Seminar Water Wars

SHADES OF BLUE
a symposium on emerging conflicts and challenges around water
symposium participants
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THE PROBLEM Posed by Sunjoy Joshi, Director and Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, Delhi SAFEGUARDING SOUTH ASIAS WATER SECURITY Michael Kugelman, Programme Associate for South Asia, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. LESSONS FROM THE 2010 FLOODS IN PAKISTAN Muhammad Azeem Ali Shah, Senior Researcher, University of Management Sciences, Lahore HYDRO-POLITICS, THE INDUS WATER TREATY AND CLIMATE CHANGE Rohan DSouza, Assistant Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi RESOLVING INTER-STATE WATER SHARING DISPUTES N. Shantha Mohan, Professor, School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore and Sailen Routray, Faculty Fellow, Azim Premji University, Bangalore SECURING WATER COMMONS IN SCHEDULED AREAS Shawahiq Siddiqui, Advocate, Supreme Court of India; Managing Partner, Indian Environment Law Offices, Delhi ECOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION Inderjeet Singh, Professor of Economics, Punjabi University, Patiala WATER CRISIS IN DELHI Rumi Aijaz, Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, Delhi WATER AS A PUBLIC GOOD VS. WATER PRIVATIZATION Uwe Hoering, author and freelance journalist, Bonn DECIPHERING ENVIRONMENTAL FLOWS Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, researcher in environment and development; Professor, IIM Calcutta CONTESTED CONSTRUCTIONS OF WATER Shailaja Fennell, Lecturer in Development Studies, University of Cambridge; and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge FURTHER READING A select and relevant bibliography compiled by ORF Library Services, Delhi COMMENT The Not-So-Discreet Burdens of Indian Communism Santosh George, researcher in building sustainable local economies, Tiruvalla India Against Corruption Ashutosh Kumar, Professor of Political Science, Panjab University, Chandigarh State Response to Movements C.P. Bhambhri, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi BOOKS Reviewed by Surinder S. Jodhka, Sachidananda Mohanty, Anna Sujatha Mathai and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh BACKPAGE COVER Designed by www.seshdesign.com
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The problem
When the well is dry we know the worth of water. Benjamin Franklin WATER is perhaps the most compelling narrative of the times we live in today. Mankinds dependence on water has shaped the establishment and growth of civilizations, and continues to influence every aspect of our lives even the lives of the few lucky ones who may yet have the luxury of taking it for granted. Rapid population growth following industrialization has today created the conditions for intense contests over water. Its (water) availability has come under increasing stress, giving rise to potential international and intra-national conflicts. Simultaneously, at the local level, discord over entitlements, access and pricing are poised to exacerbate. Cataloguing and understanding the diverse nature of these conflicts and contests over water is crucial to a better understanding of the very idea of the management of water as a resource. For, any attempt to manage such a vital resource becomes by its very nature a political act, whether at the individual, local, regional or international level. It becomes political as the associated interventions serve to either reinforce or challenge the existing distribution of power and power relationships that determine issues of rights, access and use. Therefore, for a wider perspective, it may be instructive to imagine the various narratives around water as four different shades of the same blue. The first shade of blue confers on water political overtones, treating it as a geophysical property with issues relating to sovereignty and ownership; a second shade confers on it the status of a commodity that can be priced and traded; the third shade reflects the governance and policy framework that lies at heart of any debate on the political economy of water. However, what is often lost in all these shades is perhaps the deepest and yet the most transparent shade of blue the people, their lives and livelihood, the traditions and practices associated with cultures the myriad amorphous things of the everyday that it takes to live a life of dignity. Above all it refers to the larger ecology of water and water systems that goes to nourish far more than human lives. For centuries water by its very nature has fulfilled a dual geopolitical role. On the one hand, as a naturally occurring barrier it has served to delimit geopolitical boundaries, defining frontiers between tribes and states. Simultaneously, it has refused to be itself limited by the very spaces it may have helped define. The result is that all forms of community whether family, village, state or nation have had to share it across political, international, interstate, regional and local spaces. With time the character of these communities and their priorities change. Population growth, the shifting patterns of agriculture or industry, migration, human intervention, and environmental degradation associated with these activities may then form the core of many of the intensely political conflicts about sharing of waters. The political dimension of water thus encapsulates the complex inter-relationships between various social, economic and environmental aspects. The temporal and spatial distribution of water resources today remains one of the main challenges for sustainable water management. The problem is that, say in South Asia, such management is sought to be done independently in segregated local regions within the Ganga, Mahakali, and Indus river basins. Water sharing and management agreements have been formulated and continue to be negotiated between IndiaPakistan, India-Bangladesh and India-Nepal. To these
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* We acknowledge the contribution of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), and its partners the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) in putting together this issue.
SEMINAR 626 October 2011
add the many interstate water sharing conflicts such as the Cauvery river dispute, Ravi-Beas water dispute etc. They are enough to remind us that formal dispute settlement mechanisms are all too often perceived as ambiguous and ineffective, leading to repeated dependence on legal action for enforcement. Interstate water disputes tend to get entangled with more general centre-state conflicts and political matters that often defy resolution. Recently differences over the quantum of Teesta waters to be shared between West Bengal and Bangladesh even threatened to derail the overarching settlement that India and Bangladesh were hoping to enter into. The conflicts themselves may be either the symptoms or the consequence of ineffective institutional mechanisms that ultimately threaten lives and livelihoods. Whatever their nature, politically managed information asymmetries tend to spill over into manifestations of hardened identities dealing with intensely political definitions of who constitutes the them and us. Managing the political complexities surrounding water therefore necessitate the building of a common vocabulary and information system for a better understanding for the sharing of this resource. A growing consumerism has given rise to differing narratives around whether it pays in the long run to commoditize the commons. These are reflected in the contrary positions taken by various transnational actors and institutions. The commons versus commodity debates have proliferated even more following attempts at urban water supply privatization since the 1990s. One side sees pricing as the key to conservation and regulation of a scarce resource; the other tends to treat it as restricting what is essentially a public and human right. The debate in its present shape has been largely a consequence of the water-as-a-commodity model failing to meet its professed social and economic
objectives. Privatization campaigns have done precious little to improve drinking water supply to lower income groups in most instances. The political economy of privatization tends to abandon non-paying and commercially unattractive supplies to ill-run public sector utilities while high income enclaves are transferred to the private sector. In specific cases, a combination of rent seeking and maladministration, endemic to public water supply projects, has only left the deprived sections far worse off than before. The cost coverage or cost plus approaches that laid the foundation of private sector participation are now considered as untenable for both the private sector and public utilities. Today, even erstwhile champions of water privatization such as the World Bank have become far less enthusiastic about private sector participation. Given the current dynamics, the private sector may play only a marginal role in financing water infrastructure in the future. Many of the current debates over commoditization versus commons veer toward a Malthusian discourse of increasing scarcity based on the gloomy arithmetic of rising population and declining water availability. However, the problem more often is not so much of availability as it is of access and entitlement. People remain excluded because of poverty, limited legal rights or public policies that inadequately and inequitously regulate rights of access to water and water infrastructure. Scarcity itself is the consequence of power relationships and the institutions that frame these relationships do so in ways that ultimately disadvantage the poor. The final and most frequented outcome being that the poor get less, pay more and bear the brunt of costs in terms of human development. Hence, the significance of the third shade of blue that relates to the governance and policy framework. In the real world the act of policy-making itself is seldom the rational objective exercise its proponents
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make it out to be. More often it is the negotiated outcome of keen contests over shared spaces between several stakeholders. Policy then becomes the expression of shifting power relationships, the manifestation of which may have significant and often unintended consequences on water, its pricing, usage, management and consumption. Access to water is an integral part of the right to livelihoods. It means ensuring affordable physical access to each and every individual as the cornerstone of the right to life itself. All across South Asia, with these economies transforming themselves into economic powerhouses, there is an increasing demand from competing large scale users in industry and agriculture. The future is bound to see conflicts between industry and local populations regarding access to water as well as its quality. As it is South Asia suffers from arsenic, fluoride and metal contamination putting large sections of the population at risk. As populations increase and industry grows the cost of water pollution is likely to rise exponentially, leading to new dynamics that would need urgent resolution. At the other end of the spectrum, in areas where institutional structures for regulating and distributing water are poor or non-existent, the key to sustainable governance systems lies in whether they enable local communities to plan autonomously for the long-term management of their resources or do they reduce them to becoming mere recipients of the outcome of someone elses projects and ambitions. The latter invariably results in unsustainable practices giving rise to future conflicts. The need in such cases may be to create a governance framework that helps organize and mobilize agricultural communities to identify their own priorities and take over the responsibility as well as management of local resources. For instance, policies promising subsidized power, along with minimum support prices for selected crops, today threaten to undermine the wider ecology of agriculture in certain regions. They have worked in tandem to skew cropping patterns in favour of crops with assured prices even though such crops may be highly water intensive. Even as the groundwater table stands depleted by the overuse of inefficient water extracting pumps that waste both water and power, unsustainable farm practices lead to progressive degradation of the soil. A better recourse may be to craft policies that support farming communities to evolve the best suited farming strategies instead of unintentionally serving to shape practices and produce at the farm-end.
The problem is not confined to any single region. At the heart of the water challenge faced by most of South Asia, a challenge that spills over into disputes between countries and states within these countries, is the issue of governance. The rigid and very clinical geopolitical division of river systems and therefore of the rights and responsibilities of riparian states has resulted in indivisible river systems being mismanaged in untenable and arbitrary geographical compartments. Given the rate of urbanization and industrialization in South Asia, many policy challenges, essential to the conservation of the resource and to build the physical infrastructure and social awareness necessary for its fair use and distribution, remain to be addressed. As such, water policies in most of the nations in South Asia fail to protect lifes most vital natural resource. Finally, the interconnected and interacting nature of wetland ecologies integrates aquifers, lakes, marshes and the combined actions of innumerable tributary streams into a living system. Thus merely viewing water through the prism of entitlements, property, commodity or sovereignty neglects the far deeper water-life and water-livelihood linkages. The dominant debate on water has tended to detract attention from the more important issue of how water is accessed and used, in combination with other assets, to sustain not just livelihoods but living systems. The politics and policy discourse on water transforms complex river systems into a quantitative notion, failing to recognize the ecosystems, the local traditions and cultural practices around water. These form the critical missing link in the politics and policy of water. Yes, it is increasingly apparent that over the next two decades water will become a growth inhibitor if attention is not paid to the various aspects of water use, access, ownership, control and management. Soil degradation, poverty, food security, water quality and water flow depletion stand in the way of achieving sustainable development. Environmental stability may be a millennium development goal to be achieved by 2050, but it would be impossible to attain without integrated policies and systems for the management of land and water for inclusive growth. Yet, beyond all these water remains a resource that is essential for and shared by the far larger community of all living things. This issue of Seminar seeks to outline the theoretical and evidence based discussions that describe the water saga in South Asia, in the hope that it will help advance the level of the ongoing discourse.
SUNJOY JOSHI
strategies are neither efficient nor sustainable. One of Pakistans top water experts, Simi Kamal, has calculated that the quantity of water projected to be generated by the nations underconstruction Diamer-Basha dam pales in comparison to the amount that would be freed up simply by repairing and maintaining Pakistans leaky canal system.21 Additionally, Pakistans dams, like Indias, are rapidly losing storage capacity.
uch considerations give way to another unsettling reality: So long as internal water management remains poor, the benefits accruing from deeper regional water cooperation will be strictly political; from a water resources standpoint, little will improve. Take the case of Pakistan. Assume, for a moment, that increased cooperation enables Pakistan to succeed in getting India to release more water downstream. What would be the result? Many Pakistanis would argue that their water problems would be solved: parched farmland saved, childrens thirst quenched, and lost water livelihoods restored. In reality, however, none of this would happen. Instead, more water would mean more inefficiency: More water lost to leaky canals and pipes, wasted in irrigation, showered on water-guzzling crops, and contaminated by urban waste. Indeed, if nothing is done to improve internal water governance, allowing more water to gush into Pakistan would simply intensify the countrys water crisis.22 South Asian nations need to focus more on demand-side solutions
to domestic water problems. These include water conserving technologies, crop diversification, better investments in infrastructure maintenance and wastewater treatment, and a stronger embrace of rainwater harvesting (a conservation method that has already caught on quite strongly in parts of the region). Such policies are less expensive, and potentially more efficient, than traditional supply-side water engineering projects like large dams. Some encouraging signs are emerging from India, where there has been some debate about the merits of emphasizing sugarbean cultivation over that of sugarcane, which is notoriously water wasting. There has also been discussion about embracing water saving mechanisms such as the direct seeding of rice.
