RAMASWAMY R IYER

I

S and K subsume a large number of ideas under the broad heading “IWRM”: for instance, a national water policy, water law, basin-planning, regulation, the treatment of water as an economic good, pricing, full cost recovery, and so on. I have some difficulty with this.

First, in its origins, the IWRM was the water planner’s attempt to widen the hitherto dominant engineering perspective by including and internalising environmental, social and human concerns, and to enlarge the planning horizon from isolated “projects” to a larger hydrological framework such as a river basin. (IWRM and “drainage basin management” are being propagated by the global water partnership (GWP), the World Water Council and the annual Stockholm Water Symposium). On the whole, S and K approve of IWRM, but argue that India is not yet “ripe” for it. However, this begs the question: how good is the IWRM approach? It was undoubtedly an advance on earlier thinking, but continues to remain a refinement of the engineering tradition; and (in combination with the “basin-planning” component) it has an in-built tendency towards centralisation and gigantism. S and K evidently do not share these reservations. (Incidentally, both the idea of “integration” and that of “basin-planning” antedate the emergence of IWRM as a slogan.)

Secondly, water as an economic good, pricing as the tool of regulation, the principle of full cost recovery, the creation of property rights in water and making them tradeable, the privatisation of water services, and so on, derive from neoliberal economics, and are part of the economic reform and structural adjustment programmes advocated by the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). That advocacy began several years ago, and the advocates were not talking about IWRM at that stage. IWRM as conceived by GWP and others may have incorporated some of these components later.

Thirdly, the advocacy of a national water policy and/or a national water law can be independent of both IWRM and neoliberal “economic reform” programmes. The case for these can be and has been argued on other grounds.

Thus, there are three separate streams: IWRM, neoliberal market fundamentalism, and an advocacy of a national water policy and law. They may overlap, and each may incorporate some elements from the other two, but conceptually it is useful to keep them distinct.

As for the proposition “don’t apply one standard nostrum to all countries; take note of what exists and has evolved”, one can agree with that up to a point. Indeed, one of the strongest criticisms of the Stuctural Adjustment Programme is that a standard set of prescriptions is imposed on all countries. However, “what has evolved” may not always be good. For instance, water markets have emerged in India around tubewells and borewells: are they an unmixed blessing? India is the world’s largest user of groundwater: is that necessarily a good thing, even if there have been dramatic short-term gains? S and K refer with evident approval to the local, entrepreneurial responses to the given circumstances, and one can partly agree, but some of those responses have led to the alarming depletion of groundwater in India, which is now a matter of grave concern. Similarly, the availability of canal water under major/medium projects led to the adoption of water-intensive cropping patterns that in turn led to the demand for more and more and still more water, and to intractable conflicts. Clearly, whatever has emerged is not necessarily good. That is of course obvious, and I am sure that S and K will not disagree with it.

No Positive Recommendation

What then should we do? S and K seem to come close to saying that nothing can be done about it, until India has become a wholly modern economy. To be fair to them, they are not advocating the passive acceptance the nostrum of IWRM, but not equally forthcoming on positive recommendations.

Incidentally, the central assumption underlying their theorising is that water in India is largely outside the formal economy. There is a considerable measure of truth in that proposition, but is it wholly true? Canal irrigation under “major/medium” projects has been a feature of Indian agriculture, and though its importance has declined, it still remains a significant factor; and it involves a relationship (once strong and now weakened) between irrigators and the public works department (PWD) or the irrigation department of the state government. That relationship is governed by an irrigation act or an irrigation and drainage act in most states. Major/medium irrigation has been riddled with inefficiencies, but it continues to function in a fashion. How can we possibly classify this under “the informal sector”? Similarly, are the tank farmers’ associations in the south wholly “informal”? As for groundwater, there may be 20 million tubewells, but are they all instances of “self-supply”? A large number of them may fit that description, but are there no tubewells owned by water companies, large industries, cooperative societies, and the state government or public corporations?

Let us forget IWRM; let us forget also the WB/IMF/ADB prescriptions. What are India’s problems in relation to water? To repeat some familiar points, they are an inability to assure safe drinking water and sanitation services to all; competitive and unsustainable demand for ever more water, particularly in agriculture, leading to large supply-side projects with all their attendant problems; bitter and intractable interstate and inter-use conflicts; destruction of aquifers; unmanageable generation of waste and huge problems of disposal in urban areas; pollution/contamination of water sources, turning rivers into sewers or poison, and rendering aquifers unusable; and so on. Faced with these problems, can we shrug our shoulders and say that policies, laws, regulation, pricing, etc, will not work? Or should we explore possibilities of making them work through better governance, education, innovative methods, and more than anything else, the mobilisation of civil society and changing our ways of thinking about water?

EPW

Email: ramaswam@vsnl.com