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Governance of Water—Institutional Alternatives and Political Economy Despite the recent large-scale floods, the fact is that there is not enough water to satisfy the needs of burgeoning industry, population and agriculture. In 1951, it was estimated by the government that the per capita availability of fresh water in India was 3,450 cubic meters per year. It had come down to approximately 1,250 cubic meters in 1999 and estimated to go down to 760 cubic meters by the year 2050. While the government is aware of the problem, it does pretty little to ensure that water is used judiciously and conserved as much as possible. If anything under short-term political compulsions, the government encourages some sections of the society to use water wastefully, allows others to waste the remaining water by polluting it and ensures that some sections of society remain water starved so that some other sections can wallow in as much water as they desire. How all this is done is very well documented in the case studies presented here. Virtually, all the studies notice that it is because water is under priced that much of the waste happens. The misuse of irrigation water from canals and tanks comes in for much comment. The concomitant suggestions revolve around the problem of fixing an adequate price to this water. Esha Shah, in her study of tank water in Karnataka, presents the case of setting up a water users association. Collective decision making by a community may not be the appropriate way of going about managing water, she warns, for community could be as much an arena for conflict as for consensus. The government’s emphasis for setting up formal associations may not succeed, she suggests, because their working may be alien to the local communities. There seems to be an unstated suggestion here, as was in her earlier book on community use of water, that the government cannot palm off the responsibility of regulating water use to local communities. It would have to come forward and take up this responsibility. If India needs to conserve her water resources, the government will have to take the initiative and not leave the matter in the hands of civil society in the name of empowering people. Analogous problems are reported by Vishal Narain in the management of the use of canal waters. Ground water use is studied in eastern UP and Gujarat and comparisons made with the manner in which the use of ground water is regulated in China and Mexico. The one conclusion that these field studies point out is that people will find ways out of top down restrictions on the use of water. Tough regulatory measures will not succeed. Without any further evidence, however, they all recommend that the way for ensuring a more responsible use of water would be to put an appropriate value to this common resource. In this, I suspect they are merely reiterating the current wisdom doled out by Western aid agencies without conducting any specific study in the field. Peter Mollinga, in his review of the insights from field studies, admits that there is need for far more research on the use of water and its administration and that this is one of the reasons why we keep doddering from one half-baked idea to another in search of a more equitable use of water resources. Perhaps he could have gone a step forward and asked for researches to be done on the consumption of water and its misuse by industries.
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THIS interesting collection of 17 essays deals with controlling the market for water, the management of water supply for irrigation, its pricing, the subsidisation of water and the institutional set up required to move forward towards a more equitable use of water. There are two points of consensus in these essays: one, that it is very difficult to stop the misuse of water through tough regulatory measures; two, that pricing water appropriately might go a long way in ensuring a more judicious use of water. Agriculture is the main villain in water misuse for the authors of these papers. They collectively ignore the fact that for over four decades now the industry is the largest user of water and also the one responsible for the maximum pollution of water.