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21. Simi Kamal, Pakistans Water Challenges: Entitlement, Access, Efficiency, and Equity, in Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway (eds.), Running on Empty: Pakistans Water Crisis. Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, DC, 2009, http://www.wilson center.org/topics/pubs/ASIA_090422_ Running%20on%20Empty_web.pdf
f such demand-side management policies are implemented successfully, South Asian nations would become more judicious in their use of existing water resources, and therefore less threatened in the shortterm by the spectre of scarcity. Upper riparians would, presumably, be less likely to initiate new hydro-generation projects that upset their downstream neighbours. Lower riparians, meanwhile, would have less incentive (and fewer grounds) to stoke tensions with their upstream neighbours by accusing them of water theft. As a result, trans-national water arrangements would be threatened less, and the calmer political climate would enable riparians to make more substantive progress on the data sharing and transparency essential for better South Asian water security. None of this, it should be noted, would necessitate
22. Michael Kugelman, Water Shortage: The Real Culprit, Dawn, 26 July 2010, http:// www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawncontent-library/dawn/the-newspaper/editorial/water-shortage-the-real-culprit-670
drawing up new treaties or other water agreements. To be sure, new demographic and environmental realities may well call into question the continued relevance of decades-old trans-national water arrangements. Still, these mechanisms need not stop functioning simply because of the presence of factors not at play fifty years ago. One study of the Baglihar dam case observes that the issue was addressed bearing in mind the technical standards for hydropower plants as they have developed in the first decade of the 21st century, and not as perceived and thought of in the 1950s when the [IWT] was negotiated.23 A precedent has effectively been set for new conditions to be taken into account when interpreting the existing treaty, without needing to incorporate such conditions into an altogether new or revised treaty.
his is just one more reason for South Asian nations to redouble their efforts to ameliorate internal water management. Trans-national water arrangements can also stand to improve, yet they are not in desperate need of reform and revision. Rather, it is the water governance of the regions individual countries that so urgently needs to be fixed. In effect, South Asian water policies must adopt a new approach one that, in the words of noted water expert Ramaswamy R. Iyer, embraces the responsible, harmonious, just, and wise use of water. 24 With population growth and climate change continuing apace, the stakes have never been higher, and the costs of inaction never starker.
23. Salman M.A. Salman, The Baglihar Difference and its Resolution Process ATriumph for the Indus Waters Treaty? Water Policy 10, 2008, p. 115. 24. Ramaswamy R. Iyer, Approach to a New National Water Policy, The Hindu, 29 October 2010, http://www.hindu.com/2010/10/29/ stories/2010102963801400.htm
Lessons from the 2010 floods in Pakistan

MUHAMMAD AZEEM ALI SHAH
THERE is no doubt that climate change has much to do with the 2010 floods that displaced more than 14 million people in Pakistan, creating in its wake a humanitarian crisis larger than the combined effects of the three most serious natural disasters to strike in the past decade. The culprit river, Indus, one of the worlds greats, can only hold so much water. While floods are nothing new to it in fact, its flood plains have been home to one of the earliest civilizations that we know of the monsoons that contributed to its flow were unprecedented in human memory. In August 2010, more than half of the normal monsoon rains, typically spread over three months, fell in only one week. This resulted in a flow which exceeded the normal levels several fold. It is also no secret that climate change is largely a result of rampant consumerism which, though reducing nature to resources meant for our consumption, is nevertheless necessary for generating ever higher profits for sustaining economic growth in capitalist economies. So, in the larger scheme of things, it is our relentless drive for economic growth that is to blame for these changing weather patterns.
However, the 2010 floods in Pakistan demonstrate much more than simply what might be expected from unsustainable development. The devastation caused by the floods was also a manifestation of the particular type of development path that Pakistan has followed over the years, its sociopolitical structure, and massive inequalities in resource distribution. Contrary to the claims of the Pakistan government (or those made by Richard Holbrook for that matter, who described it as an equal opportunity disaster), the devastation caused by the floods was neither equitous nor inevitable. There is no direct correlation between the intensity of the floods and the destruction it unleashed. Instead, this relationship is heavily mediated by Pakistans unequal social structure and developmental experience. Take for instance, the intensity of the floods. In the northwest of Pakistan, where the flood originated, devastating scenes of destruction were witnessed. Bridges, houses, and other man-made structures were swept away by the sheer force of the torrent as if they were made of paper. This intensity was in part a result of the deforestation that has gradually
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spread through Pakistan. The speed of flowing water increases manifold when there are no trees to hinder the passage of water. Similarly, with trees no longer holding down top soil, landslides become far more frequent. Deforestation represents a rather typical case of the Pakistan government allowing various interests (in this case, the timber mafia, which in turn supplies other businesses) to get away with pillaging the countrys resources (in this case forests) and government officials making a quick buck at the expense of long-term sustainability.
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he state has continuously followed a policy of pillaging the environment and modernizing primitive communities with scant regard for the ecological disasters that are resulting in the wake of this laissez-faire policy. That deforestation could magnify the effect of a flood and cause landslides does not appear to be a major concern of the Environment ProtectionAgency, a body propped up to pay lip service to sustainable development and the environmental movement. Despite having been around for over a decade and having qualified people on board, it has only been running standard environmental awareness campaigns, or implementing National Environmental Quality Standards (which have been superseded by ISO standards), unsurprisingly, with little effect. Connecting forests or flood plains to communities livelihoods appears to be beyond its comprehension or mandate. In fact, the entire government machinery is configured in a way that makes coordination or the attainment of a bigger social goal difficult. Forests fall under the forest department, and environment under the EPA. Floods are the concern of the meteorological department, irrigation department and the newly created disaster management authorities. Different
barrages are operated by different entities. Even within these organizations, coordination is absent, rendering their existence a mere ritual of governance. Take the meteorological department (Met) for instance. Just prior to the flood, the different divisions of the Met, e.g., FFD (flood forecasting division), NWFC (national weather forecasting centre) and R&D (research and development), had their own forecasts which presented a fragmented and sometimes conflicting picture of the magnitude and nature of weather system developing at that point in time. For instance, the NWFC started issuing forecasts from mid-July that there was an unusual weather system developing in the Bay of Bengal. The FFD, however, issued no forecast about its consequences until 27 July 2010. It was only once real time data was available that they issued their first qualitative forecast. This too did not mention the possibility of super floods. Meanwhile, the R&D department, for its part, did not issue even a single annual report about its research on climate change, global warming and this pattern of changing monsoon system, confining itself instead to the publication of an academic journal with articles by its employees.
These structures must be able to withstand the water pressure if neighbouring communities are to be protected. Because of their critical importance, standard operating procedure dictates that all maintenance and development works on these structures be completed before the flood season starts in mid-June every year. This was openly violated in the case of Jinnah barrage located at Kalabagh. An emergency repair work, incidentally started over a year earlier, on the downstream apron of the Jinnah barrage, was still in progress when the flood hit the barrage in late July. Due to this work, around 10 gates out of a total of 56 gates of the barrage were closed, leaving the remaining 46 gates to take all the pressure. This resulted in increased pressure on the barrage and its allied structures as the closed gates created an obstruction to the flow of water. Even as the irrigation department tried to open these gates, a swirling action of waves resulted in a parallel flow alongside the left guide bund of the barrage which collapsed, exposing the neighbouring communities to the brunt of the water flow.
hat happened at the barrages presents further evidence of the ritualistic nature of state institutions. Barrages are the most important man-made structures that the torrents encountered on their way to the Arabian sea. Barrages raise the water level in rivers so that irrigation canals can be fed. In making barrages, the natural course of the river is diverted. Because of the pressure the river exerts on the sides when its course is being changed, barrages are preceded by training works, guide bunds and marginal bunds.
urther downstream, similar panic was witnessed at the recently rehabilitated Taunsa barrage. With World Bank funding, this barrage was recently equipped with a state of the art control system to operate the gates. Yet, when the floods hit this newly constructed structure, its control room was not operational. The reason is reflective of the complete mismatch between the plans of modernization and the capacity and preparedness of the concerned department, a phenomenon all too common in Pakistan. The entire project was funded (to the tune of Rs 600 million) and installed by foreign agencies using technology that was too advanced for the irrigation department. As a result, there
were no trained technicians available to operate it, rendering the entire control room useless. This state of unpreparedness was similarly reflected in the disaster management authorities that were created following the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir. Political rivalry between the Centre (dominated by the Pakistan Peoples Party) and Punjab (ruled by the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz) meant that unlike other provinces and the Centre, there was no provincial disaster management authority in Punjab, Pakistans most densely populated province. At the Centre too, things had stopped moving after the creation of a National Disaster Management Authority. Four years after its creation, the NDMA had no national disaster management plan ready. The district level disaster management authorities that were to be created as part of the original plan, never came into existence.
While the practice was universally applied, the poor people of Sindh, perhaps Pakistans most feudal province with the least land reforms, suffered most. Inhabitants of cities such as Kherpur, Karampur or Jampur paid with their lives to save the properties of their feudal masters. All of the states resources were effectively placed at the disposal of the landed elite. If the poor wanted to save themselves or access these resources, they could only do so through the feudals in their district. The system in Pakistan at the best of times is based on political patronage. During the floods, it became the only way out for the poor, reinforcing their subordination to the landed elite.
term this disaster capitalism, and she was not far off the mark. The politicians used the relief funds in a blatantly partisan manner to oblige their constituencies. The industrialists claimed corporate social responsibility brownie points. The army used it to redeem its much tarnished image, and the Americans to further their hearts and minds campaign, with little impact, it has to be said.
eadiness for disasters such as this aside, the dynamics that transpired during the floods also reveals much about the Pakistani state. As the mighty Indus flows through Pakistan, it not only irrigates vast swathes of land in Punjab and Sindh, but also shapes the political structure of this traditionally agrarian country. Unsurprisingly, most of the land on both sides of the river is owned by prominent political figures of the country, who have a vested interest in protecting their area of cultivated land from any kind of eventualities/calamities. These interests came to the fore as the Indus threatened to flood areas several miles to its left or right. State resources were indiscriminately used to build bunds (embankments) and breach canals. The result was invariably the same: exposing those most vulnerable to the floods while protecting those who were much better off.
he dependency relationship between the peasants and the feudal elite was not the only one that was strengthened during the floods. The same dynamics were apparent at the state level, as the country used the floods to extract more loans out of countries that it otherwise regularly accused of not respecting its sovereignty. The relief and rehabilitation work that ensued with the pledged $1.7 billion and the millions that were collected in charity was completely uncoordinated. Months after the floods people were still living in camps while waiting for support from the government. Meanwhile, the government used this opportunity to introduce new inflationary taxes earlier agreed to with the IMF but had not implemented for fear of a backlash. The post-flood debate in the countrys political set-up largely focused on introducing flood taxes and reforming general sales taxes, leaving most people wondering that if the reformed GST was such an important issue, then why did the government have to wait for the floods to implement it? Naomi Klein would
n sum, as the Indus retreated, it rendered visible the desperate plight of a people, their chronic dependence on their feudal masters, and the contours of a society premised on inequality and oppression. Nothing has really changed in Pakistan. The 2010 flood will soon be forgotten, and with it the displaced families who, having lost their livestock and abodes, are still struggling to survive. It is doubtful if the state will discard its modernizing impulse fuelled by borrowed money in favour of a more communitybased, eco-friendly model of development. It is also unlikely that the next flood will bring any less misery. The way things are developing in Pakistan, the vulnerability of people will only have increased by then. Even if the meteorological department is able to get its act together, and the irrigation department fortifies all the barrages, poverty will still ensure that millions will be inhabiting riverbanks and living in shacks, entirely at the mercy of their feudal lords. Forests meanwhile will continue to disappear, and unplanned construction will continue to litter the flood plains, preparing traps for flood waters. And whichever government is in power will probably still be waiting to pass on new taxes to the hapless public. As tragic as the floods are, in the case of Pakistan they appear to be a smaller disaster than the one the people experience daily.
