began her career as an electrical engineer. She has a Masters in Political Economy from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a doctorate in economics from CESP, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been engaged with water issues in a prominently political context through research, advocacy and networking. Theoretical interpretations of intensive field investigations carried out by her in Punjab, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh have focussed on structural inequities in water sector that underlie current water crises. Through her studies and experimental forays on participatory irrigation management, droughts and urban water sanitation, she has emphasised the water problematique as one of monopolistic appropriation as opposed to merely that of low quantum or mis-management that is typically highlighted in popular discourse on water. She has served as a member of the board of governors of World Water Council, a prominent member of the Global Water Partnership from South Asia. Her edited collection of essays of droughts in South Asia is due for publication in 2008. S. Janakarajan is Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Madras and completed his post-doctoral work at Cornell University, USA. He was subsequently Visiting Professor at Oxford University, UK. His areas of specialisation include water management, irrigation institutions, water conflicts, urban and peri-urban issues, drinking water and sanitation, stakeholder analysis and dialogues. He has written several research papers and has also been a co-editor of various books. K.J. Joy is Senior Fellow with the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune. An activist-researcher, Joy has been a Fulbright Scholar at University of California, Berkeley, and a Visiting Fellow at CISED. His research interests centre on people’s institutions for natural resource management. He has co-authored a number of books on water, watershed and energy issues, including Sustainable Technology: Making the Sardar Sarovar Project Viable; Banking on Biomass: A New Strategy for Sustainable Prosperity Based on Renewable Energy and Dispersed Industrialisation; Watershed Based Development: A Source Book and the forthcoming Water Conflicts in India: A Million Revolts in the Making. Seema Kulkarni is presently Fellow and Co-ordinator of the Women and Water Network with SOPPECOM, Pune. She holds an MA degree in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has over 10 years of experience of working in drought-prone rural areas of Maharashtra. Her key area of interest is Gender and Natural Resource Management. She also works on the question of rural deserted women and their livelihoods. She was associated with

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the women’s movement in Sangli district of Maharashtra, working on issues of the peasant women. She has contributed several articles for various journals and conferences on gender and rural livelihoods. She has authored and co-authored the following publications: Intensive Cultivation on Small Plots and Women, Water and Livelihoods. Sudhakar Mishra is a freelance consultant working for the interests of the handlooms and handicrafts sector in Orissa. After completing post graduation from IRMA, Sudhakar worked in the cooperative sector for over 10 years. During this period he travelled extensively in India and abroad and seen the cooperatives from close quarters. He took active interest in market integration for the Producers’ Cooperatives products. Later he worked as Research Associate at IRMA. He was also associated as a consultant to Oxfam’s livelihood augmentation programmes in Orissa. Peter P. Mollinga is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development Studies (ZEF) in Bonn, Germany. Prior to this, he was Associate Professor at the Irrigation and Water Engineering group at Wageningen Agricultural University, the Netherlands. He is also Convener of SaciWATERs (South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies), Hyderabad, India. He has worked on irrigation management and reform, and more generally on the politics of water. He is presently involved in land and water management related research in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and India. His academic interest lies in the integration of natural and social science perspectives through the interdisciplinary study of water resources. Vishal Narain is an Associate Professor with the School of Public Policy and Governance at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon. He holds a Ph.D. from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests are in the analysis of public policy and institutions, governance and management of natural resources, and water policy and irrigation management reform. He has authored a book Institutions, Technology and Water Control; Water Users’ Associations and Irrigation Management Reform in Two Large-scale Systems in India. His research has also been published in international refereed journals like Water Policy and Environment and Urbanisation. Hemant Kumar Padhiari is a doctoral (Fellow) student at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He has done his Masters in Environmental Engineering and also has a Bachelor degree in Civil Engineering. He also worked as a project engineer for a few years with a construction firm. His areas of interest include natural resource management and environmental management. His current research work focusses on organisational and management aspects of service delivery in public irrigation systems. Sushil Pandey is a Senior Agricultural Economist and Deputy Head of the Social Sciences Division at the International Rice Research Institute, Philippines. His professional areas of expertise include agricultural research and development, institutional aspects of natural resource management and policy analysis. In addition to this broad area, his research has

