DINESH KUMAR
Our water sector today is facing insurmountable problems. A country with 130 crore mouths to feed, with rapid urbanization and industrialization and changing consumption patterns and life styles, the challenges facing the water managers of our country are immense. Managing water today is no longer about developing new sources through conventional means through construction of reservoirs, digging wells and laying canals and pipelines, but also about finding new sources of water and allocating the limited water amongst various competitive uses, while protecting the hydrological integrity of our catchments, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Inter sectoral water allocation requires greater use of sound economic principles for efficient pricing, introduction of water use restrictions, etc.
Water resource management requires application of ecological sciences, ecological economics and environmental economics. It is quite obvious that our water sector institutions have to be equipped with more technical manpower, with greater competence and with people from multiple disciplines. They also call for new institutions for basin wide water allocation and for undertaking resource management action.
It also needs to be appreciated that water being a state subject, most of the reforms have to be initiated at the state level through consensus, in order to affect changes in the orientation and working of these agencies, which plan, design, execute and run water projects. The role of the central level agencies such as Central Water Commission (CWC), Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) is limited to: hydrological monitoring of rivers (for river discharge and sedimentation); flood forecasting; groundwater survey and assessment (recharge estimation and GW quality monitoring); and, water quality monitoring of aquatic systems.
In other words, their role is advisory in nature and they have no direct stakes in the outcomes of their decisions. For instance, the CWC and CGWB can work jointly to come out with a basin management plan for an inter-state river basin, for the larger interest of the basin water economy. But, it is up to the affected parties (in this case, the riparian states), which have to agree to this plan. It is quite possible that one state has to forego some of its economic interests for the benefit of another. As a result, in the current institutional set up, the state may show no interest in such plans, as they are not statutory in nature.
A committee, set up recently by the Ministry of Water Resources, under the Chairmanship of Dr Mihir Shah, which was to come out with specific recommendations for restructuring the CWC and CGWB, on the premise that these institutions are quite out-dated and their work need to be made more relevant to the changing context of India’s water sector, seems to have ignored these basic facts.
The Committee, whose report is now available on the Ministry’s website, made several recommendations, based on its own diagnosis of the ailing sector.
Some of the problems identified by the Committee are:
1) the efficiency in public irrigation schemes is as low as 35%;
2] there is a mounting gap between potential created and potential utilized in the irrigation sector, to the tune of 26 m. ha;
3) groundwater is a ‘golden goose’, which accounts for 2/3rd of India’s irrigation, but its use is alarmingly unsustainable; and,
4] proportion of area irrigated by canals is declining fast; and,
5] there is no scope for further development of surface water in the country, particularly in view of the fact that most rivers in Peninsular India, which are highly developed, are already facing severe environmental water stress.
The Committee’s recommendations, however, are rather mere reflections of the strong ideological bias and position of its members collectively than outcomes of any proper diagnosis of India’s water sector problems.
Some of them are:
1] plucking the ‘low hanging fruit’ of 26.0 m. ha of additional irrigation by filling the gap between irrigation potential created and potential utilized;
2] water demand management through promotion of water users associations in irrigation commands;
3] participatory groundwater management through nation-wide aquifer mapping to be completed on a war footing;
4] river rejuvenation; and,
5] integrated water resources management should be practiced by taking river basin planning as a unit for planning.
The Committee went on to suggest CWC and CGWB to work under a single umbrella body, named the National Water Commission, with their present chairpersons as members, along with a few other members and wings for ecology, environment etc. The Committee assumes that such an institution can promote Integrated Water resource Management (IWRM) planning at the basin level, for both surface water and groundwater, and take their water management agenda forward.
What the committee failed to understand or conveniently ignored is that the reason for lack of integrated planning is not the lack of coordination and data sharing, but lack of ability to foresee how future development of the resource is going to take place in different sectors and lack of control on that development, which still lies in the hands of the concerned state departments.
As clear from the several interviews of its Chairman, Dr Mihir Shah, the Committee thinks that this would mark a major paradigm shift in India’s water sector, and would have long lasting outcomes and impacts. Contrary to this claim, the fact, as also suggested by international experience, is that most of them can only bring about cosmetic changes.
