Restoring sanity in water use

HIMANSHU THAKKAR

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THERE is no dearth of signs indicating the centratily of water each passing day – headlines about impending drought, floods, impact of monsoon failure on the economy, and rising frequency and intensity of inter-state water disputes. The new prime minister’s first three outings to a state have all been around water related issues. The first to Andhra Pradesh was related to agriculture and farmer suicides and the visits to Assam and Bihar were to assess the damage due to floods. It is arguable as to how prescient the prophets of water wars are, but there is little doubt that in the future water related issues will acquire much greater salience. Governments could be made or fall on these issues. Even as the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government at the Centre is attempting to set its priorities and programmes, let us see what it can realistically do to avoid the worst-case scenarios.

The outgoing government had announced a new National Water Policy in 2002, but its formulation left a lot to be desired. This became evident when at the release function, Atal Behri Vajpayee, in his typical poetic fashion, quoting Meghdootam, talked about the virtues of rainwater harvesting when the policy document did not even acknowledge rainwater as a source. He then went on to declare a new scheme for rainwater harvesting, for which he said the government would allocate several hundred crore rupees, but that scheme is yet to be implemented.

What is needed is a participatory process for formulating a new national water policy that must include transparency, accountability and participation in planning, decision-making and implementation, compute and prescribe minimum water flows in rivers, declare biodiversity rich stretches of rivers as sanctuaries, define conditions for decommissioning dams which are doing more harm than good. All these aspects should clearly define the process of environment impact assessments (EIAs) and public hearings.

 

 

Rivers are an important resource for society and the state. However, the manner in which rivers are treated by everyone – particularly the states which claim water resources development, management and water resources related information as a monopoly – has made them into endangered species. We need a policy that will allow rivers to exist in a healthy state, define the extent to which society should tinker with them, what actions will or will not be allowed, which stretches of rivers are to be preserved for the well-being of society, and how these objectives will be achieved. The policy must specify how river pollution (as also pollution of all water bodies) should be controlled and, most crucial, what the role of communities should be.

Unfortunately, even after the passage of the Freedom of Information Bill there is little by way of transparency in governance. The rules to implement the act are yet to be framed, and secrecy remains a central mantra in our culture of governance. To make freedom of information effective, there needs to be a credible grievance redressal and regulatory system in place at different levels so that those who do not follow the norms are punished and citizens know where to seek redressal. In the water resources sector, transparency is even more crucial as all crucial information, including siltation rates and river flow data, water release data, and so on are treated as state secrets.

There is a need to deepen Indian democracy. Fifty-seven years after independence and 13 years after the passage of the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments devolving powers to local bodies on local issues and resources, panchayats and municipalities have little effective say. If the Union government wants to improve the lot of Bharat, it must ensure effective local control over local resources and delegate powers to take decisions on local issues.

The previous regime had made large dams and the river linking programme central to the government’s agenda of development. They paid the price as they had little idea about how to provide drinking water or how to alleviate and reduce impacts of drought and flood. If the new dispensation does not want to meet the same fate it should give top priority to local systems like rainwater harvesting, groundwater recharge, local water storage systems and watershed management, allow minimum flows in rivers, effectively control pollution and manage existing infrastructure to get optimum outputs and also implement demand side management measures.

 

 

Two-thirds of our people and 80% of the poor live in rural areas, most dependent on agriculture and related professions. Every farmer would benefit from better management of water resources. Agriculture is by far the largest consumer of water and rain is the primary source of water for all farmers. The importance of rains for the farmer, the economy and society gets highlighted when the monsoon fails, but when formulating water resource policies, plans and strategy, this crucial fact is forgotten.

Rainwater will have to be brought to the centre of our water policies and programmes. Since the use of rainwater in agriculture differs in different agro-climatic situations, protection of existing local systems of water harvesting and creation of more such systems will have to be the focus of the water sector agenda, policies, programmes and financial allocation. The local communities must have the right to decide about development, management and use of such systems. Local water systems would also help generate more employment for the rural population, a crying need today.