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Hydro-politics, the Indus water treaty and climate change

ROHAN DSOUZA
DISCUSSIONS on the Indus rivers have become overwhelmingly strategic. Flows are matters of political contest, vested interests and, above all else, national security. Ironically enough, such strident noises over the division of waters have mostly avoided meaningful attempts to recall the region/watersheds often-times troubled histories. It is as if the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) of 1960 could be almost nonchalantly deployed to snip vast flowing courses into neat divisible segments and with equal ease rationally allocate immense volumes between nations. That is, a mere blunt knife approach can comprehensively sever and move about a complex hydrology without so much as an afterthought about disturbing delicately poised fluvial ecologies or the implications of coarsely stirring whole river-based communities. The IWT with this structured forgetting of the Indus basins many pasts and varied environments, is not unexpectedly, often seen by experts
to be a successful legal-technical arrangement that has suffered from frequent and exceptional political misperceptions.1 It can, however, be more convincingly argued the other way. The IWT was an unsteady political project to begin with and is now fatally failing as a legal-technical arrangement. But reversing the analytical vantage requires a sharp perceptual shift as well. A type of taproot understanding of the IWT is urgently called for, by which new facts, so to speak, must be dug up, sunned and differently seasoned in order to have one go beyond the limited simplifications of hydraulic data, official statistics, engineering opinion and statist imperative. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Mughal empire held, in a single firm embrace, vast territories of what today comprises India and Pakistan. For the Mughal ruling elites,
1. Ramaswamy Iyer, arguably, is the most sophisticated voice that debates the workings of the Indus Water Treaty as being principally dogged by problems of political misperceptions. His writings on the subject are too numerous to cite here. In all, however, Iyer provides some of the most valuable and informed insights on contemporary water challenges in South Asia.
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* The author wishes to thank Observer Research Foundation and Lydia Powell in particular for enabling this essay. Also Sushil Aaron, Rudra Chaudhuri and Harish Damodaran for their inputs and ideas.
applying a regular squeeze over agricultural surpluses was the preferred route to wealth and privilege. Typically enough, given this essentially land based notion of power, the empires numerous and intricate network of rivers were, at best, used either for navigation or as avenues to conduct easy trade. These inestimable flows, in other words, became natural outliers to the imperial governments otherwise more onerous quest to extract revenues from soil. It would be unfair, however, to entirely dismiss all Mughal efforts at harnessing water. Several innovative structures, for example, helped deftly steer river currents into gardens, fountains, hunting grounds and even giant reservoirs. On balance, nevertheless, comprehensive fluvial management was rarely ventured upon. It was only in the middle of the 19th century, following the steady consolidation of British colonial rule in the subcontinent, that those big immodest engineering interventions for total hydraulic control were carried out. In particular, the vast semi-arid flood plains sandwiched between the Indus and Gangetic river systems became amongst the first sites the world over for implementing largescale modern irrigation schemes.
water during lean seasons, to be then diverted in calibrated quantities across miles of canals. On the reverse, in times when the rivers were swollen or torrential, the shutters would be flipped open to hurriedly jettison discharge. In effect, by alternately impounding or quickening the discharge of flows, the rivers variable or moody regime, it was held, could be transformed from a seasonal to a perennial irrigation possibility.3
eginning with the Upper Bari Doab Canal (1859) and the Sirhind system (1882), the drive climaxed with the most ambitious irrigation project of the colonial period the Triple Canal Project (1916). These perennial canal schemes, however, were assembled not merely as channels commandeering river flows but in the words of David Gilmartin, were crucially linked to political imperatives of state building.4 The colonial dispensation, in effect, vigorously
3. Herbert M. Wilson, Irrigation in India. Daya Publishing House, Delhi, (first published 1903), 1989, pp. 78-81; D.G. Harris, Irrigation in India, H. Milford, Oxford University Press, London, 1923, pp. 5-7. For an introduction to the modern hydraulic moment in British India see Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India: The United Provinces Under British Rule, 1860-1900, vol. 1. California University Press, Berkeley, 1972; Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985; Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885-1947. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1987; Rohan DSouza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006; and David Hardiman, Well Irrigation in Gujarat: Systems of Use, Hierarchies of Control, Economic and Political Weekly 33(25), 1998, pp. 1533-44. 4. David Gilmartin,Scientific Empire and Imperial Science: Colonialism and Irrigation Technology in the Indus Basin, The Journal of Asian Studies 53(4), 1994, p. 1132. Also see David Gilmartin, Water and Waste: Nature, Productivity and Colonialism in the Indus Basin, Economic and Political Weekly 38(48), 2003, pp. 5057-65.
pursued perennial irrigation and agricultural settlement as means essential for stabilizing its otherwise unsteady authority in the region. At heart, canal building was the pressing attempt to yoke the then just disbanded Sikh soldiery and a large number of non-cultivating predatory herdsmen to permanent interests in landed property. The impacts of perennial irrigation, however, can also be historicized differently. Indu Agnihotri in a seminal essay on the canal colonies in the British Punjab, argued that irrigation did not, as is widely held, simply bring water and increase agricultural productivity into hitherto desolate wastes. Rather, the colonial canal colonies, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, overwhelmed and overran a pre-existing vibrant pastoral economy and people who, besides herding, also seasonally cultivated crops through inundation canals. This process of marginalization, if not substantial elimination, of the pastoral communities and their unique ways of living with the ecologies of the doabs continues to find only rare mention.5
or the sprawling Indus basin, coursed through by the fluvial fingers of the Indus, Ravi, Chenab, Beas, Sutlej and Jehlum, colonial hydraulic interventions were, in fact, both technically and politically unprecedented.2 For the first time in the region, permanent structures in the form of barrages and weirs were thrown across riverbeds. These durable headworks were equipped with a series of shutters to regulate flows by impounding
2. Rohan DSouza, Water in British India: The Making of a Colonial Hydrology, History Compass 4(4), May 2006, pp. 621-8.
he point here is that the introduction of modern irrigation in the semi-arid flood plains of the Indus system was enabled following intense struggles over the creation of landed property, the elimination of pastoral livelihoods and accompanied by relentless wide-ranging environmental transformations. Raising agricultural productivity through perennial irrigation, hence involved, by design or otherwise, a deafening silence about different pasts: the ignored but suffered
5. Indu Agnihotri, Ecology, Land Use and Colonization: The Canal Colonies of Punjab in Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.), Indias Environmental History: Colonialism, Modernity and the Nation. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2012, pp. 37-63.
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consequences of waterlogging, soil salinization, the violence of landed property, the defeat of nomadic peoples, instabilities brought on by monocultures and commercial agriculture, the attrition-ridden assembling of colonial social hierarchies and inevitably, the forced training of once volatile free falling rivers into contained disciplined irrigation channels.
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rofoundly intertwined with the relentless march of modern irrigation in the doabs was the life-world of the colonial civil engineer. Though often less heralded, these energetic, restless, innovative and adventurous men of empire were made steadfast with technical training in modern river management and control. Through the lens of imperial science, colonial environments for these engineers were not merely to be catalogued, studied and observed but actively pursued for large scale manipulation, all in the name of commerce, civilization and endless improvement. In the same stride, this resolute quest to control nature was intimately tied to the equally severe project of dominating colonized populations. For the British colonial enterprise, in other words, intensely extracting from nature and exploiting subject peoples seemed almost logically to go hand in hand. Attempting the dramatic transformation of complex and immense river systems through engineering was, however, no simple task. In aiming to physically shuffle, transfer, move or redirect vast volumes, engineers resorted to reductionist and specialized mentalities. That is, colonial engineers planned and crafted modern river control initiatives primarily through ideologies for abstractions in the form of formulas, equations, model-making, and by repeatedly fine-tuning an overwhelmingly quantitative notion of hydrology. Irrigation
engineering preferred, in terms of their self image and professional training, to be defined principally by the mathematical sciences.6 Such a notion of handling water, in effect, assumed an unequivocal trust in numbers, while simultaneously aiming to wilfully ignore and shut out local knowledge or placespecific ecological idiosyncrasies involved in harnessing flows. If anything, therefore, the ascendance of colonial hydrology meant the consolidation of the universal, expert-driven and specialized practices for river management alongside the steady marginalization of localized cultures and place-based knowledge for water management. The mighty Indus basin, in effect, was disciplined with the elegance of numbers and rational hydraulic model-building. The river systems, hence, that otherwise stood as messy miscible admixtures of flows, histories, cultures, localities and exceptional environments were conceptually recast as straight contained channels. A once heterogeneous collection of people and places, through imperial science, cement and quantitative hydrology could be turned into homogenous spaces.
17 August 1947, flows had to be reconfigured as national rivers. From previously watering an uninterrupted contiguous political bloc, the Indus and its tributaries, in step with this logic of partition, had to be hastily inserted within new geographical scales and imagined as part of decolonized national biographies.
ollowing the hydraulic rearrangements of the 19th century, the Indus basin witnessed, in the mid-20th century, a second equally dramatic rupture the division of waters for nation-making. In effect, scuffles over hydraulic access and rights that characterized the colonial period were transformed into bitter disagreements over clarifying issues of ownership and control of the Indus rivers. As the Radcliffe Line etched a hard border between India and Pakistan on
6. Benjamin Weil, The Rivers Comes: Colonial Flood Control and Knowledge Systems in the Indus Basin, 1840-1930s, Environment and History 12(1), 2006, pp. 3-29.
ot unexpectedly, complications over the Indus erupted as intractable hydropolitics between India and Pakistan. For a start, flows had to be instantaneously sliced and diced at multiple conceptual levels, in order to acknowledge the regions changed geopolitical realities. Stretches of the tributaries, hence, that fell within India were classified overnight as upper riparian waters while Pakistan, on the other hand, inherited downstream flows. Having been thus officially instituted as cross-border flows, the various arms of the Indus system could now only be managed through a raft of international rules and protocols. The first involved a bandaid approach, with the concluding of an immediate pact appealingly termed the Standstill Agreement, by which all existing flow arrangements were to be maintained till 31 March 1948. Alarmingly enough, for Pakistan, the Government of India suspended supplies the very next day when the agreement officially lapsed. Though flows were eventually restored after 18 long days, the shock of being denied water not only seared the Pakistani sense of entitlement to the rivers but the entire incident brutally made known to both sides that water could easily translate into severe problems of politics and power.7 The subsequent Inter-Dominion Agreement,
7. For an excellent discussion on the politics over the Indus rivers between India and Pakistan see Daanish Mustafa, Critical Hydropolitics in the Indus basin in Terje
as a stopgap arrangement, actually ended up further amplifying the fact that sustaining a divided fluvial system, invariably, if not urgently, needed an enduring final settlement.
ollowing a period of staggered negotiations, the IWT was finally clinched in 1960, as a trilateral deal between Pakistan, India and the World Bank. As noted by Daanish Mustafa, the IWT process substantially mirrored the political landscape of its time. A context that was defined by extreme suspicion between the two countries, their respective location in larger geopolitical strategies for the region and relationships that were repeatedly marred by political competition. Rehearsing elements or features of the IWT, however, would not be helpful here, as they have been competently done elsewhere. What, nevertheless, needs to be marked is the fact that the IWT was overwhelmingly a legal-technical document. A notion about flows which, on the one hand, were firmly anchored in colonial legacies for water management in the region while, on the other, water agreements were crafted as legal protocols for nation-making. That is, flows were appropriated not on the basis of their ecological properties, but rather subdivided in order to enforce hard national borders. The Indus system, in essence, was inserted into the geopolitical calculations of a troubled region and made legible primarily as statistically tabulated hydraulic data. The physical constituency of the river regime was, thus, starkly framed simply as a network of water channels, with the aspired normal defined as a seasonally determined average volume.
Rivers as national resources, hence, became facts without stories and quantities without qualities. That is, flows were not understood as organically interconnected and interacting elements of wetland ecologies, aquifers, lakes, marshes and the combined actions of innumerable tributary streams. Rather, as mere volumes contained in channels, rivers could be abstracted, diverted or interfered with to satisfy national priorities.
