When UNICEF brought borewell rigs in early 1970s to help deal with water shortage, little did we know that it would become a tool for privatising the ground water in the decades to come, leading to over-exploitation of ground water and increasing mineral contamination as we drill deeper in search of water. Before we realised, several parts of the country turned grey and dark zones based on CGWB categorisation based on ground water extraction. India now has around 33 million borewells, making us the largest user of groundwater in the world.
Through populist programmes and subsidies, we have managed to shift the management of water as a common resource (managed collectively) to an individually controlled resource (private property) in the last five decades. This brought in more areas under irrigation, displaced traditional cropping systems and brought in wrong crops in wrong places. The shift resulted in the breakdown of institutions that evolved over centuries, displaced the centuries old scientific learning of building and managing tank cascades, disturbed the irrigation systems and severe neglect of the surface water systems.
The change has been so obscure, sporadic and spread temporally in the form of technology changes, individual irrigation sources and gradual crop changes for communities to understand and realize the honey trap they are into. It is also difficult to say that these interventions were part of a design and if we at this point, realise the potential impact of such interventions, because we continue to have slogans such as ‘har khet ko paani’ or programmes like Navaratnalu welfare scheme in Andhra Pradesh that aims to irrigate every acre of arable land in the State. Over the years, the decision making in agriculture has shifted from being a collective decision to an individual farmer primarily because of the decentralised/individual sources of irrigation.
Instead of taking a holistic picture of water at the village level, little attention to the degrading catchments, insufficient attention on the conjunctive relationship between surface and groundwater, we have designed institutional mechanisms to manage surface water and ground water separately. Perhaps designed to aid better implementation of programmes through these committees, these have created a deep divide in understanding of water and their governance. Though there is an emerging discourse that conjunctive use of surface and groundwater is an effective strategy for climate change adaptation, improve resilience of water and sustainable resource use. However, there is a lack of institutional framework for conjunctive management of water.
This would require a mindshift change of looking at water as a common pool resource; the understanding that livelihoods of the local communities are dependent on the effective management of the resource; the recognition that the communities therefore are the primary stewards of the resource and are best suited to manage the resource. Being stewards they would be responsible to manage their water, take cropping decisions, partake in land-use decisions (for water conservation) and evolve rules for governance of the resources. The institutional framework for conjunctive management of water would evolve through the overall understanding, but also through devolution of responsibilities to the village level. While the National Water Policy 2012 has outlined the principles, there is a need to design the structure, provide authority and design long term support to make this a reality.
All these years, we have focussed our attention on improving the storage of surface water through watershed development and improved water harvesting. Programmes such as Jalyukt Shivar in Maharashtra and Mukhyamantri Jal Swavlamban Yojana (MJSY) in Rajasthan have made considerable effort in improving storage and recharge of water. However, it is also important to focus our efforts on managing the demand for water and evolving mechanisms for better governance of the water resources like crop selection, water sharing or installation of water saving technologies (drips and sprinklers). Another important aspect is to build awareness among communities to bring in behavioural change in water use.
An important aspect necessary for the water sector and its governance is the lack of data and information for decision making at the community level and at subsequent levels. There have been experiments by various programmes (APFAGMS and APWELLS) and organisations to support this initiative through community level water budgeting or through crop water budgeting exercises at community or watershed levels. There has been reasonable success in community governance of groundwater under the programmes which requires to be scaled up with a much clearer architecture for supporting the village institutions and the gram panchayats. With appropriate precautionary principles in place, exercises like crop-water budgeting can be key to enable interactions among community members and evolve principles of governance of water in their vicinity. Simulation games can lead to improved understanding and help in evolving governance mechanisms for water. A Water Management Game evolved jointly by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Arizona State University and Foundation for Ecological Security suggests that communities would be willing to collaborate to improve the governance of water when they understand how the individual actions have negative impacts on the common water resources.
As we celebrate the World Water Day this year on 22nd March on the theme “Groundwater: making the invisible visible”, there is a need to bring in a paradigm shift towards democratisation of water - with focus on breaking the silos in water sector by bringing in drinking water, surface water and groundwater together, evolving institutions for conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater, paying attention to protecting and rejuvenating the Commons (the hydrological sinks), enabling information (data) based decision making, along with emphasis on equity and sustainability by delinking water rights from land rights. This would also require building dedicated cadres/functionaries to support communities through reliable data and in enabling better governance of the water resources.
States require to work on holistic solutions to overcome the complex problems that help build an ecosystem that appreciates the commons-farming system connect, that ensures the right crops in the right area, evolve resilient systems to manage climatic risks, and technological solutions to assist optimal water use. Instead of announcing subsidies for borewells or providing free electricity that distort farmer behaviour, long term work is needed for a coherent and collaborative engagement of various stakeholders in enabling a better future.