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focussed on microeconomic analysis of farmers’ livelihood systems in unfavourable rainfed rice environments, risk coping mechanisms, constraints to technology adoption, and the dynamics of land use changes. He has co-authored/edited five books and has published over 50 research papers and book chapters. Suhas Paranjape is Visiting Fellow at CISED and Senior Fellow with SOPPECOM, Pune. He is also founding member of the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana. His interests cover the area of water, energy and biomass resources. He has co-authored a number of books in these areas: Sustainable Technology: Making the Sardar Sarovar Project Viable; Banking on Biomass: A New Strategy for Sustainable Prosperity Based on Renewable Energy and Dispersed Industrialisation; Watershed Based Development: A Source Book; and the forthcoming Water Conflicts in India: A Million Revolts in the Making. R. Parthasarathy is currently Director of Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Gota, Ahmedabad. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. Professor Parthasarathy was the HUDCO Chair Professor at CEPT University, Ahmedabad and has been Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research interests are broadly in the area of Natural Resources Management and have published extensively on issues relating to large-scale irrigation systems. Anjal Prakash is currently Programme Officer with the Policy and Partnership group of WaterAid India, based at New Delhi. He won the 2000 Ford Foundation scholarship to Wageningen University, The Netherlands for perusing a Ph.D. in Environmental Science. Dr Prakash has worked and researched in Gujarat since 1997 on issues of groundwater irrigation and management while being associated with VIKSAT, Nehru Foundation for Development in Ahmedabad. He also worked with the Government of Gujarat’s rural drinking water supply projects by being associated with Water and Sanitation Management Organisation in Gandhinagar. His research interests include equity and sustainability of water management in South Asia and social inclusion in water supply and sanitation projects. K.V. Raju is Professor and Head, Centre for Ecological Economics and Natural Resources, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, and Visiting Research Fellow in the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington D.C., USA. He had also worked in the International Water Management Institute, Agro-Climatic Regional Planning Unit of the Planning Commission, and Institute for Rural Management, Anand. Dr Raju has published widely in national and international research journals. Esha Shah is Research Fellow with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She was formerly a Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development (CISED), Bangalore. She has authored a book Social Designs: Tank Irrigation

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Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka. Esha is an environmental engineer turned social scientist whose main research interest involves anthropology and history of science and technology. Her recent research activities include the politics of the knowledge generation, risk and uncertainty of new and emerging technologies in developing societies, and history of the Green Revolution. Tushaar Shah is currently Principal Scientist at the Colombo-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in their India office. He has also served as former Director of IRMA. Trained as an economist and management specialist, his research interest lies in institutions and policies for groundwater management, a subject on which he has published extensively. In a research career spanning 25 years, he has worked extensively on water policy and institutions with a strong focus on the governance of groundwater economies of nations. He has published five books and over 50 research papers. Dr Shah also advises the Planning Commission of the Government of India on the issues of water policy and water governance. He was honoured with the Outstanding Scientist award of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 2002. Manoj T. Thomas is currently Assistant Professor in Strategic Management Area at XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, Jamshedpur. A civil engineer from NIT Raipur, he did his post graduation in rural management from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. In his doctoral work at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand, he worked on the dynamics of fee collection in large irrigation projects. He has been working in the areas of rural management and management of natural resources for more than a decade and has a varied experience in field level implementation and managing research consulting projects.

Index absolute droughts, 50 agrarian sector, 207, 212 agrarian structure, 168 agricultural growth, Bihar, 213 east India, 212 Gujarat, 219–227 West Bengal, 212 agricultural practices, 149, 150 agriculture subsidy, 104 agriculture, during Green Revolution, 224–27 capitalist development in, 221 impact on water quality, 3 agriculture/industry water conflicts, 22 agro-ecology of Gujarat, 216, 217t Almatti project, 21 Andhra Pradesh State Irrigation Development Corporation, 92 Andhra Pradesh Water and Trees Act, 315 Andhra Pradesh, groundwater over-exploitation, 315 reform programme, 165 WUAs, 93 area irrigated by source, 223t, 225t area under principle crops, 223t Asonpur village, 196, 206, 207, 209 Atchakat, 139, 149, 151 landholding pattern in, 142, 143 schematic map of, 141f basins, closure of, 349 bavi irrigation, 149–150 bavi water, transportation of, 152f

