Integrated Water Resource Management In India

Coordinated and conjunctive use of all water - by location (surface, ground) by users (rural, urban, peri-urban), or by use (domestic, irrigation, industrial and institutional) - is a working definition of integrated water resource management (IWRM). Water Resources Management (WRM) is sometimes used inter-changeably with IWRM. But it refers to basin-level management on the basis of watersheds (geographically, the area where water drains to a common point), although inter-basin transfers are sometimes needed, and carried out.

Why IWRM? It is easy to use water for one sector without worrying about its use in other sectors. Especially when departments are fragmented, as they are in India, the same river is tapped for irrigation water and drinking water, while assuming that it will continue to provide basic ecological functions.

The kuhls of Himachal Pradesh are traditional channels diverting river water at a point upstream and running at a higher elevation than the river, to irrigate more upstream land than the river itself. In use for centuries, under the direction of kohlis (local water managers), problems started with the government taking over these community-owned kuhls. Viewing them as potential 'sources' the Irrigation and Public Health Department lined them with cement - thus reducing sub-surface water percolation that fed the local springs. Then the Rural Water Supply Department began using them as ?sources? for their community piped water supplies ? reducing flows downstream of their 'uptake' point to a trickle.

Even in urban south India, Bangalore city needs more water and so doubles its intake from the Kaveri river ? which supplies irrigation water in both Karnataka and Tamilnadu. Chennai needs more water and takes it from Krishna. Hyderabad takes it from Godavari? Sprialling urban demand will mean reduced inflows in rivers ? and less water for canal-based irrigation. Uravakonda in Andhra Pradesh has a piped water scheme designed for 6-villages and Uravakonda town. But since the mid 1990s, urban demand in the town has grown so much that no water can be spared for the 6 villages, which are not politically powerful enough to assert their rights for drinking water.

How IWRM? The more difficult question, of course, is how to do IWRM. Several developed countries have excellent water management systems, notably Australia (Murray-Darling river system), the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.

''The Dutch are well-known the world over for their meticulous water management. Their water system bring water from the Rhine in the east, which is channelled through a carefully managed network of big and small canals throughout the country, that finally carry all the waste water into the western sea. Given the gradient problem, pumping stations meticulously raise and lower water levels in different canals to ensure that water flows in the right direction. Indeed, they even managed to make a river flow backwards in the 1990s, when their water management system required it!

On the management side, the Dutch Water Boards managed small groups of stakeholders spread out over the entire countryside - farmers, livestock managers, city water supply managers and ordinary folk. But over time, their vast computerized network and well-developed decision-making skills gave them so efficient a system that they are now pressing for more centralisation - fewer and larger Water Boards!''

The problems of size are apparent in South Africa?s experiments with water management in the post-apartheid era. To counter the grossly unjust distribution of water rights of their previous licence-based regime, the new South African government mandated 25 litres per capita per day in their new Constitution, and put out two path-breaking Acts, one on Water Resource Management and another on Water Supply Services Provision. The former Act, for instance, divorced land rights from water rights (if you owned the land, you did not own the water below it - just as the Indian law on minerals in the ground), and cancelled all riparian rights (you may live near the river, but you cannot withdraw as much water as you liked from it!).

South Africa divided its country into 17 Catchment Management Areas (CMAs) and set up multistakeholder Reference Groups to decide how the water must be used. Each Municipality and local body was to come up with its water resource plans, which would be coordinated at different levels up to an entire CMA. While started with laudable principles, they are finding that it is almost impossible to have efficient decision-making with participation at such a large scale (a reference group has around 100 people). They are finding that ?representation? is perhaps better than participation and are thinking of moving the pendulum back to somewhere in between full authoritarianism (where the Government decided everything) and full participation (where the people tried to decide everything).

MAJOR ISSUES WITH IWRM

• Scale: It has been found to be difficult to implement because of its large scale of planning and implementation. Should one start small and 'grow' or does one have to start big and move slowly?

• Technical complexity: The water modelling to makes sure that there was sufficient water in the entire system to support all the various uses of water, distributed equitably across geographical space and users, is quite complex. Outside Australia and the US, it has not been tried at large scales (except perhaps fro river-based systems like the genossenschaften of Germany).

''Some recent modelling in South Africa struggled to develop a framework that allocated water for the Ecological Reserve and the Basic Human Needs Reserve and the Free Basic Water policy of the government, to integrate surface water and groundwater at a Catchment scale [see WHiRL Working Paper 10 by Moriarty et al., 2004].

• Demand management versus supply augmentation: Since water is always going to be scarce in India (we will never be able to irrigate 100% of our cultivated area - and semi-arid India may have to continue to live with a maximum of 20%), there will always be some rainfed agriculture. But given that irrigated agriculture is twice as lucrative, farmers will try to drill as many bore wells as possible in the hope of finding water. In the absence of demand management in urban as well as rural India ? i.e., some means of making us conserve water (either through prices or traditional practice as in Rajasthan) - supply augmentation alone is not going to bring supply in line with demand.

• Demand responsiveness versus IWRM: A major conundrum is how to make 'demand-responsive' water development in rural India match with the technical requirements of watershed-wide management under IWRM. If a handful of villages within a watershed (or catchment) decide not to opt for water management (because they are currently enjoying the benefits of upstream plenty), how can they be made to comply with IWRM requirements of equitable distribution of water?

Lack of the right 'operational space': Administrative boundaries cannot limit water, and at least for planning, the space has to be along watershed boundaries. In India, currently, there are limited institutional arrangements for decision-making across administrative boundaries (our inter-state disputes bear witness to this). We need different institutional arrangements for water resources planning, and while recent developments like the move to establish a Department Water Resources Planning in Rajasthan and the District Water Management Agencies in Andhra Pradesh are welcome moves, much more work remains to be done.

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