Tvedt, Graham Chapman and Roar Hagen, Water, Geopolitics and the New World Order. A History of Water, Series II, Volume 3. I.B. Taurus, London, New York, 2011, pp. 374-94.
he belief that rivers are merely moving masses of water crying out to be regulated and dammed has been dramatically challenged since the 1980s by a fresh spirited theoretical turn amongst river ecologists. These ecologists have been convincingly able to demonstrate that fluvial regimes are complex geomorphologic, chemical and biological processes in motion. By recasting, in fundamental ways, the manner in which fluvial processes are understood, river ecologists are now suggesting that a fresh paradigm is required for managing and interacting with such hydraulic endowments. Centrally, what is being argued is that flows are embedded in ecological contexts and therefore transferring them through technological fixes can and often do have several unintended environmental consequences. Simple steel and concrete approaches aimed at water abstraction, diversion and interference, in other words, must give way to an entirely new spectrum of knowledge, which will treat flows as being determined by non-linear ecological qualities. Put differently, treating rivers as mere mute volumes is flawed both as a concept and as a water management practice. Handling and harnessing variability and stochastic flow regimes, consequently, have become critical to shaping sustainable approaches
towards river management. The entire Indus basin, in effect, is a collection of relationships between streams, floodplains, the head reaches, aquifers and inevitably the chaotic delta. Small wonder then that the so-called success of the IWT has resulted in the relative ecological devastation of the Indus delta. Historically, for the Indus basin, a rough calculation suggests that before projects for siphoning flows began in the 19th century, up to 150 million acre-feet of fresh water probably fell into the delta, along with the deposition of close to 400 million tons of nutrient rich fertilizing silt. These immense uninterrupted volumes nourished and sustained a sprawling collection of mangroves, inlets, creeks, estuaries and other wetland ecologies.
y suggesting that flow variability is central to fluvial health, river ecologists have put forward a definitive challenge to the cement-steel based water-control ideologies of the contemporary civil engineer, whose entire conceptual tool kit, as pointed out earlier, was mostly drawn up in the colonial setting of the long 19th century in the subcontinent. In a similar vein, the hitherto untroubled preeminence of the expertise generated by giant centralized water bureaucracies such as the Central Water Commission (India) and the Indus Waters Commission (Ministry of Water and Power, Government of Pakistan) need to, in the light of these new ecological facts, be carefully qualified and reconsidered as well. These institutions, with their training anchored in quantitative hydraulic data, have thus far been oriented primarily towards strategizing for average flows. In other words, these are technical-bureaucratic institutions that are committed to searchSEMINAR 626 October 2011
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ing for and premised entirely upon harnessing hydraulic predictability. Significantly enough, these centralized water bureaucracies also play a crucial role in shaping national water policies and informing political processes over the building of hydraulic infrastructure in India and Pakistan, respectively. But with variability and stochasticity as the new norm for engaging with river systems, so to speak, what becomes of these legaltechnical institutions and their infrastructural technologies? Put differently, if climate change is about the intensification of hydraulic unpredictability in the region, will the IWT as a legal-technical institution be able to respond to the new challenges.
Beginning with the dramatic hydraulic transformations in the colonial period, an independent Pakistan persevered in creating a mismatch between the design assumptions of the infrastructure, such as embankments and barrages and the dynamic reality of the channels carrying capacity.9 That is, Pakistans hydraulic and social designs were geared to ignore the river systems natural rhythms, in return for agricultural productivity and prosperity. Overcoming the potential dangers in such a trade-off, for them, therefore, would require a better tactic, which plainly stated was to adapt to the Indus basins hydro-meteorological regime.
lose to 1700 people or more perished and 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed in the floods that occurred in 2010 in Pakistan. In its wake, the floods also rummaged through 2.3 million hectares of standing crops and brought about a loss of US$ 5 billion to the agriculture sector and around US$ 2 billion each to the physical and social infrastructure. The flood-devastated realities of Pakistan, as Daanish Mustafa and David Wrathall argue in a recent essay, point to a far more striking conclusion: that the floods were aggravated and its impacts made even more ferocious because of vulnerability.8
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8. Daanish Mustafa, and David Wrathall, Indus Basin Floods of 2010: Souring of a Faustian Bargain? Water Alternatives 4(1), 2011, 72-85. 9. Ibid., p. 7. 10. I draw upon this useful notion of a riverfront community from Sarandha Jains wonderfully compelling book on the Yamuna river titled In Search of Yamuna: Reflections on a River Lost, New Delhi, Vitasta Publishing, 2011. The riverfront community, she suggests, refers not only to people who live by and off the river but become a bridge between land and water, river and society and as mediators between nature and culture.
limate change and its perceived impacts, in effect, push for an active reconsideration of the IWT framework. Instead of an overt emphases on technical and technology based approaches, run with the narrow expertise of engineers and state negotiators, the new compact for river management/sustainability in the region would require different social constituencies and their experiences with the Indus waters. This would involve drawing upon and fostering cooperative dialogues between riverfront communities on both sides of the border, such as fisherfolk, irrigation dependent farmers, river ecologists, water historians, sociologists and aquatic specialists (to name a few).10 These plural narratives can imbue the IWT with a much needed ecological sensitivity. The IWT or another compelling version has to be crafted to meaningfully grasp the Indus and its temperamental tributaries as qualities of flows rather than as blocs of disconnected volumes. The current reign of cement, steel and quantitative hydrology must, in other words, urgently give way to viable dialogues over fluvial relationships and ecological process.
Resolving inter-state water sharing disputes

N. SHANTHA MOHAN and SAILEN ROUTRAY
WATER does not respect any boundary. Most of the larger rivers in India meander through the administrative boundaries of the Indian federal system. Sometimes a river itself is the boundary: the Indravati forms the boundary between Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh for a part of its flow. Often rivers mark metaphorical boundaries as well: the Ganga is the vehicle to the heavens whereas the Vaitarani marks the crossing from this world of mortals to an infernal one. Therefore, in a fundamental sense, all rivers are transboundary. But for our somewhat mundane discussion, its the wayward rivers that do not obey the diktats of human cartographic exercises that end up being marked and categorized as transboundary. For our purpose, we focus on rivers that arise in one province of India but end up in another. All of the longer and major rivers in India are transboundary rivers: the Mahanadi originates in Amarkantak in Chhattisgarh and crosses over into Orissa before finding its way to the Bay of Bengal; the Chambal rises near Mhow in Madhya Pradesh before meandering for more than 900 kilometres to the Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh, after having acquired the formidable reputation as a river of the badlands.
The Chambal is a telling example of a river, a large one with a length of around 960 km, that complicates the ways in which rivers in India are clubbed together and categorized. It arises in the central highlands and drains into the Yamuna which itself drains into the Ganga, thus forming part of a larger Gangetic river system. But it is difficult to locate it within the four-fold categorization of rivers of India into Himalayan, peninsular, inland and small coastal rivers flowing into the Arabian Sea. The Ganga, Yamuna, Son, Gandak, Brahamaputra, Lohit and Teesta are examples of Himalayan rivers. A large part of the water that Himalayan rivers receive is from the snowmelt during summer and therefore perennial in nature. Most of the larger rivers in peninsular India are east flowing, apart from a few exceptions such as the Narmada and Tapti that drain into the Arabian Sea. The important east flowing rivers of peninsular India are the Subernarekha, Mahanadi, Brahmani, Godavari, Krishna, Cauvery and Pennar. The Western Ghats form an important watershed for the southern part of the country. Apart from many of the east flowing rivers that rise here, many small and fast flowing rivers
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such as the Zuari, Mandovi, Netravati and Periyar originate in the ghats and after flowing fast over a short distance, drain into the Arabian Sea. Most of the other rivers in India are transboundary, be it a large river such as the Ganges or a relatively smaller one as the Penner. Rivers such as the Ghaggar and Luni do not find an outlet into the sea and lose their way in the desert wastes of Rajasthan and Gujarat.
fore, the storing and subsequent usage of water is of utmost importance. It is this imperative to store water that creates potential for conflicts over transboundary rivers.
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he transboundary rivers have significant implications for water usage and policymaking, especially because while India has around 16% of the population and 2.45% of the land area of the world, it has only 4% of its water resources. In gross national terms the availability of water is comfortable. But this situation can easily change with increased demand due to changing patterns of economic growth and urbanization. Further, there is a large variation in terms of both spatial and temporal aspects. Spatially speaking with respect to water, the northern and eastern parts of the country are better endowed as compared to the western and southern. The less endowed regions with respect to water are located in arid parts in the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu that lie in one rain shadow region or the other.1 India has a monsoonal climate and the average annual rainfall is 1,170 mm. It varies from less than 150 mm/year in northwestern Rajasthan to more than 10000 mm/year of rainfall in Meghalaya. A large part of the country, however, receives rain for only 100 hours in a year. More than half of the precipitation is received in rainfall of less than about 20 hours.2 There1. Ramaswamy Iyer, Water: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns. Sage Publications, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London, 2003.
ll rivers which flow across international and inter-state boundaries are a source of potential conflict. Fortunately, the experience around sharing of both international and inter-state transboundary river waters is not all that grim. The Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan that emerged out of a process of mediation facilitated by the World Bank is an important example of a working and successful resolution of disputes surrounding an international transboundary river. The treaty which awarded nearly 80% of the water of the river system to Pakistan and 20% to India has survived three wars between the two countries. It can thus be safely described as a good example of successful transboundary water sharing in a politically volatile region. The dispute between India and Bangladesh over the Ganges, especially the one surrounding the Farakka barrage, was addressed with the signing of a 30 year water sharing treaty in 1996. This was an important step towards figuring out mechanisms for sharing the waters of other transboundary rivers between the two countries on a mutually acceptable basis.3 And while tensions continue to episodically flare up, they have never reached the level of conflict. Examples of successful dispute resolution of river waters related to India can be cited not only in the case
2. Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narain and Srabani Sen (eds), The State of Indias Environment: The Citizens Fifth Report, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, 1999. 3. N. Shantha Mohan, Locating Transboundary Water Sharing in India, in N. Shantha Mohan, Sailen Routray and N. Shashikumar
of international rivers but with respect to inter-state transboundary rivers as well. These include rivers such as the Damodar, Gandak and Subarnarekha. Especially important is the example of a complex multi-basin and multipurpose project such as ParambikulamAliyar, where a joint water regulation board was established with members from the riparian states. However, it must be admitted that despite some examples of successful and mutually beneficial water sharing, the potential for conflict remains. 4 Rivers such as the Yamuna, Krishna and Cauvery have, for instance, been bitterly fought over.
he Yamuna is the largest tributary of the Ganga and an important source of water for irrigation and urban use in northern India. It drains the North Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. The total present claims on the river add up to more than twice the total water available. In 1954, the waters of the rivers were shared between the states of Uttar Pradesh and undivided Punjab. Uttar Pradesh controls the eastern Yamuna canal whereas Haryana, as a successor state of undivided Punjab, controls the western Yamuna canal. With increasing demand from the growing and urbanizing state of Delhi, this arrangement soon faced conflicts between Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh on sharing the waters of the Yamuna, especially during the lean summer months. Matters have often landed up in the courts, including the Supreme Court of India, through the public interest litigation route. With water demand continuing to grow in the basin states, especially in Delhi,
(eds), River Water Sharing: Transboundary Conflict and Cooperation in India. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 3-22. 4. Ibid.
the conflicts surrounding Yamuna waters see no signs of abating.5 In peninsular India, the Krishna has seen disputes over its waters as well. The second longest river in peninsular India, the Krishna drains the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. After the reorganization of the states on a linguistic basis in the 1950s, the 25 year agreement on the Krishna waters signed in 1951 between Bombay, Hyderabad, Mysore and Madras states began to be questioned. The Krishna Dispute Tribunal headed by Justice Bachawat gave its award in 1976 with the states being asked to utilize their respective allocations by the year 2000. This in turn fuelled a frantic a race for utilization of water of the river between the various claimants.
growing demand and attendant conflicts surrounding the river are exemplified in the problems between Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka over the Almatti dam in Karnataka. Any attempt by Karnataka to raise the height of the dam from its original height of 519 metres to 524.25 metres would have reduced the capacity of the Nagarjunasagar and Srisailam projects in Andhra Pradesh pushing the two states on a path of confrontation. But when Maharashtra, the upper riparian, tried to develop its water allocation, both Karnataka andAndhra joined hands to oppose such a move. We thus witness a complicated process of cooperation and confrontation depending upon contingent self-interest of the different parties. The concerned states routinely complain to the central government regarding water usage by other states, setting the stage for central mediation. With increasing intensity
5. A. Swain, Struggle Against the State: Social Network and Protest Mobilization in India . Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, 2010.
of resource utilization, such conflicts can only escalate as the Krishna river basin is one of the most over-utilized river basins in peninsular India.6 The Cauvery in peninsular India too has been a site of cooperation and conflict over a period of time. The regions of present day Tamil Nadu were the first movers in using the water of the river. In the era before the growth of modern dam-building technologies, the Cauvery was not dammed and its waters were only sparingly used in the upland areas of present day Karnataka. Attempts in the latter half of the 19th century by the then Mysore princely state to dam and use the waters of Cauvery river led to protests by the Madras Presidency and the beginning of negotiations between the two, eventually resulting in a treaty signed by the two relevant governments in 1892. This agreement, after placing on record the projects already taken up, stipulated that the Government of Mysore would not initiate any new projects and maintain the status quo.