Beneficiary Farmers’ Associations (BFAs), 318 bhaichaara-based organisation, Haryana, 169 Bihar, lack of public water supply system, 309 Bordos, 256 Borewells, and pump sets, 198t, 200–01t, 203t cost-effective technology for, 202 density of, 196 British colonial administration, 352 building of civil society, 137 bureaucracies, centralisation of India’s, 353 Calamity Relief Fund (CRF), 51 CALFED Bay-Delta Program, 273–274 canal irrigation, 106, 120, 159, 163, 350, 356 canal irrigation financing in India, 91 canal irrigation systems, 104, 115, 170 canal management/maintenance, 103, 106 canal water for irrigation, 20 canal water pricing, 89, 96, 103–04 capital mobilisation by private sector, 91 cash-crop production, 224 Cauvery water dispute, 4, 21, 28, 349 Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal award, 4 Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) of India, 226, 249, 304n Central Groundwater Authority, 20, 249 centre and states, relations between, 185 CETPs. See Common Effluent Treatment Plants Chikotra Valley issue, 276 China, collectives, 240 electricity supply industry, 245 irrigation reforms, 330

378

Governance of Water

local government and party organisation, 243 socio-economic and institutional preconditions, 251 taxes on farmers, 243 village governance institutions, 243 village groundwater economy, 244 water bureaucracy, 250, 252 water management, 248, 249, 250 Chinese Water Law, 245 civil society, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 31–32, 38, 50, 100, 137–39, 156–57, 159, 189, 190, 191, 195, 229, 270, 277, 279, 280, 297, 298, 306, 340 CNA. See National Water Commission collaborative policy making, 270–73 collective action, 145–48 Command Area Development Agencies (CADAs), 318 commission agents, 206t Committee on Pricing of Irrigation Water, Report of, 90, 343, 364n Common Effluent Treatment Plants (CETPs), 291 common pool resource (CPR), 272, 284n, 287 communitarian model, 319 community formation, 138 community-based associations, 137, 139 community-level drinking water committee, 73 comparative institutionalism, 359 competitive populism, 353 conflict management techniques, 190 conflicts and sustainable development, degrees of, 297f conflicts, 294, 295 consensus and conflict theories, 139 Constitution of India, 168, 295 control relations, 165 corporate governance, 18 cost recovery objectives, 106 COTAS (Acquifer Management Councils) 257–260 County Water Bureau, 249 CPR. See common pool resource ‘crafting institutions’, 161, 162 Credit-Subsidy Programme, 199, 202 CRF. See Calamity Relief Fund crop output, 224 cropping pattern, change in, 224 crops rotation, 151, 153 cultivation risk, 149

culture fishery, 322 cumulative refinance, 204 dam review process, 274, 275 DDP. See Desert Development Programme Decentralisation, 119, 162, 168, 169 decentralised recharge movement, 326 decentralised water management, 52 deep tube well (DTW), 240 deliberative democracy model, and Jürgen Habermas, 139, 271 demand forms, 112 demand management initiatives, 251 demographic trends in India, 43 Desert Development Programme (DDP), 52 desirable water policy, 342 developed states, rivalry amongst, 186 development policy, 139, 156 development processes, 6 Development Sociology group, 161 disasters and poverty, 40 dispute resolution mechanism, 189–190 distribution of households, 129t DPAP. See Drought Prone Areas Programme drinking water sector, 68 shortage of, 4 drought declaration, process of, 50, 54 Drought Prone Areas Programme (DPAP), 52 drought proofing, 50, 54 drought relief measures, 51 drought-induced impacts, 55 drought-proneness, 44 droughts, 22, 26, 36–42, 44, 45, 49, 50–51, 53, 54–56 droughts discourse, 37, 48 DTW. See deep tube well Dublin conference, 1992, 269, 358 ecological adversities, 48 economic growth and urbanisation, 253 economic individualism, 221 economic reforms, 161 electrical power, supply, 51 consumption of, 315 electricity-irrigation nexus, 245