Even if for a moment, one accepts these recommendations bundled under the ‘new paradigm of water management’ are capable of bringing about major reforms in the sector, the larger concern remains: can the two central agencies (CWC and CGWB) be held responsible for the perceived poor state of affairs in the water sector and also held accountable for implementing the new water management paradigm, as envisioned in the report, for the Committee to justify the restructuring proposal? The report doesn’t provide any analytical base to establish the link between the two. In the process, the Committee has taken the wrong patient to the operation table.
In long and short, the entire report is built on false premise, faulty diagnosis and mis-representation of facts. Firstly, the paradigm shift being advocated is based on neither a proper analysis of the problems nor an understanding of what needs to be done to rescue the ailing water sector in India.
Instead, it echoes some of the out-dated concepts used for judging performance of irrigation systems and some of the stale ideas repeatedly tried for almost two and a half decades by lending agencies in India and many other developing countries with no significant positive outcomes. Secondly, the two agencies whose work is under review (CWC and CGWB) are neither linked to the problems identified by the Committee, nor are parties for implementing the consequent recommendations for solving them, as it is made out to.
We will deal with them one by one. First of all, the efficiency in public irrigation is far higher than what is reported, if one assesses it at the basin scale. International agencies have long been using the concept of basin water use efficiency.
A mere 25-35per cent efficiency in public irrigation schemes, as noted by the Committee, means nearly 70% of the water released from the reservoirs or diversion systems would be lost. This works out to be around 280 BCM of water, annually. This ‘wastage’ should end up in the natural sink that is the rivers and the oceans.
If we acknowledge the fact that most of the large irrigation systems are located in the water scarce states of India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, AP, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telangana), most of this water should appear at the last drainage point of the rivers. However, this doesn’t happen. Most of these rivers have no significant amount of water draining out in normal years, as noted even by the Committee. Hence, the efficiency argument is completely flawed.
Secondly, as regards the Committee’s remarks on the large gap between ‘irrigation potential created’ and ‘potential utilized’, they are only found in the administrative lexicons of India and not used in irrigation science. Moreover, the way estimates of ‘irrigation potential created’ is arrived at is nothing but fallacious.
These figures are often unrealistic, heavily inflated, as they are based on the estimates of quantum of water available in the reservoir and a ‘design cropping pattern’ which never happens in reality. Water inflows into reservoirs can change depending on the amount of rainfall in the catchment and many upstream developments. Also, farmers shift to water intensive crops once irrigation water is made available, shrinking the area further. A modern day water scientist with a good understanding of hydrology and socio-economic aspects would never resort to these numbers to critique an agency’s performance.
On the other hand, as regards the potential utilized, there is heavy under-reporting of the actual area irrigated by canals, with no account for water lifted from canals and drains by engine owners, and the area irrigated by wells in the command which benefit from the seepage of canals and return flows from gravity irrigation.
This also means that we need to review the way data on canal irrigated area is collected. In sum, there is no ‘low hanging fruit’. Every drop of water in these water scarce basins is captured and used within the basin, though some scope exists for reducing non-beneficial uses of water such as evaporation from barren soil or fallow.
Surely, this takes up to the next point that WUAs will have too little role in achieving water demand management, except taking care of the distribution issues to some extent at the level of the tertiary canals. Water demand management requires efficient pricing of water in irrigation and other sectors, and water rationing or fixing volumetric entitlements.
These are long overdue. Only such measures can bring about improvements in water use efficiency, through optimal use of irrigation water for the crops, or allocation of the available water to more efficient crops, or saving water in the existing uses and selling it to alternative uses at a high price. But, these are political decision, which need to be executed by the respective state agencies and are no way within the purview of the agencies whose work is under scrutiny.
As noted by Darrell Huff in his book titled How to Lie with Statistics: “the secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify”. This is precisely what was done by the Committee when it compared surface irrigation with well irrigation.
It used figures of ‘% of net area irrigated by different sources’ to show that canal irrigation has declined and well irrigation went up consistently. But, if one looks at the actual gross irrigated area by different sources, it clearly shows that the gross canal irrigated area after steadily going up, has stagnated in the recent years and the same has happened to well irrigation as well, though well irrigated area is much higher than the former.
The Committee doesn’t make a mention of the fact that large reservoirs (most of which were primarily built for irrigation; excluding those for hydropower) today supply water to several large cities, a factor which would have been considered by any scholar who makes an objective assessment of the sector. Not doing that shows the professional bias against public irrigation.