This agreement was not renewed in 1974, at the end of its 50 year period. This 50 year period saw the intensification of irrigation development in both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the successor states of the princely state of Mysore and the Madras Presidency respectively. Increasing intensity of water use, especially for irrigation, led to conflicts. Tamil Nadu, that had enjoyed the first mover advantage with respect to irrigation development, now complained about the increasing use of water by Karnataka, the upper riparian. Tamil Nadu demanded the setting up of a tribunal for resolution of these disputes and sharing Cauvery waters. The Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal was established in 1990 and gave its awards in 2007, unfortunately satisfying neither side.7
o when Mysore proposed the construction of the Krishnaraja Sagar dam on the Cauvery, the Madras government challenged the decision of the arbitration committee, under the agreement of 1892. On receiving an adverse judgment from the committee, the Government of Madras took the matter to the Secretary of State in 1919 and managed a favourable response. Soon thereafter, negotiations started between the two governments and a 50 year agreement was reached in 1924, allowing for the construction of the Krishnaraja Sagar dam in the then Mysore state and the Mettur dam in Madras Presidency. It also provided a framework for the development of irrigation in the Cauvery basin.
6. Ibid.
he history of inter-state transboundary river water sharing in India is thus characterized by both cooperation and conflict. Water conflicts are of many types depending upon the nature of the contesting parties and contestation involved. The issues pertaining to resolution of conflicts surrounding transboundary rivers are made especially complex because of a lack of adequate legal and institutional mechanisms. Take for instance irrigation, which as a sector consumes more than 80% of all available water in the country; it is listed under the state list in the Indian Constitution. Entry 17 in the state list in the Constitution of India is important in this regard. It is subject to the provisions of entry 56 of the Union list which enables the central government to legislate on inter-state transboun-
7. S. Settar, Kaveri in its Historical Setting, in N. Shantha Mohan, Sailen Routray and N. Shashikumar (eds), River Water Sharing: Transboundary Conflict and Cooperation in India, Routledge, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 99-107.
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dary rivers. But entry 56 of the Union list is much underused. Article 262 of the Constitution provides a role for the Centre in adjudicating conflicts surrounding inter-state transboundary rivers. The Inter-State Water Disputes (ISWD) Act 1956 has been promulgated under article 262. This act provides for the formation of tribunals for settling such disputes.8
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ccording to the provisions of the ISWD Act, a state government can approach the central government to set up a tribunal for adjudication of the dispute. The tribunal is headed by a chairperson with two other members, all three nominated by the Chief Justice of India. At the time of nomination, the chairperson and members have to be judges of the Supreme Court. The tribunal is empowered to appoint assessors to aid in investigation and provide advice in the proceedings. The act mandates that the award of the tribunal is to be published and that its decision is final and binding on the parties to the dispute. The tribunals set up for settling the disputes surrounding the Krishna, Godavari and Narmada rivers are perceived to have been successful. Nevertheless, their efficacy to settle inter-state transboundary rivers is increasingly coming under question. There have been substantial problems surrounding the tribunals set up to settle the disputes surrounding the water of Ravi-Beas and Cauvery. The awards of both the tribunals failed to resolve the disputes and have led to greater bouts of intense politicking even though the tribunals award now has the status of a decree of the Supreme Court of India by virtue of recent amendments to the ISWD Act. One problem is that the tribunals take time to reach a final settlement.
8. N. Shantha Mohan, 2010, op cit.
Though the amended Act of 2002 mandates a time limit of six years, it still is a long period of time. In this context, mention must be made of several nonofficial civil society efforts to address the issue of river water sharing. The Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai, initiated a process of creating a platform to facilitate dialogue between the farmers of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the Cauvery basin. Through the process of dialogue, farmers are developing a better understanding of each others problems and needs and thus reducing the potential for conflict.9
e now list some ways to help address issues of transboundary water conflicts. The first path is of an institutional nature. We suggest that a combination of existing institutions, such as the inter-state council, and the creation of new institutions such as river basin organizations, can go some distance in resolving water conflicts. We also need to use some new tools or old tools differently, to creatively deal with conflicts. In this regard, we look at mediation and an alternative approach to scenario building as two possible ways. Article 263 of the Indian Constitution envisages establishing an InterState Council (ISC) with the mandate of enquiring into and advising upon disputes arising between the various states of India, to investigate subjects of common interest amongst the states, and to make recommendations upon such subjects for the better coordination of policy and action. The Inter-State Council was finally established by presidential order on 28 May 1990 as a recommendatory body to fulfil the already mentioned constitutional mandate. The council comprises of the prime minister of India; chief ministers of all states; chief ministers of
union territories; administrators of union territories; six ministers of cabinet rank in the union council of ministers and permanent invitees. Any matter in the Union list, Concurrent list or the state list of the Constitution of India in respect of which there exists a common interest as referred to in clause (a) of paragraph iv of the said order or a need for better coordination as referred to in clause (b) of the paragraph can be considered. The council provides a forum for discussion on complex public policy and governance issues having a bearing on centre-state relations or with an inter-state dimensions. Because the council is a constitutionally mandated body, and has now built a wealth of experience in dealing with matters that are of common interest to states, it can play a useful role in facilitating dialogue and discussion towards resolving conflicts.10
here is a need to look at arbitration and negotiation as methods of conflict resolution. One institutional arrangement that can be used to facilitate negotiation surrounding interstate transboundary rivers is the River Basin Organization (RBO). RBOs can be set up under the River Boards Act of 1956 (RBA), legislated under article 56 of the Union list. These are empowered to regulate and develop inter-state rivers and their basins. The board must comprise of members with expertise in fields such as irrigation, water and soil conservation and finance. But so far river boards have not been established in the country under the provisions of this act, in part
9. Ibid. 10. Ramaswamy Iyer, Inter-State Water Disputes Act 1956 Difficulties and Solutions, Economic and Political Weekly 37(28), 2907-2910, 2002; and N. Shantha Mohan, 2010, op cit.
because state governments fear that they will intrude upon their authority and power.11 However, given the era of coalition politics, and an increased self-confidence of the states, there is need to take a fresh look at the possibility of setting up RBOs. Till date seven tribunals have been established to deal with disputes surrounding the water of inter-state transboundary rivers. But they have not always helped resolve the disputes in a satisfactory manner. These tribunals depend upon the legal principle of arbitration. The awards of these tribunals, although supposedly final and binding, have been challenged in the courts. The judicial process is essentially an adversarial process and damages the relationship between the disputants.
tool for conflict resolution and participatory management.
n contrast, mediation is a process that employs a neutral person or persons to facilitate negotiations between the disputing parties so as to arrive at a mutually acceptable solution. Mediators should not have any direct interest in the conflict as they both control the process of mediation and its outcome. In actuality, it is the parties or disputants in whom the real power is vested. Mediation is a flexible and informal process and draws upon the multidisciplinary perspectives of the mediators. In the South Asian context, the World Bank played the role of mediator between India and Pakistan, which resulted in a successful resolution of the conflicts surrounding the rivers of the Indus basin. In the Zambezi river dispute involving eleven countries, the Vatican mediated an agreement to use and manage the river waters jointly.12 Thus, there is great merit in the proposal to deploy mediation as a
11. Ramaswamy Iyer, Towards Water Wisdom: Limits, Justice, Harmony. Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2007.
he way scenario building in the water sector usually takes place, it is reduced to a technical tool for prediction. Scenario building, however, is not a tool for projection and need not be used as one. It is essentially an imaginative exercise involving political and social choices; as much a tool for action as it is of thought. While undertaking an exercise in scenario building, one needs to take into account the physical qualities of water as a resource. Generally, in exercises of scenario building surrounding water, the current patterns of consumption are taken as a given, based on which various demand projections for future points of time are generated. Thus, this exercise is a projection of current patterns of demands into the future. We argue that there is a need to look at scenario building completely differently. We need to hypothetically freeze the total available water, or the quantum at current levels of total consumption, for a given region or unit of analysis and build scenarios of alternative usage patterns. Instead of trying to predict the total quantum of water demand at a future date given certain conditions, one must plan as if water and its characteristics as a lifegiving resource matter. This will necessarily be a non-technocratic and democratic exercise, since the simu12. Geeta Devi, Legal Framework for Resolution of Water Disputes. Paper presented at The National Consultation on Water Conflicts in India: The State, the People and the Future, 15-16 March 2010, NIAS, Bangalore. 13. Sailen Routray, Water Conflicts and Scenario Building in Orissa: An Alternative Approach. Orissa Environmental Congress, 22-24 December 2010, Regional Museum of Natural History, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.
lation depends on the social choices that we might want to make if water availability and/or consumption were to be frozen at some arbitrary point in the present. Such an exercise will also help unravel the assumptions we make while making projections, as also help us radically interrogate theories of risk society by positing scenarios as designs.13
ater is increasingly an important site of contestation between states in India because of the rapid pace of economic growth, growing populations and increasing urbanization. The growing importance of forging coalition governments at the national level and the related assertion of regional identities add to the intractability of the problems. More often than not, such issues arise as a result of a focus on demand-side management. Many scholars have argued that supply-side management might be one way of dealing with such issues. While there is merit in this argument, we need to undertake institutional innovations as well. The suggestion for setting up RBOs and providing a greater role for the inter-state council in dealing with inter-state transboundary rivers needs to be seen in this regard. Given the changing political dynamics in the country, it should not be difficult to convince the states that the relationship between state governments and the Centre need not be a zero-sum game. An increasing role for central institutions in dealing with issues emerging out of sharing the waters of transboundary rivers does not necessarily mean a whittling down of the powers of the states. Second, one needs to creatively use existing tools (such as mediation and scenario building exercises) for managing water resources of inter-state rivers more effectively and democratically.
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Securing water commons in scheduled areas

SHAWAHIQ SIDDIQUI
ACCESS to safe drinking water is a fundamental right in India.1 The right to clean and safe drinking water is considered as embodied in Article 21, known as the right to life, under the Constitution of India. 2 This right becomes even more significant due to the effects of climate change that are felt at both levels global and local. Studies suggest that climate change is likely to adversely impact water resources in India resulting in an unpredictable hydrological cycle, affecting the overall water scenario.3 As a result, our ability to meet the requirements of different water-intensive sectors such as agriculture, for drinking purposes,
1. Subhash Kumar vs State of Bihar, AIR 1991 SC 420. 2. A.P. Pollution Control Board II v Prof. M.V. Naidu and Others (Civil Appeal Nos. 368-373 of 1999). Cited from John Lee Right to Healthy Environment, Columbia Journal of Environmental. Law, Vol. 25, 2000; Also see Bandhua Mukti Morcha Vs Union of India Case Judgment. 3. See study by Ministry of Environment and Forest, Impact of Climate Change on Water Resources in India, 2009 www.envirofor. nic.in
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sanitation and industrial use is likely to face increased challenges. Community water resources such as village ponds, tanks, reservoirs, johads, and community wells are also likely to be affected due to changes in the hydrological cycle. In such a scenario it is necessary for the government to take appropriate measures for securing common property resources of the poor and vulnerable tribal communities who will be disproportionately impacted by climate change. Community water resources, or water commons, thus assume greater significance as they are crucial to the climate vulnerable forest-dwelling and pastoral communities who are heavily dependent on them for their very survival. The changes in the hydrological cycle may have varied and unpredictably impacted water resources in the past, beyond the comprehension of tribal communities dependent on these resources. In India, a significant portion of the tribal population that is listed under the Constitution as Scheduled
Tribes live in areas classified as Scheduled Areas. These areas are treated differently under the Constitution for administrative purposes.4 They are provided special protection and governance because their population is perceived to be socially, educationally and economically backward, and hence easily distinguishable from the mainstream population. They need special protection to preserve their culture, identity and community resources.
been made in conserving community water resources.
he Constitution of India provides for the allocation of subject matters that are to be regulated by the central and state governments. Under the present constitutional scheme, water is listed as a state subject, wherein the states have control over water resources, its supply and management. Notwithstanding this constitutional mandate, states have achieved precious little regarding water supply for drinking purposes to both urban and rural areas. Irrigation, being the most water consuming sector, has also remained unregulated, resulting in an excessive withdrawal of groundwater and consequently an exponential fall in the water table in many states. States have also failed to formulate and implement norms for industry. Moreover, little has been done for the protection of common water resources. While certain policies regulating fisheries in common village ponds do exist, little progress has
4. The Constitution defines scheduled areas as falling under either Schedule V or Schedule VI. The fifth schedule under article 244(1) of the Constitution defines Scheduled Areas as such areas as the President may by order declare to be scheduled areas after consultation with the Governor of that state. The sixth schedule under article 244(2) of the Constitution relates to those areas in the North East, which are declared as tribal areas and provide for district or regional autonomous councils. These councils have wide-ranging legislative, judicial and executive powers.