Index electrification of villages, 223 employment and forced migration, 293 Employment Assurance Scheme, 347 Englebright dam, 274 Environment Protection Rules for Development and Protection of Ground Water, draft, 226 environmental police force, 256 environmental pollution, 301 ‘equitable appropriation’ doctrine, 184 equity, approach, 69 in water entitlements, 71–72 in voice, 72–73 Eradi (Ravi-Beas) Tribunal, 181, 183 ethnography, role of, 139, 140 exchange participants, 329 FAIA. See Financially Autonomous Irrigation Agency Fariani village, 196, 209 farm income stagnation, 188 farm power supply, metering of, 316 farmers’ organisations, 161 farming community, 188, 207, 295 Federal Electricity Commission (FEC), 256 Federal Water Law, Mexico, 254 feminist water advocates, 66, 70, 74 financial autonomy, 117 Financially Autonomous Irrigation Agency (FAIA), 92 Fish Farmers’ Development Agencies, 322 fisher communities, 321 fishery cooperatives, 319, 321 floods, 26 food, 43 Free Boring Scheme, 199 Ganges Treaty, 28 gender equity, 67–70 gender inclusive governance, 61 gender-just agenda for natural resources, 61, 62 gender participation in drinking water sector, 68 General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS), 9, 270 gestation lags, 81 Global Water Partnership (GWP) Framework for Action, 269

379

global water sector, 307 governance, 6, 11, 18, 36, 55, 278, 280, 313 accountability in, 168 alternate system of, 57 crisis of, 189 definition by Constitution, 354 design and operation of, 53 in development discourse, 269 in water sector, 164 institutional mechanism of, 37 limitations of, 39 modernist paradigm of governance, 271 operational features of, 54 performance of states, 347 problems with, 272 structure of, 101 perspectives on, 100 Government of India Water Policy, 315 government role, 118 governmental agencies, 20 Green Revolution, 187, 219 groundwater, 65 access, 290 bills, 250 buyers, 210t, 211t concessions, 256 demand management, 329 depletion, 238, 239 development, 3, 195–97t, 199, 202, 206, 212, 213 ecology and canal network, 229 economy, 239, 262 exploitation, 30, 230 institutions and policies, 238 law and policy, 250 mining, 218 output response, 128 overdraft, 289 ownership rights, 196, 239, 288 pollution, 289, 295 recharge, 325 resources, access to, 199, 226 utilisation, 291, 294 withdrawals, regulations on, 324 commercial transactions of, 295 use and abuse of, 289–94

380

Governance of Water

groundwater governance, 64, 195–214, 237 in Gujarat, 215–36 in South Asia, China and Mexico, 237–66 in South Asia, China and Mexico, 261t ecological framework for, 232 political economy of, 215–36 groundwater irrigation, 196, 237, 238 costs of, 245 Gujarat, 220–227 in India, 289 groundwater markets, 207–12, 215, 320, 321 Groundwater Model Bill, 225 Guanajuato, 256, 258 Guanajuato COTAS (Technical Councils for Water Management), 258, 259 Guanajuato Water Resources Council, 258 Gujarat Agriculture Commission, 125 Gujarat, agricultural growth, 231 Gujarat Irrigation Department, 125 Gujarat Water Resources Development Corporation (GWRDC), 92, 224 Gujarat, agricultural growth, 219–27 agro-ecology of, 216, 217t decline in groundwater level, 215 inland fishery, 322, 323 Joint Irrigation Management Programme, 317 natural resources distribution, 230 Public Tubewell Transfer programme, 331 rainfall, 216 water scarcity, 215, 218 WUAs in, 166 Habermasian notion of communicative rationality, 139 Haryana, bhaichaara-based organisation, 169 WUAs in, 165, 166 Hatberia village, 196 Helsinki Rules, 28, 184 hollow state, 102 hydropolitics, 357 IDNDR. See International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction IFRC. See International Federation of Red Cross