Our water resources development is marked by an over-emphasis on mega projects. There are, of course, many fallouts of this approach. One that is less discussed is that inter-state water disputes (including the current one between Punjab and Haryana) can be traced to big projects and long distance water transfers. By making planning and decision-making processes bottom up, this conflict of inter-state water disputes can be tempered.

Another useful step would be to ensure that the cropping patterns adopted are appropriate to the hydro-climatic conditions in the region. This should be an important feature of agricultural planning. Equally, the issue of a virtual export of water from the country, and from specific areas, should be made integral to the policy and programmes. India, according to one estimate, exported 161 billion cubic mts of water each year in the late 1990s. Can we afford to do so and simultaneously continue to cry for more water?

 

 

The finance minister, while presenting the recent budget did recognise the importance of local water systems when he said, ‘Through the ages, Indian agriculture has been sustained by natural and man-made water bodies such as lakes, tanks, ponds and similar structures. It has been estimated that there are more than a million such structures and about 500,000 are used for irrigation. Many of them have fallen into disuse. Many of them have accumulated silt. Many require urgent repairs. I therefore propose to launch a massive scheme to repair, renovate and restore all the water bodies that are directly linked to agriculture.’

That sounds reasonable. He also announced the allocation of a billion rupees during the current financial year to take up this task on a pilot scale in a district each in the five zones of the country. However, finance is not the only constraint in the restoration of water bodies. The real constraint has been the total absence of a role for the local communities in the planning, decision-making, development and management of water-related systems and issues. Worse, though such pronouncements have often been made in the past, including by the former prime minister, nothing has happened on the ground.

More significantly, in the same budget, the finance minister announced an allocation of Rs 28 billion for schemes under the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Project (AIBP), almost all of it for large projects. That hardly shows a clear priority in favour of decentralised systems.

 

 

The new government at the Centre has so far made all the right noises about interlinking of rivers (ILR) and expressed its scepticism on the issue, a good sign. However, it should have unequivocally declared that the ILR scheme was being abandoned. In the absence of such a clear pronouncement, the forces behind this ‘unscientific’ proposal will continue to push for the project. The Supreme Court too continues to monitor the petition on the issue. In a sign of things to come, another PIL has been filed seeking an extension from the Union government to the tenure of the ILR task force that expired on 30 June 2004. It is unlikely that the water resources bureaucracy will allow the proposal to be quietly buried as they see huge opportunities in the ILR. In fact, Volume II of the Union budget has a provision of Rs 35 crore for the National Water Development Agency (a government of India society in existence for over 22 years with the sole aim of studying ILR, but even after spending huge sums it has not produced a single report worthy of being placed in the public domain) to cover the agency’s work, including the preparation of detailed project reports (DPRs) and expenditure on the task force. This waste of precious national resource needs to be immediately stopped by closing down the NWDA.

 

 

The ILR proposals are justified on grounds of transferring water from a so-called ‘surplus’ basin to a so-called ‘deficit’ basin. First, there is no basis for such categorisation. A basin can be called deficit or surplus only after the potential of all schemes in the basin has been studied. But, surprisingly, there has been no attempt to assess the potential of local water systems of even a single basin or sub-basin in India, leave aside the question of realising its potential. Thus, there is no basis for declaring any basin as surplus or deficit. Many of the basins that NWDA calls surplus contain areas that face drought and others that it has called deficit have faced floods in the monsoon.

This brings us to a possible action agenda for the new Union government. There is a need to set up a task force to assess the potential of local water systems of some of the most water scarce basins like the Cauvery, Pennar or Krishna and prepare an action plan to realise their potential. Such a task force could also help reduce the inter-state problems in these basins. An important outcome of such an exercise would be to assess the cumulative storage capacity of such local systems across a basin or sub-basin. This is particularly critical, as an important argument used to push large projects is the need for additional storage (to store the water in monsoon and make the same available in non-monsoon months), without ever assessing the storage potential through local systems and groundwater aquifers. The task force should also look into the total groundwater potential in these basins, including deep aquifers, groundwater aquifer size and ground-water recharge potential.