ater law framework in India comprises of a number of policy and legal instrument, at both national and state levels. The institutional framework to implement water related policies and programmes is also complex and comprises of multitude of agencies in the local, state and central government. Besides a multiplicity of agencies, there are overlapping and unclear mandates both at the central and state level for management of water resources for various purposes such as drinking, irrigation, sanitation and industry. This complex network of policy instruments, programmes, schemes and implementation agencies results in poor governance with overlapping responsibilities. Thus, for example, the Central Water Commission (CWC) in the Ministry of Water Resources is tasked with the responsibility for regulating the use of surface water for irrigation, industry and for drinking purposes. At the same time the Central Groundwater Board (CGWB) has an overarching mandate for monitoring groundwater levels and rates of depletion, as well as production of water resource inventories and maps, and the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) is responsible for controlling basin-wide pollution control strategies. Similarly, the Ministry of Agriculture is involved in planning, formulation, monitoring and reviewing various watershed-based developmental project activities, the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission under the Ministry of Rural Development in the central government is charged with policy formulation and setting standards, funds and technical assistance to the states for rural water supply and sanitation, and
so on. Clearly, there is no streamlined framework for a single coordinated institutional arrangement. Moreover, the current institutional mechanism does not factor in the involvement of gram sabhas and village panchayats in water management and supply services.
he regulation and use of groundwater in the country also faces a number of challenges. One reason for excessive withdrawal of groundwater is the extreme subsidizing of energy for irrigation pump sets. Other reasons that directly affect water balance include an alarming rate of deforestation and loss of tree cover, loss of common lands, and a complete disregard for traditional management systems, such as tanks in South India. The current policy framework at the central or state level does not factor in these issues, which are important for effective groundwater regulation in the country. In the early seventies, free electricity to farmers and heavy subsidies on water pumps resulted in an excessive withdrawal of groundwater, leading to its rapid depletion nationwide. The Central Water Commission in the early nineties suggested measures to regulate overuse of groundwater. The states were given the prime responsibility for drawing up new regulations, water being a state subject. However, few states in the country have so far formulated a robust regime of regulations, and groundwater depletion in the country continues to be a serious concern, especially in the paddy growing states such as Chhattisgarh. In this complex scenario, with the increasing risk of unpredictable effects of climate change, it is necessary that community water resources are secured and managed by the communities themselves to mitigate the effects of climate change. The legal
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and institutional regime for ensuring community participation exists and needs to be understood. An attempt to summarize key elements of the existing legal regime has been made below.
ith the 73rd constitutional amendment, the panchayati raj system was extended throughout the country and elected representatives from villages could form part of the block panchayat samitis. However, the amendment was not applicable to scheduled and tribal areas referred to in article 244 of the Constitution. Nevertheless, the Parliament had the discretion to extend the provisions of part IX to scheduled and tribal areas referred to in article 244, with such exceptions and modifications as may be specified by law. Clearly, scheduled areas were kept out of the purview of the 73rd constitutional amendment whose provisions were to be applied only with exceptions and modifications. Following the spirit of the 73rd constitutional amendment with respect to scheduled areas, the Parliament passed the Provisions of the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA Act, 1996).5 The PESA empowers people in the villages of the scheduled areas to address issues that affect their daily lives. It is a simple yet powerful law that provides for decentralized governance in the scheduled areas in the country to enable people to govern themselves. Such decentralization requires an institutional structure, as well as an allocation of powers and
5. The PESAAct seeks to extend the provisions of part IX of the Constitution as referred to in clause (1) of article 244 and calls for the legislature of a state not to make any law under that part (i.e. part IX) which is inconsistent with any of the features given under section 4 of the act, some of the important features of which are that the state legislation should be in tune with the customary law, social and religious practices and traditional management practices of community resources.
responsibilities. The PESA, therefore, recognizes the village community as a basic unit of governance and prescribes the creation of panchayati raj institutions at different levels. One of the important features of this important legislation is that it prescribes the recognition of the gram sabha or the village assembly as a central unit of village governance and vests it with such powers and functions as may be necessary for governance.6 The PESA, further, politically empowers the village community for planning village development, managing natural resources and resolving conflict in accordance with traditional customs and practices. Such empowerment is through the panchayati raj institutions mentioned above.
he PESA tries to empower panchayati raj institutions through six basic methods. These are: 1. By recognizing the central role of customary laws, social and religious practices and traditional management practices of community resources in the lives of the tribals and making them the founding principle of selfgovernance in scheduled areas. Further, PESA accepts the competence of the gram sabha in safeguarding and preserving the traditions and customs of the people, their cultural identity, community resources, and customary mode of dispute resolution. Accordingly, the act dictates that all state legislation on panchayats must be in accordance with customary laws, social and religious practices and traditional practices for management of community resources.
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6. A gram sabha elects a gram panchayat, which is the body of elected representatives of the gram sabha. At the block level, it mandates the creation of the panchayat samiti, and at the district level the zilla parishad. The gram panchayat, the panchayat samiti and the zilla parishad are collectively called the panchayat at appropriate levels (hereafter PAL).
2. By exclusively according some powers to the gram sabha. These powers include, among others, the power to approve developmental plans, programmes and projects for social and economic development, the power of identifying and selecting beneficiaries for poverty alleviation and other programmes, and the power to grant certificates of utilization of funds or plans, programmes and projects implemented by the gram panchayat. 3. By giving the panchayat at appropriate levels (PAL) the exclusive power for planning and managing minor water bodies to secure community water resources such as village ponds, johads and ghats, with the active involvement and participation of the gram sabha. 4. By empowering the gram sabha or PAL to hold consultations before land acquisition for development projects and resettling or rehabilitating persons affected by such projects, and for prior recommendation in granting a prospecting license or mining leases for minor minerals, as well as for grant of concessions for the exploitation of minor minerals by auction. 5. By empowering the gram sabha and PAL through powers that are perhaps the most important for the lives of tribal people. These powers make the gram sabha a necessary unit of empowerment, along with any other level of panchayat and include: enforcing prohibition, regulation or restriction on the sale or consumption of any intoxicants; ownership of minor forest produce; prevention of alienation of land in scheduled areas and taking appropriate action to restore unlawfully alienated land of a scheduled tribe; control over institutions and functionaries in all social sectors; management of village market; control over moneylending; and control over local plans and resources for such plans, including tribal sub-plans.
6. By necessitating proportional representation and reservations for scheduled tribe members. Proportional representation means that if the scheduled tribe population in a village is 80% of the total population, then a similar percentage of members must be represented in the gram panchayat. Moreover, for facilitating local leadership from the tribal community, the posts of sarpanch and up-sarpanch in the scheduled areas are reserved for members of scheduled tribes. Thus one finds that Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, 1996 provides enough legal space for the protection of village commons, especially community water resources in scheduled areas. As per PESA, water commons in scheduled areas are to be managed by the panchayat at the appropriate level (PAL) and if the state government so decides, the control and management of community water resources can also be entrusted to the gram sabha. Thus, central PESA provides that the state may exercise its discretion in allocating this power to either tier of the village governance system. Consequently, different states have adopted different arrangements in allocating this power to institutions for managing the water commons. Thus for example, in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, the zilla parishad is tasked with the management of water bodies. But this arrangement violates the basic spirit of PESA wherein village water bodies and all common resources are to be managed by the gram sabha through consensus. Therefore, a prerequisite for securing community water resources is the effective implementation of PESA and its adaptation for subject matters falling within the states jurisdiction. In order to secure the resource base of communities, their involvement is essential for which creative use of the legal mandate and constitutional imperative of village self-governance must be realized.
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Ecological implications of the green revolution

INDERJEET SINGH
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EVER since the advent of the green revolution in the mid-sixties, agriculture in Punjab has experienced a significant structural change, with traditional agriculture progressively giving way to modern and commercial agriculture. Since the 1960s, the main focus has been on increasing agricultural production, especially of foodgrains. As a result, the production of wheat and rice has increased manifold. Apart from high yielding varieties of wheat and rice, what facilitated the process was the consolidation of land holdings, expansion of irrigation facilities, higher use of chemicals fertilizers and pesticides, farm mechanization, power and road infrastructure, and easy access to inputs and market support mechanisms for output. To meet the ever-growing demand of the country, foodgrain production has been increased by enhancing productivity through intensive use of water and inputs like fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides. The adoption of this strategy has raised many development related problems on economic, social and environmental fronts. Punjab has about a 14500 km long canal network and close to 100,000 km of watercourses, providing irrigation to 1.15 million hectare,
which is 28.19% of total cultivable area of the state (2006-07). However, the network of canals, which is more than 150 years old, is unable to take its full discharge since it requires major repairs and rejuvenation. As a result of the reduced carrying capacity of the system and decreased availability of surface water, the net area irrigated by canals has gone down from 55% in 1960-61 to 28% in 2006-07. Consequently, ground water has become a major source of irrigation in the state. To relieve stress on ground water, a greater emphasis is needed on building an efficient conveyance and distribution system for optimal utilization of available surface water. Simultaneously, Punjab needs a greater share in its river waters to reduce stress on groundwater resources and power consumption. In the absence of any systematic policy to regulate the demand for water, the unconstrained mining of this resource has resulted in its overexploitation. A look at the temporal dimension of categorization of blocks shows that in year 1984, 44.92% blocks were the over-exploited and about 49% blocks were classified as semi-critical or safe. But by the year 1992, 52% of the blocks fell into the
category of over-exploitation and the share of semi-critical and safe blocks went down to 40%. Currently, as per the 2004 statistics, the number of over-exploited blocks has risen to 75.18% and the number of semicritical and safe blocks has shrunk to 21%. A combination of overexploitation of groundwater and reduced share of canal water is drastically depleting the central resource of the Punjab economy.
n the whole, the area dependant on groundwater of unfit quality is around 7957 square kms, which accounts for nearly 16 per cent of Punjab state. In addition, the state has moved from growing a previously healthy mix of crops such as wheat, maize, pulses and vegetables to now devoting nearly 80% of its crop area to rice and wheat, two of the most water-intensive crops. Overall, the central and state level agriculture policy consisting of minimum support prices, effective procurement of selected crops, input subsidies benefiting farmers in electricity, fertilizer, and irrigation and the increased availability of credit facilities over the years has been instrumental in pushing farmers to focus on wheat and rice, at enormous detriment to water resource sustainability in the country. Since the scope to address the supply side of water is limited, the major focus has to be on managing the demand side of water. Rice so far has been the most remunerative crop, relative to other kharif crops. It is also the most water intensive crop, using about 24000 cubic metres of water per hectare, which is about six times more than maize, nearly 20 times more than groundnut and about 10 times more than pulses. A major reason for the deteriorating water table is the state governments long-standing policy of giving
free power to farmers. As power in Punjab is heavily subsidized, its 1.1 million agricultural consumers feel free to run their powerful submersible motors to draw groundwater. The supply of free power to farmers is directly linked with underground water, since it encourages over-exploitation of this scarce natural resource. During the years when electric supply was free in Punjab, the water table in some districts went down considerably. Unfortunately, farmers are still going deeper in search of water by installing deep submersible pumps using heavyduty motors consuming more power. Political considerations should not overlook the ground realities. A few years more of this honeymoon with free/subsidized power will render many more areas in Punjab and elsewhere barren. People then may not get water even for drinking, leave aside for irrigation.
when there are no irrigation requirements. The accompanying table is indicative of the damage caused by such floods in the immediate past.
espite the infrastructure of dams and large head works on all major rivers and low dams on excessive discharging rivulets of the state, occasional excessive flood water, which cannot be impounded upstream of the dams, has to be passed downstream keeping in view the regulation norms based on the safety of dams. Sometimes, water has to be released in the interest of power generation, even
Year 1980 1990 2000 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Villages/ towns effected (No.) 1191 755 81 43 480 93 442 1033 2001 Area affected (in sq. km.) 489 471 127 47 610 31 211 1035 5004
he problem of floods, from a planning perspective, calls for a mix of short-term, medium term and long term measures that must be specific to the region. To counter floods, a number of river taming works need to be annually constructed on the river. The rivers, Ravi and Sutlej near the international border, need to be paid special attention to counter the floods menace resulting from protective works constructed by the neighbouring country and the shifting course of the rivers. There is a need to adopt a coordinated management approach to minimize the floods in the state, by formulating suitable drainage policy for annual maintenance of drains and ensuring optimum utilization of hydropower and irrigation potential. Another important aspect is water quality, which is impacted by untreated or inadequately treated industrial effluents and sewage flowing into nallahs and rivers. The problem is further compounded by the mixing of storm water and sewage in various municipal towns, as these carry solid waste, biomedical waste and other hazardous waste from city roads into the water bodies. The polPopulation affected (No.) 85724 90465 319 25 60157 125 405933 405911 389116 Human lives lost (No.) 44 13 5 3 15 11 10 7 34 Cattle heads lost (No.) 117 275 88 0 511 48 23 3 104
Effect of Floods During Rainy Season in Punjab in India
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Source: Statistical Abstract, Govt. of Punjab, various issues.