IMT. See irrigation management transfer incentive concentration, 330 incentive diffusion or perversion, 330 incentives and authority, structures of, 331 incentives structure, 117 Independent Regulatory Commission for Canal Irrigation (IRCCI), 96 India, bureaucracy, 353 demographic trends in, 43 diversity of contexts, 277 electricity pricing policies, 245 inland fishery, 322 institutional experience in water sector, 313 political democracy, 351 water economy, 309 water sector reforms, 340 Indian Easement Acts, 1882, 221 Indian Irrigation Commission, 148 Indian irrigation reforms, 90 Indian policy processes, 359 Indian rivers, interlinking of, 270 Indian water resources policy, 362 Indian water sector, 11, 12, 315, 329, 341 IndianPIM, 161, 163 Indus Waters Treaty, 28, 179 informal credit market, 202 inland fishery, 322, 323 Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), 12 Institute of Water Studies, 291 institutional arrangements for groundwater irrigation, 241–42t institutional changes, 310, 313, 331 institutional credit support, 204 institutional environment, 331 institutional experience in water sector, 313 institutional finance, 212, 225 institutional interventions, 314f institutional reforms, 93, 94 institutional transformation, 362 institutions, 307 Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), 10, 38, 70, 270, 348 Intensive Fish Culture Programme, 322 International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), 38

Index International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC), 39 International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), 38 International Water Management Institute (IWMI), 237, 277 inter-state politics, 357 inter-state river-water disputes, 4, 12, 21, 174–92, 283 Inter-State Water Disputes Act, 1956, 183, 184 IRCCI. See Independent Regulatory Commission for Canal Irrigation IRMA. See Institute of Rural Management, Anand IRMA Silver Jubilee Symposium, 12 irrigated agriculture, 3, 222 irrigation agencies, 91, 96 irrigation bureaucracy, 118 irrigation cess, 100, 105 Irrigation Commission, 125, 221 irrigation costs, 81 Irrigation Department, Gujarat, 125 Irrigation Finance Corporation, 91 irrigation infrastructure, 148 irrigation management transfer (IMT), 124, 160, 163, 317 irrigation management, 95, 159 irrigation needs, 106, 153 irrigation organisation, China, 240 irrigation potential, 219 irrigation projects, farmers’ participation in, 161 farmer involvement in, 87 Gujarat, 223 irrigation reforms, 164, 330 irrigation sector, 4, 79 irrigation services, 105 irrigation sources, 126 irrigation subsidies, 79–84, 87, 90, 96, 97 irrigation systems, 87, 112 irrigation timings, 154 irrigation use, 125 irrigation water sources, 149 irrigation, 81, 84, 85, 224 ISDR. See International Strategy for Disaster Reduction IWMI. See International Water Management Institute

381

IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program, 314, 344 IWRM. See Integrated Water Resources Management IWRM debate, 358 Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme, 68 Joint Irrigation Management Programme, Gujarat, 317 jowar tithi, 150 Karnataka Neeravari Nigam Limited (KNNL), 92 Karnataka Tank Irrigation Project, 141, 142 Karnataka, budgetary allocation for water projects, 91 irrigation reforms, 140, 339 WUAs in, 165 KBJNL. See Krishna Bhagya Jal Nigam Limited Khemaupur village, 209 KNNL. See Karnataka Neeravari Nigam Limited Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KFW), 66 Krishna Bhagya Jal Nigam Limited (KBJNL), 91 Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal, 21, 183 Kutch branch canal (KBC), 228 land revenue system, 222 land types, 149 large canal irrigation systems, 100, 103 Law of the Nation’s Waters, 254 ‘least worst scenario’, 70 leather industry, 291, 297 local resource management, 253 Machhahi village, 196, 209 Mahabubnagar, 55 Maharashtra Rajya Dharangrasth va Prakalpagrasth Shetkari Parishad, 276 Maharashtra, law on irrigation wells, 314 WUAs in, 165, 166 Mahi Right Bank Canal (MRBC), 107 major projects for storage/diversion of river waters, 30 major projects, 22, 25 ‘management by objectives’ (MBO), 119 market forces, 55 market interactions for a public organisation, 102f