 

 

Though India has the biggest irrigation infrastructure in the world, it is in bad shape and the government is unable to allocate adequate resources even for its upkeep and maintenance. That infrastructure is delivering sub-optimum benefits. According to the mid-term review of the 9th five year plan, ‘With a 10% increase in the present level of water use efficiency, it is estimated that an additional 14 million hectares can be brought under irrigation from existing irrigation capacities. This would require a very mode-rate investment.’ It needs to be noted that even after a 10% increase, efficiency would remain far from optimal.

At the rate irrigation capacities were enhanced in the ninth plan period, to add 14 m ha additional irrigation would take 21.5 years. And yet, little is being done to achieve that additional irrigation efficiency. The government needs to ensure that the limited available resources are used for repair, maintenance and management of existing infrastructure to get optimum benefits. The World Bank, in its draft Country Assistance Strategy for 2005-8 has said, ‘The highest returns of water resource management lie in rehabilitation and upgrading of existing infrastructure.’

Ever since the sixth five year plan, every five year plan talks of putting a stop to additional projects and focusing on completion of ongoing ones. The situation today is worse than in 1980 when the sixth plan started. This strategy of trying to finish the incomplete schemes is self-defeating when we cannot freeze new schemes and are unable to allocate resources even to maintain the existing infrastructure. Currently there are at least 411 incomplete major and medium irrigation schemes that were started over 30 years ago. The AIBP was initiated in 1996-7 with a view to complete the ‘last mile’ projects. However, eight years and expenditure of tens of thousands of crores later, only 28 of the 411 schemes that we started with have been completed, that too only under the threat of stopping funds. Nevertheless, hundreds of crores each year is being diverted from AIBP to fund projects like the Sardar Sarovar, which will not be completed for several decades according to the government’s own admission. This must stop. A similar situation exists with respect to command area development projects started in the early seventies.

 

 

We must undertake a credible review of incomplete projects with the aim of scrapping those projects where little physical infrastructure is in place. Where substantial physical infrastructure has been created, the review should examine if the projects can be redesigned to reduce investment requirements and achieve faster and optimal benefits. Such a review should also look at the option of reducing dam height, among others.

Even among existing projects, there is a need to assess the performance of select schemes to compute actual costs, benefits and impacts compared to the estimates made at the planning stage. The objective would be to draw lessons for future projects and to see what needs to be done to achieve optimal benefits. It may well turn out that some of the projects are doing more harm than good and it would be better to decommission them. The review exercise should look into the siltation of reservoirs and measures to arrest it as also assess the extent and nature of water-logged and salinised areas and the measures required to solve the problem.

 

 

Groundwater is in many respects a unique resource, available to most of the areas and people. In fact, the bulk of drinking water needs of the rural population in India are satisfied by groundwater. Over half the irrigated areas and two thirds of production from irrigated areas comes from land irrigated by groundwater. And yet, that resource is slipping out of the hands of the people. The groundwater levels are falling almost everywhere. A very large portion of the remaining groundwater resource is getting polluted. We have little idea about the extent of groundwater pollution and its impact on the health of people who depend on groundwater for their daily needs assuming it to be pure. This is a silent tragedy waiting to strike.

Under the circumstances what is required is to first make a basin-wise and district-wise assessment of groundwater potential, both state of use and quality. The Central Ground Water Board assessments are neither available to the local communities and decision-makers in good time, nor do they have any place in planning, decision-making or regulation. Second, the assessment should also include a survey of groundwater recharge potential and measures needed to achieve it. A main reason for the groundwater situation is the neglect and destruction of local water systems. Simultaneously, we need to legislate that anyone with a groundwater extraction system should be responsible for recharge of groundwater to the extent of its use. Finally, we need to ensure effective regulation of groundwater use. Communities should be placed at the centre of any regulatory mechanism.

 

 

As regard floods, the new government seems to have started on the wrong foot. While it is good to see the prime minister take prompt action in setting up a task force on flood related issues after a visit to Assam, his announcement that the Lower Subansiri and Pagaladiya projects in the North East and the Sapta Koshi project on the Bihar Nepal border will be expedited as these projects would help control floods shows an inability to go beyond bureaucratic briefs. The fact is that these projects will not help in flood control, but could lead to greater damage during floods. Instead the new government needs to:

* Review the efficacy of embankments and abandon those doing more harm than good;

* Review the dam operating instructions so that they do not lead to increasing flood damage and make the operating instructions and information about operation of dams public;

* Ensure better catchment management of flood prone areas through creation and maintenance of local water systems, managing hill areas with proper forest and vegetation cover, flood warning systems, flood preparedness systems and so on;

* Review drainage congestion in the basins, remove those that can be easily done, while preparing a longer-term plan for those that cannot be immediately removed. Drainage congestion is caused by a number of factors, including improperly designed canal systems, railway lines, roads, buildings and so on;

* Review the reports of the Flood Commission of 1980 and others to assess implementation of the recommendations.