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lution and contamination of water resources due to industrial waste, sewage and excessive use of chemical/ pesticides in agriculture has led to high pH, BoD, DO, faecal coliform and concentrations of arsenic etc. At some places, the water has become toxic due to high concentration of heavy metals, adversely affecting the health of the populace and causing diseases like cancer. Toxic water may even enter the food chain, affecting genotoxicity and possibly even the DNA, causing irreparable loss to both human beings and wildlife. The chemical quality of groundwater is also deteriorating due to natural release of selenium and fluorides. As such, special attention needs to be given to these aspects to provide safe water. Despite the recently formulated Punjab State Water Policy (2008), a lot remains to be done. Although scarcity of water has been a serious problem for at least the last two decades, the investment in research and development in water use efficiency has not yet picked up. Thus R&D programmes on water use efficiency need to be given the highest priority. There is also an urgent need to develop a long term policy for groundwater use and recharge to help maintain an optimum balance. The current negative balance between annual available water supply and actual use needs to be corrected through multipronged strategies like making maximum use of surface water, increasing recharge addressing the urban sector, and reducing demand for water. The state government passed the Preservation of Subsoil Water Ordinance in 2008 to institutionalize delayed sowing of paddy. If Punjab is to continue as the foodgrain capital of India, modern agricultural practices will have to take into account the reality of the water situation and create a feasible long term plan for a sustainable future.
Water crisis in Delhi

RUMI AIJAZ
SOME urban settlements the world over have grown phenomenally in population size. A high concentration of people within urban limits is not a unique phenomenon, but problems occur when urban governance institutions and mechanisms are unable to manage urban growth, or fail to meet the demands, aspirations and expectations of citizens from all sections of the society. A failure in managing growth invariably has an adverse impact on the quality of life and living conditions. Such a situation is observed in most cities of developing countries which are experiencing a rapid growth of slums and unauthorized settlements, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, severe infrastructure and service deficiencies, increase in rents and land values, threats to built and natural heritage, crime, violence, corruption, and so on. Many such problems severely affect the life of urban residents, and have a negative impact on economic growth and productivity of cities. The nature and extent of problems occurring due to urbanization may be further understood by examining specific cases. Let us look at the situation of water a basic human
necessity and a fundamental right. In Indian towns and cities, the responsibility for providing water to the citizens falls on the local government (i.e., a municipality) or a subordinate agency of the state government (such as the Delhi Jal Board). They are engaged in the planning, design and implementation of water supply schemes, and look after the operation and maintenance of water supply systems. To discharge this duty, financial and technical assistance is received from the concerned central ministry and the state government department. The water supply agency obtains raw water mainly from surface sources (such as rivers, lakes or canals) and from under the ground (commonly known as groundwater). Rainwater harvesting is an insignificant practice. The raw water procured is first treated at treatment plants and thereafter conveyed to underground and/or overhead storage reservoirs for distribution to different parts of the city by pipeline. A legislative act empowers the water supply agency to recover from the citizens the costs incurred in the production and distribution of water by levying a water tax, or a charge. For the poor communities living in slums and unauthorized coloSEMINAR 626 October 2011
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nies, water is usually supplied free of cost by public stand posts, hand pumps and tankers.
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n appraisal of the urban water supply sector reveals that numerous problems are being experienced in ensuring a safe and regular supply of water to urban residents. This situation is also observed in the case of Delhi, which is home to 16.75 million persons. Indias capital city should ideally demonstrate the best form of governance. On the contrary, the situation is alarming. The statistics maintained by the service providing agency, namely the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), confirm that there is insufficient raw water available for the people of Delhi, and due to a continuous addition to the citys population, the deficit has been increasing over the years. In early 2011 for instance, while the water produced by DJB was about 830 million gallons per day (mgd), demand was estimated at 1,080 mgd and the deficit was 250 mgd. Furthermore, many city-level indicators pertaining to water supply coverage and distribution per capita supply, quality, duration of supply, water pressure, groundwater levels, water infrastructure (including reservoirs, treatment and recycling plants, pipelines, meters, etc.) are lagging behind established norms. For example, in early 2010, as against the 100% benchmark, only 72% of the population was covered by water supply and the extent of water metering was even lower at 55%. The average water supply per day is between two and three hours. Similarly, the capability of the service providing agency is a matter of great concern, evident from the huge water losses (about 40%) caused by leakages in transmission/distribution lines and in various stages of treatment, frequent pipeline bursts,
significant proportion of non-revenue (52%) and unaccounted flow (42%) of water, insufficient capacity to treat waste water, huge energy consumption in water conveyance, inefficient grievance redressal mechanism, inappropriate water pricing and low cost recovery (42%), large number of defective meters as well as non-metered connections, lack of reliable data and information, lack of community and private sector involvement in water planning and distribution, and noteworthy intra-urban disparities.
basic problem faced by the water supply agency is the arrangement of raw water from various sources in and around Delhi. Groundwater levels are depleting fast, falling by 80-100 metres in some parts of Delhi, since extraction outpaces natural recharge. There is also evidence of groundwater contamination and high salinity levels. The civic agency thus relies mostly (85%) on surface water sources, namely river Yamuna, Bhakra storage and the upper Ganga canal. The water available in surface sources reaches (or is brought to) Delhi after passing the adjoining states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh (UP). Delhi is thus dependent on the neighbouring states for raw water supply. The states located near or along the route of the three different surface sources have a policy of sharing water according to an agreement. For example, Yamuna waters are shared between Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi. However, past experience shows that quite often there is arbitrariness in receiving regular supply from the adjoining states as per the allocated share. Sometimes, the ensured supply of water to the national capital as per the water sharing policy between the North Indian states is disrupted, affecting supply of water to various parts of the city.
In the recent past, there has been some tension and politics over inter-state water sharing, and distribution of water in various localities of Delhi. It would be useful to understand the underlying problems in greater detail, as well as the reasons responsible for the occurrence of such adversities. In 2005, Delhi officials publicly announced that their raw water demands for a treatment plant would be definitely met by UP. This statement was made without receiving any formal notification on release of water from the UP government.1 Such practices did not go down well with the UP government functionaries, who took it as a serious offence and refused any major water concessions to Delhi at that point of time. Again in 2006, UP functionaries argued that the water meant for farmers in western UP will not be given to Delhi.2
he Haryana government in 2007 did not release Delhis share of water allotted by the Bhakra-Beas Management Board for more than two months. While Haryana state functionaries argued that this happened because the water was not received from Punjab, the latter provided evidence of release, implying stoppage of water in Haryana.3 Consequently, some water treatment plants in Delhi functioned at half their capacity and many residential localities were left unserved for long periods. The Delhi government has also made arrangements to obtain fresh water by developing new surface sources in collaboration with adjoining states. This is due to increasing pollution levels in the river Yamuna,
1. Delhi Victim of Water Politics, The Hindu, 19 June 2005. 2. Water Politics May Leave Delhi Thirsty, Business Standard, 27 February 2006. 3. Release Citys Share of Water, CWC Tells Haryana, The Times of India, 12 August 2007.
as well as inadequate availability of raw water. Sometimes, water production at treatment plants in Delhi is curtailed by as much as 35% because ammonia and chloride levels in raw waters of the Yamuna river go up substantially, which affects city supplies. The construction of a 102 km. long Munak canal is a joint effort with the Haryana government to ensure supply of fresh water to both Delhi and Haryana. The Delhi government has contributed Rs 3.5 billion for canal construction. Recent news reports indicate that the water sharing dispute that arose between the two state governments, possibly because of ambiguities in sharing of project costs, has been resolved through dialogue and discussion between the two state governments.4 There are, however, concerns over receiving the full share of canal waters from Haryana in future, as water levels in the Munak canal sometimes show a fluctuating trend.5 This problem affects production of raw water at treatment plants in Delhi. In this regard it is learnt that canal waters are often diverted to the paddy fields in Haryana, especially at times when the region experiences scanty rainfall.
extra efforts have to be made during the treatment stage before the water can be supplied to various Haryana settlements downstream.6
he quality of raw water in river Yamuna is another area of concern and conflict. It is alleged that the problem occurs when Yamuna waters enter Delhi after which untreated or partially treated effluents are discharged into the river through the numerous city drains. This practice contaminates the raw water, and creates difficulties for the Haryana government, as water available for production gets significantly reduced. Moreover,
4. GoM to Solve Delhi, Haryana Water Row, expressindia.com, 27 January 2011. 5. Haryana Withholding Delhis Share of Water, The Hindu, 12 August 2011.
et another peculiar case of conflict may be mentioned here. In one instance, the water supply received from the upper Ganga canal was blocked by the local population for a few hours in the bordering state of Uttar Pradesh. Some groups were protesting for the inclusion of their community under the OBC category, as it would ensure reservation of seats in jobs. The impact of this minor social movement in UP was felt on the water availability for local residents living in several East and South Delhi colonies. They faced a severe water shortage crisis and had no option but to call water tanker operators who supplied water at exorbitant rates. To prevent a similar situation from occurring again, the Ghaziabad district administration had to deploy the Rapid Action Force at the upper Ganga canal in Muradnagar so as to avoid disruption of water supply to Delhi. Hence, the manner in which the water sharing situation as well as other inter-state social and economic issues are managed by various stakeholders can severely affect city supplies. Within the city too, there exist severe inequities in water availability. The data on water supply coverage shows that about a quarter of Delhis population does not get piped and treated water. This is the situation in slums and unauthorized colonies of Delhi where hand pumps and tankers are provided for water supply. The urban poor have also been neglected because many of the (unauthorized) colonies in which they live are yet to be regularized, thereby depriving
6. Haryana Blames Delhi for Polluting Yamuna Water, The Times of India, 7 February 2011.
them the right to gain access to basic civic amenities. Thus, some areas in the city get only 30 to 40 litres per capita per day (lpcd), while other parts are better off with as much as 500 lpcd. The duration of supply is another area of concern, as the average supply per day is only about two to three hours.
uch inequities in basic civic amenities often result in serious dissatisfaction among the masses as well as civil unrest. For example, the residents of Kondli, a locality in East Delhi, raised slogans against the Delhi government and the Jal Board, blocked roads and damaged vehicles due to non-receipt of water supply for several days. 7 A similar situation was observed in the Khanpur locality in southeast Delhi,8 and in Sangam Vihar in South Delhi.9 A shortage of drinking water results in greater reliance on private suppliers, and affects the household budget. The residents hold the view that unless they engage in disruptive action, their complaints generally go unheard. Occasionally, there have been arguments between workers of different political parties over inadequate water supply in some parts of the city.10 Sometimes, poor communities benefit by way of improved access to water supply.11 Such a situation is observed mainly before elections when influential candidates affiliated to various political parties ensure that their voters receive sufficient supplies of water, and other essential com7. Protest Against Water Shortage Turns Violent, The Hindu, 7 July 2010. 8. Protests on Streets Over Water Shortage, The Hindustan Times, 26 June 2009. 9. Protests Over Water Crisis in Delhi, NDTV, 26 June 2009. 10. Cong., BJP Workers Clash, The Times of India, 27 April 2010. 11. DJB Flooded With Politics of Water, indianexpress.com, 7 May 2009.
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modities. This shows how the politics over water is a big election issue, and politics affects equitable distribution of supply in the city. In fact, such politics tend to influence and distort policies and decisions and render rationality difficult,12 often creating a crisis in those parts of the city that are under-served, since water meant for them is diverted due to vested interests.