382

Governance of Water

market, 55, 101 MBO. See ‘management by objectives’ mean values of land area, Thalota, 129t medium projects, 22 melatto, 149 Mexico, agrarian structure, 254 groundwater depletion, 253 groundwater economy reforms, 253 land reforms, 254 population imbalance, 253 power supply to agricultural users, 256 water availability, 253 Water Law, 254, 260 WUAs, 164, 255 MID. See Minor Irrigation Department migration due to environmental degradation, 293, 94 minimum support prices, 103 Minor Irrigation Department (MID), 66 officials’ attitude, 146 farmers’ attitude towards, 147 rule making of, 146 MRBC. See Mahi Right Bank Canal organisational structure of, 107, 108f recovery of irrigation charges, 109t MSD. See multi-stakeholder dialogue MSPs. See Multi-Stakeholder Participation/ Platforms Mukti Sangharsh Movement, 70 Mullapperiyar agreement, 21 multi-stakeholder dialogue (MSD), 299, 300 Multi-Stakeholder Participation/Platforms (MSPs), 10, 269–86 multi-stakeholder processes, 271 Multi-Stakeholders’ Committee, 301, 303 NABARD. See National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), 227 Narmada canal, 228 Narmada river, 227 Narmada Valley Development Plan (NVDP), 227 Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal, 183 National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), 205t, 212, 239 National Bureau of Soil Survey and Planning, 216

National Calamity Contingency Fund (NCCF), 51 National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development Plan (NCIWRDP), 23, 24 national groundwater economies structure, 262t National Registry of Water Rights, 254, 255 National Sample Survey (NSS), 309 National Water Commission (CNA), 254, 260 National Water Law, 31, 250 National Water Policy (NWP), 10, 125, 253, 270, 340, 343 national water-grid, 26 natural resource data management systems (NRDMS), 283 natural resource management, 167, 169 natural resources, 186 NCCF. See National Calamity Contingency Fund NCIWRDP. See National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development Plan needs approach, 68 Net State Domestic Product (NSDP), 186 Network Reform programme, 246 New Institutional Economics (NIE), 307, 320 new public management, 119 NRDMS. See natural resource data management systems NSS. See National Sample Survey O&M investments in canals, 125 Ocampo COTAS, 259 organisational plurality, 169 Orissa power reforms, 316 Ostrom, Elinor, 162 over-extraction from aquifers, 350 Palar Basin Board, 302 Palar River Basin, 290 groundwater use in, 294 MSD meeting, 300 pollution in, 297 sample survey, 292, 293 verdict against tanners of, 296 Panchayati Raj Act, 7 Pani Panchayat, 70 Parambikulam Aliyar agreement, 21 participation and democratisation, 162 Participatory Irrigation Development and Management (PIDM), 66

Index Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM), 10, 30, 93, 115, 159–163, 317 project villages, Gujarat, 127t working group, 93 academic constituency, 161 Andhra Pradesh experiment, 116 breaking the impasse in, 170 difficulties of, 124 disenchantment with, 165 DSC’s experience in, 116 impasse of scale, 166 implementation in India, 116 Indian Network on (IndianPIM), 161, 163 initiation of, 227 legal framework for, 139 social effects of, 167 PIM/IMT programmes, 318 participatory organisations, 73 participatory water governance (PWG), 270 Philippines model, 164 PIDM. See Participatory Irrigation Development and Management PIM. See Participatory Irrigation Management policy processes, 356, 358–360 political and administrative institutions, 352, 354 politics of water, 356 pollution generation, 288, 291 population increase, 42 power supply metering, 316 power supply to agricultural users, Mexico, 256 precipitation, 44 presas, 256 primary pump set markets, 204 private-public participation, 118 privatisation, 28, 162 project-affected persons, 22 project-level federations, 94 project-level users organisations, 94 Provincial Water Bureau, 249 public and private organisations, 119 public investment, 86 public management reform, 101 public policy, political economy of, 359 public science, 275 public sector reform, 101 Public Tubewell Transfer programme, Gujarat, 327t, 331