On the groundwater side, it is a well-established fact that the two major reasons for over-exploitation of aquifers are the absence of well-defined water rights in groundwater and inefficient pricing of electricity supplied in the farm sector. The problem is surely not due to lack of sufficient information about occurrence of groundwater and its flows.
The farmers as well as official agencies know well that the resource is fast depleting in many pockets. Participatory aquifer mapping can do nothing to halt this on-going menace. Neither the Committee is able to visualize how the participatory aquifer mapping gets translated into participatory groundwater management under the much touted National Aquifer Management Program with a budgetary allocation of Rs. 3539 crore under the 12th Plan.
While we can invest some more resources in refining the current assessment methodology, we already have sufficient information to start initiating management actions in the problem areas. But, those actions are going to be institutional in nature, and what we lack is the political will from the state governments to do it.
The experience of developed countries such as the United States, Australia, Mexico and Spain, dealing with groundwater management issues, clearly shows that the solution lies in creating robust institutions–which can clearly define water rights of individual users and enforce them or put tax on groundwater use based on volumetric withdrawal.
On the other hand, programmes like participatory aquifer mapping can have serious negative consequences on equity, with the rural elite using the information for their benefits–say for instance to buy land in areas where there is good amount of water lying underneath.
The problem today is that most of the basins in the naturally water-scarce regions are ‘closed’, with no water going un-captured. But, agriculture growth is suffering in these regions due to lack of water. Telangana, Rayalaseema and western Rajasthan are just a few examples. Cities located in these basins are not getting adequate amount of water to supply to their rapidly growing population.
The rivers in these regions need water to maintain the ecosystem health. While the Committee discussed about ‘rejuvenation of rivers’ at length, it failed to offer any practical suggestions on the ways to achieve it, except talking platitudes about integrated surface and groundwater development. But, to get water back in the river and to maintain the base flows from aquifers, we need to cut down water withdrawals drastically.
The only way we can achieve these multiple objectives is through inter-basin water transfers from water abundant basins, which is already happening in limited ways in different basins that are characterized by sharp differences in resource endowments.
We would require much larger and more sophisticated water infrastructure for inter-basin water transfers: to store, divert and transfer water from water-rich basins to distant regions that are perennially water-starved.
Therefore, capacity building of state and central level institutions has to be in disciplines such as hydrology, hydraulics, groundwater modelling, water engineering, river morphology, environmental hydrology, dam safety, ecological and environmental economics and water law to take up the new challenges. There is no doubt that water demand management has to receive great attention in the coming years, with the cost of production of water touching astronomical heights.
But, to achieve this, we need legitimate, regulatory institutions which can look at issues of water allocation and water pricing at the state level, with good understanding of economics of water. Capacity building of CWC and CGWB officials in the field of integrated water resources management is important and welcome.
However, this has to be replicated at State level too. There cannot be two paradigms in a single country. The paradigm which the States chooses to follow will always be dominant as they have statutory mandate. Hence this exercise is a recipe for face-off between Centre and State.
The IWRM is also a complex model of water governance and management. The challenge is in operationalizing the concept through appropriate coordinating institutions at the river basin level. This is in the realm of the state water agencies which have to create such coordination mechanisms.
These challenges are time dependent. The Committee did not deal with these myriad issues. Instead, it passes judgements that these organizations have outlived their mandate, but recommends restructuring of these agencies into a NWC with basin-wise headquarters, without having any vision about future water management needs and the role they have to play to make it a reality.
This can only demoralize the cadre of scientists and engineers in these institutions. To conclude, in a recent book by Harvard historian David Blackbourn “The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany”, he documents the way in which each succeeding generation takes the achievements of the past generation for granted and wonders how their predecessors could have been so stupid as to not have dealt with the new generation of challenges! The state of art (of water management) is always provisional.
Dinesh Kumar is a renowned Distinguished Water Sector Expert, Executive Director, Institute for Resource Analysis & Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad & Honorary Advisor, IMPRI.
The article was first published in LinkedIn as There are No Low-hanging Fruits in Water Management! on 13 October 2016.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgment: This article was posted by Shivashish Narayan, a Visiting Researcher at IMPRI.