 

 

Pollution is another important issue that has not received adequate attention, even though it destroys much more water from the available pool. While agriculture is also a source of pollution, industries and urban areas do the most damage. The Pollution Control Boards, in the absence of any transparency, accountability or local participation in their functioning and decisions, have turned into dens of corruption. Changes in the legal and institutional framework to ensure transparency and accountability, and for local communities to have right to access the sites and records of any pollution-generating organisation, are essential to prevent freshwater resources from being polluted.

Effective treatment of urban and industrial effluents can have far reaching impact. It will stop pollution of freshwater resources, instil a sense of conservation in industry and urban centres and create an asset in the form of recyclable water that was earlier a liability. The finance minister needs to focus on this rather than on expensive desalinisation projects.

A large number of big hydro projects are being proposed by the new government in the name of satisfying the power needs of the country. Hence, power issues are also related to the water sector agenda. A quick review of decision-making processes in the case of any big hydro project makes it clear that there was no attempt to show that the proposed project fits into the least cost (including social, environmental and economic) option for the justifiable (and prioritised) power needs of the state or basin where the new project is being proposed. This becomes all the more disturbing in view of the inefficient and sub-optimal use of the existing infrastructure, transmission and distribution losses, scope for conservation and demand side management and other generation options, including renewable options like small hydro, wind, solar, biomass and so on.

There have been many instances (e.g. in the case of Tarun Bharat Sangh) when communities faced legal action from governments when they tried to create local water systems for their own needs. Many acts in the statute books have been used to discourage communities from setting up local water systems. The state canal and drainage acts are an example. A commission is required to review the existing laws and regulations to remove impediments in the way of community-driven processes and efforts.

 

 

The previous Union government had announced a National Relief and Rehabilitation (R&R) policy, expectedly without adequate public consultation, in fact ignoring the experience of displacement and resettlement over the past 57 years. The policy also ignored the earlier draft acts and processes. It seems to have been a hurriedly put together policy to satisfy some conditionality of the multilateral agencies. Even the most ardent supporter of big dams would agree that there are no success stories in resettling displaced communities in a just way, even as the number of those displaced by large dam related projects alone now exceeds 35 million.

What the new government can do is to set up a time bound process of formulating a national R&R law (as different from policy, that is not mandatory and cannot be used in a court of law by the affected) through a participatory process. Unfortunately, the new government has begun on the wrong foot by not taking any action even as tens of thousands faced submergence and displacement without legally mandatory resettlement due to the Indira Sagar Project on Narmada River in Madhya Pradesh and the Sardar Sarovar Project in Gujarat. In both projects the Centre has a substantial role to play: a central government organisation, NHPC, holds a 51% stake in Indira Sagar and in the case of SSP, the height of the dam cannot be increased without the consent of the Centre.

As a confidence building measure, the government should set up a task force to assess the outstanding social and environmental issues of large dam projects already completed with a view to addressing these issues. It should also stop construction of all such projects till mandatory resettlement has been completed at least six months prior to submergence. It may be a good idea to make it mandatory that before taking up or sanctioning any new displacement generating activity in any river basin, the state will ensure that all the outstanding social and environmental issues of the earlier projects in that basin have been satisfactorily addressed.

 

 

The United Nations has set Millennial Development Goals (MDGs), a number of them related to water: halving the number of poor, number of people without access to water supply, number of people without access to safe sanitation by 2015. Unfortunately, such goals enjoy low credibility given the earlier performance of various agencies. If we are to achieve the MDGs in a real sense, then the agenda set out above will have to be a part of the Common Minimum Programme. All sections the society will have to work together to see that this is achieved.top