383

pump irrigation markets, 207 pump sets number, 196 Punjab and Haryana, disputes between, 179 Punjab settlement, 180 Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004, 182 Punjab, 187, 188 Qin Shi Huangdi, 247 rainwater harvesting, 25, 26, 325 Rampur village, 209 Ravi-Beas water dispute, 21, 179–82, 187 recovery process, 110, 111, 113, 120 recovery system, 114, 119 reform process, 102, 254, 317 regulations, 226 regulatory management actions, 226 relations between centre-states/states-states, 185 Report of the Committee on Pricing of Irrigation Water, 343 Report of the World Commission on Dams (WCDs), 273 reservoir operations, 94 resistance, impasse of, 165 resource use efficiency, 103 revenue deficits, 85 rights and entitlements, 159 Rio conference, 358 riparian doctrine, 182 risk management, 38, 40 River Boards Act 1956, 21 river development agreements between states, 175 river linking project, 11, 26 river-water sharing, 184 RO cottage industry, 323 rotational water distribution, 347 rule making role of the state, 156 rural water supply, 19 rural/urban water conflicts, 22 salinisation problem, 238 Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana (SGRY), 51 Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), 216, 227–30, 324, 325 scarce resource use, 67 scarcity and surplus, 42 Second International Water Tribunal, 292 self-enforcement, 330

384

Governance of Water

sellers’ monopoly power, 133 SGRY. See Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana sharecropping, 149 Shetmajoor Kashtakari Shetkari Sanghattana (SKSS), 276 Sinchai Samitis, 317 social analysis, criticality of, 312f social benefits, 103 social dialogue approach, 299 social dislocation, 55 social movements, 6, 11, 307, 354, 355 social organisations, 169 Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), 70, 163, 172, 276 Soil Survey and Land Use Organisation, 292 South Asia and North China, 237, 238, 245 South Asia energy costs of groundwater, 245 South Asian water administration, 247, 248f SSP. See Sardar Sarovar Project stakeholder analysis, 299 state agencies and farmers, 148 State Electricity Boards (SEBs), 245, 315 state institutions, 156 State Water Commission of Guanajuato (CEAG), 258, 264n State Water Management Council, 258 subsidies, 202, 206, 213, 234n, 298, 322, 323 subsidising agriculture, 103 Sukhomajari experiment, 329 summer cropping, 155 supply-side augmentation, 30 Supreme Court, environmental decision of, 249 surface water, 3, 4, 15, 25, 43, 63, 71, 73, 86, 134, 216, 349 Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL), 180, 181 Swayambhoo water institutions, 327–28t, 325, 329 Switzerland, water economy of, 309–310 SYL. See Sutlej Yamuna Link talati, corruption charges against, 114 Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage (TWAD) Board, 292 tank irrigation, 148–150 Tank Irrigation Committee (TIC), 142 Tank Irrigation Project, 142 tank water availability, 154 tank construction quality, 147

tanning technology, 291 Tarun Bharat Sangh, 325 tax and non-tax revenue, 104 Taxation Enquiry Commission, 90, 222 Tembu Lift Irrigation Scheme (TLIS), 276 Tenancy Act, Gujarat, 222 Thalota, 126, 127t, 128, 129–131, 133, 135n total quality management (TQM), 119 Township Water Bureau, 249 Tranol, 133 transaction costs, 316, 317, 329, 330 transparency in transactions, 96 tradeable water rights, 95 tube well companies in Thalota, 131t tube well water charges, 130 tube wells, 224, 225, 240, 320 Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal, 346 Uchchangi Dam issue, 276 UKP. See Upper Krishna Project UN Convention, 28 Unidades de Riego, 257 unified governance system, 246–47 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 269 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 9 Upper Krishna Project (UKP), 91 urban water supply, 19 ‘use and need management’, 47 user involvement, 94 Uttar Pradesh government support, 212 Vaidyanathan Committee report, 81, 89, 92 village committees (VCs), 240 village community, 353 village governance institutions, China, 243 village groundwater economies, 239, 244t Village Vidyut Sangha, 316 Visvesvaraya Committee, 221 volumetric pricing, 105, 106 warabandi rotation schedule, 154 Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 295 water, agenda for action, 29 and environmental protection laws, 295

Index as a social good, 278 as an economic good, 8, 9, 65, 282 as an ecosystem resource, 272 as basic human right, 282 availability, 3, 31, 174 commodification of, 8 common pool character of, 71 compartmentalisation of, 71 contestation over, 11 demand for, 15 distribution and allocation, 349 diversion of, 144 negotiated allocation, 350 wastage of, 86 water abundance, determination of, 65 water access, 9, 43, 63, 72, 287 Water Affairs Bureau, 248 water analyses, 49 water bureau structure, 249 water bureaucracies, 246, 341 water charges collection, 90, 96, 107, 108, 110 water conflicts, 31 water control, 356 water crisis, 23, 296f water disasters, 38 water disputes, 186, 187 water distribution, 86, 144, 148, 156, 347 water economy, 307, 309, 310, 311f water entitlement for women, 72 ‘water for life’, 29, 30 water governance, 5–8, 19, 20, 21, 61, 190, 269–86 water harvesting, 10 water infrastructure, 340 water institutions and policies, 252t, 307 water level decline, 287, 288 water management, 47, 65, 133, 149, 248 decentralisation of, 66 deficiencies in, 46 localised systems of, 40 Water Management and Service Bureaux, 249 water management regulations, 250 water management transfer programmes, 95 water management use, 343 water markets, 5, 27, 29, 195, 196, 209, 221, 225, 288 water outlets, 154 water overdraft, 64, 219

385

water policy research agenda, 346 water politics, 21, 32 water pollution, 291, 292 water pricing, 30, 87, 96, 103–105, 125–129, 207 water problems, 64, 310 water provision and economic growth, 308f water quality, 3 water rates, 29, 134 water requirements, 47 water resource distribution, 174 water resource management, 250, 356 water resources, 4, 8 alternative approaches to, 342 community management of, 124 global politics of, 358 integration of, 71 mismanagement of, 218 politics of policy on, 357 sub-systems of, 298 water resources bureaucracy, 341, 354, 362 Water Resources Consolidation (WRC) projects, 94 water resources development (WRD), 48, 49 water resources development and management (WRD&M), 39, 47 water resources governance, 355, 356, 363 water resources management, 189, 340, 343, 348, 349, 356 water resources policies, 343–45, 356, 357 water rights, 27, 62, 72, 106, 124, 255 water risks, 37–39 water rotation rules, 153, 154 water scarcity, 41–46, 64, 288 aggravation of, 11 de-linking from WRD, 56 determination of, 65 in Gujarat, 218 local responses to, 54 patterns of, 37 pilferage due to, 5 water sector reform, 10, 15, 66, 340, 341, 342, 356, 361, 362 water sector, categories of, 72 challenges faced by, 348, 362 feminist movement in, 64 formalisation of, 308

386

Governance of Water

planning in, 71 privatisation of, 117, 118 structural dynamics of, 346 water sellers, 209 water service, 73, 105, 324 water sharing, 156, 157 water sources, 3, 31 water subsidies, 86 water supply, 3, 24, 309 water tank outlets, 143 water trading, 208, 255 water transport regulation, 288 water use, 4, 24, 30, 63, 85 Water Users Association (WUA), 10, 73, 95, 317 agrarian relationships of, 167 and tube well companies, 128 design characteristics of, 170 development tasks of, 138 establishment of, 159, 164, 166, 167, 168 financial sustainability of, 94 in Andhra Pradesh, 93

in Gujarat, 126, 166 in Haryana, 165, 166 in India, 93 in Karnataka, 165 in Maharashtra, 165, 166 in Mexico, 164, 255 literature on, 170 water-induced adversities, 50 watershed development, 25, 52, 227 Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), 12, 49 WCD. See World Commission on Dams well irrigation, 5, 221, 223, 289 Western India States Agency, 222 ‘willingness-to-pay’, 105 Women, 62, 63, 68, 69, 72 World Bank Staff Appraisal Report, 141 World Commission on Dams, 355, 358 World Trade Organization (WTO), 358 WRC. See Water Resources Consolidation WRD&M. See water resources development and management