In cases, such as in Bolivia, the ensuing unrest even resulted in regime change.14
ublic-private partnership in infrastructure and services is a popular approach adopted by governments of numerous developing countries for achieving efficiency in providing services to the citizens. This approach has, however, met with varying degrees of success and the experience differs from place to place. The Delhi government too has given priority to joint venture arrangements with private companies for the treatment and distribution of water in the city. But there is resistance to privatization of water distribution. In 2011, hundreds of activists protested against proposed privatization of water.13 In their view, corporate houses and MNCs alone would benefit, and there would be abolition of subsidies and stoppage of free water for the urban poor. Political parties in opposition also hold the view that the experience of such reforms in the electricity sector of Delhi has not been very encouraging. A recent study on this subject shows that across the globe, the moves towards handing over urban water supply and management to private parties has increased the burden on the poorer sections.
12. Ramaswamy R. Iyer, The Politicisation of Water, InfoChange News and Features, October 2005. 13. Protest Against Water Privatisation in Delhi, The Tribune, 6 July 2011. 14. Kshithij Urs and Richard Whittell, Resisting Reform? Water Profits and Democracy. Sage Publications India, 2009.
n evaluation of the urban water supply scenario in Delhi reveals that problems have arisen mainly due to unplanned urbanization, slow implementation of national and state water policies, lack of institutional reforms, insufficient allocation of funds for the development of urban water infrastructure and institutions, underutilization of funds, weak maintenance, management and governance of water supply systems and local and regional water resources, and interstate issues. And if the same trend continues, possible future threats could be lower quantities of water available, more time and money spent on addressing daily consumption needs, increased local conflicts over sharing of water resources, and serious economic, environmental and health concerns.
References Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organization, Manual on Water Supply and Treatment (third edition, revised and updated), Ministry of Urban Development, New Delhi, 1999. Delhi Development Authority, Master Plan for Delhi 2021. Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi and IL&FS Ecosmart, City Development Plan for Delhi, Chapter 8 Water Supply, 2006. Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi, The Delhi Water Board Act, 1998. Ministry of Water Resources, National Water Policy, 2002. National Sample Survey Organization, Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in India, NSS 54th Round (January to June 1998), Department of Statistics, Government of India, New Delhi, 1999. Planning Commission, Eleventh Five Year Plan 2007-2012, Chapter 5 Drinking Water, Sanitation, and Clean Living Conditions, Government of India, New Delhi. WHO and UNICEF, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water, 2010 update, 2010.
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Water as a public good vs. water privatization

UWE HOERING
THE re-municipalization of the water supply system of Paris at the beginning of this year, until then one of the crown jewels of the French global players in the water sector, could be seen as a signal that the nearly two decade old heated debate on Private vs. Public has turned full circle. But the process of reversing privatization or to be more precise of Private Sector Participation (PSP) started already nearly a decade ago, when global water corporations like Suez/ Ondeo, Veolia/Vivendi and Thames Water/RWE announced their intention to reduce their engagement in southern countries. This forced institutions like the World Bank to re-evaluate its privatization strategy for the water sector, conceding that under current conditions the private sector will play only a marginal role in financing water infrastructure.1 And it opened up room for opportunities for non-governmental, civil organizations and public utilities to develop alternatives to privatization. But first a brief look back on how it began. The investment requirements in the water sector were the central argument with which private sector participation has been promoted since the early nineties. The expectation was that transnational private utilities would supply capital and modern management. More market, more competition and the entrepreneurial
1. Water Resources Sector Strategy: Strategic Directions for World Bank Engagement, Draft for Discussion, 25 March 2002, p. 38.
striving for profit would help remove the chronic problems many public utilities are faced with, such as high water loss and insufficient supply. This was the only way so the mantra went to achieve the Millennium Development Goal, i.e. to cut by half the number of people who do not have access to safe drinking water and appropriate sanitary installations by 2015. As a preliminary step, profound institutional and political adjustment processes were initiated to create positive investment conditions for private utilities in developing countries. The widespread habit of subsidizing was replaced by the concept of cost recovery. Private investors were encouraged with the help of various risk coverage instruments and by offering low interest loans for Public-Private Partnerships (PPP). Since then, experience has shown that these projects contributed much less than expected to an improvement of the drinking water supply for the low-income population, and even less so to an increase in the number of sanitary installations. This was even confirmed by a World Bank report.2 According to the report, even as privatization results in an improvement in some cases, the basic problems remain: marginalized areas are hardly covered, corruption merely acquires a new shape, and accountability towards the public continues to remain weak.
2. Clive Harris, Private Participation in Infrastructure in Developing Countries, World Bank Working Paper No. 5, Washington D.C., April 2003.
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Frequently, privatization has a negative effect on the poor, as in many cases prices have increased dramatically. Nevertheless, despite these increases in water charges, corporations have had to concede that the expected easy profits in the water sector are not to be made, the main reason being that costs and returns in most areas of the water sector tend to be diametrically opposed. No wonder that J.F. Talbot, CEO of SAUR International, emphasized that the notion of cost coverage, particularly with regard to low-income groups, is untenable.3
and where increasingly the poor themselves must become self-reliant to balance the lack of funds provided by the public sector.
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rivate investments in many projects remained much smaller than hoped for or even agreed on during negotiations. One of the cases is Manila, where Suez/Ondeo has invested only a quarter of the capital that was originally promised. Instead of being supplemented by additional private resources, the investments continue to be financed by public means: by low interest multi- and bilateral development loans to governments that are then passed on to private implementing agencies. Thus the politics of privatization creates a dichotomy in the water sector: lucrative areas such as the supply of drinking water for high income groups are transferred to private enterprises; less attractive areas such as squatter settlements, suburbs and rural regions remain with the public sector. This dichotomy corresponds with the dichotomy of public funds for the development of the water sector: on the one hand there is the promotion of the private sector and the minimization of risk for global corporations, and on the other hand there are the alternatives that cannot be privatized,
3. Speech at the World Bank in January 2002, www.worldbank.org/wbi/B-SPAN/docs/ SAUR.pdf

he multifaceted political, economic and financial problems, however, with which the involved companies are confronted, turned out to be the basic problem confronting the privatization strategy. * In many countries (Bolivia, South Africa, Indonesia, and the Philippines) there was strong resistance against the water corporations, which, as in Cochabamba, led to a cancellation of the contracts. * The financial crisis in Asia and the economic crisis in Argentina resulted in grave financial losses, especially for the second ranked of the global players, Suez/Ondeo. Thus the devaluation of the Philippine Peso and serious management errors resulted in a cancellation of the contract for Manila (West) which was at one time one of the World Banks most prestigious projects. * All three market leaders (Suez, Vivendi and RWE) accumulated large debts as a result of rapid expansion, which became a burden on the shareholder value; Veolia/Vivendi was up for sale after the collapse of the group. Furthermore, corporate representatives conceded that low hanging fruit, low-risk projects that require little investment, have almost all been picked. Some corporations thus initiated a consolidation phase. A central component of this consolidation was a retreat to supposedly secure markets such as the U.S., European countries with a low degree of privatization like Germany, the Eastern European accession countries, or China. Still they claim that they cannot raise the investments necessary to achieve the Millennium Goals without consi-
derable state subsidies and low interest loans. Thus, they are demanding a stronger engagement by the development banks again with public money. The World Bank and other multilateral and bilateral financial institutions and donors also became more reserved in their prognoses concerning the participation of the private sector in the countries of the South: We were too optimistic concerning the willingness to invest in these countries, Nemat Safik, World Bank Vice President for Infrastructure, conceded, despite far-reaching reforms, many countries do not find investors. The experiences with privatization and the decreased interest of water corporations also left its mark on a number of governments: Privatization has not resolved the water problems for most of the population, is how Olivio Dutra, responsible for urban planning in Lulada Silvas first Brazilian government, summed it up.
he most obvious conclusion would have been to reorient towards an improvement of public utilities, which had been systematically placed at a disadvantage as opposed to PSP options. However, whenever reforms of public utilities were promoted within the scope of development cooperation, they usually served just as a preparation for privatization, not as a means to improve the functioning of public utilities to remain public. The withdrawal of the private global players could have been an opportunity for development cooperation to once again concentrate on public corporations as the central pillar of water supply and sanitation. The picture has become much more diverse, mixed and differentiated than lets say a decade ago. Even as the drive for privatization continues, the global players have set their
sights on a more appealing target: countries with dwindling water supplies and ageing infrastructure, but better economies than developing countries. These are the countries that can afford to pay, says James Olson, an US-attorney who specializes in water rights. Theyve got huge infrastructure needs, shrinking water reserves, and money. Take China. Since 2000, when the country opened up its municipal services to foreign investments, the number of private water utilities has skyrocketed. But as private companies absorb water systems throughout the country, the cost of water has risen precipitously. At the same time, there are many smaller, regional companies from emerging economies that are driving privatization moves. This is the case in many countries across Latin America and Asia, less so in SubSaharan Africa.
n principle the World Bank has not relinquished its privatization strategy as can be seen from several strategy papers like the Water Resources Sector Strategy (WRSS) adopted in February 2003, or the Private Sector Development Strategy (PSDS) from early 2002, which focuses on infrastructure and services. All the papers have two main ideas in common: (i) a widening participation of the private sector in the complete water sector, and (ii) a rediscovery of large infrastructure projects. Similar strategy papers and political ideas also emanate from the Asian Development Bank, viz. their Agricultural Sector Programmes. By broadening existing instruments (guarantees, loans, etc.) and by developing new support measures (like Output Based Aid), the World Bank and other development banks are continuing to lower hurdles for participation by corporations in developing
countries and make the investment conditions more attractive. Nevertheless, the World Bank and other donors have become less enthusiastic about private sector participation even though they continue to promote it. Simultaneously, they now promote public water utility reforms, consumer corporations, and other non-private forms of management and ownership. Additionally, the focus has shifted away from urban water supply and sanitation towards high dams and irrigation, where an increasing proportion of investments of the World Bank now go. Central to the new policy of the World Bank in the water sector is the development of a legal framework for water entitlements, the issuance of such entitlements, and the use of market based mechanisms that permit voluntary adjustment by owners and users to meet temporary or permanent changes in demand. Investments in new or existing hydraulic infrastructure and irrigation projects are considered to provide a greater chance to introduce the basic concepts needed for the issuance of such water entitlements. Thus, the focus shifts from the privatization of infrastructure or management towards privatization of the water resource itself. And water pricing has become the new magic formula, which has been the base of private sector participation in the 1990s: a higher water price is considered to bring about efficiency, investments, and conservancy, which will also benefit the poor without access to water and sanitation.
move by the federal government of Malaysia, which is in the process of buying all water and waste water infrastructure in the country to develop them with public money. Instead of the so-called Public-Private Partnership there is a new model emerging of Public-Public Partnership (PuPs), where successful and experienced public utilities team up with others to exchange information and experiences on how to improve public service delivery. Most people involved in this process of reviving public utilities agree that merely a return to the conventional public provision utilities is no solution. Instead, there are several preconditions for success, drawn for example from cases like Porto Alegre and its concept of participatory budgeting. One of these is the participation of workers, employees and unions in the process, extended to participation of users and the public. Another is shifting of resources towards the public sector and the provision of public goods in spite of the precarious financial situation of many municipalities. Both preconditions point to the need and challenge for some fundamental shifts in policy and financial resource management, which are not easy to achieve.
aris water is not the only example for re-municipalization. There are many other prominent cases like Stuttgart and Berlin in Germany, Hamilton in Canada, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, or the
his is not to argue that private sector and industry does not have a role to play. Or that there is no scope to make profit from investments in the water sector. With the right incentives, they can develop and supply the technology needed to make water delivery more cost-effective and environmentally sound. Ultimately both public and private entities will have to work together. The question is: who shall be in the drivers seat? The answer depends on whether water is considered to be a common good and water supply a public responsibility, or not.
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Deciphering environmental flows

J AYA N TA BANDYOPADHYAY
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RIVERS, lakes and groundwater aquifers have been abstracted, dried and ecologically degraded worldwide by humans, especially during the last two centuries. The scale of human economic activity has grown exponentially and so has intervention into the natural systems to gain access to increasing volumes of water. The availability of reinforced cement technology and powerful mechanical pumps made such interventions possible, offering a supply-side bonanza. It took a few years to understand the cumulative impacts on the ecological processes on which such a bonanza depended, as in the case of the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Such cumulative damages have resulted in quantitative decline and consequent inability of the water systems to maintain the various ecosystem services and supplies of water on which the livelihoods of a large
number of people depend. This gave rise to a new type of water conflict between the satisfaction of short-term economic demands of water and the long-term sustainability of the diverse ecosystem processes and services that water systems provide. The rapid decline in the groundwater table in many parts of India and the degradation of flows in most rivers, in both quality and quantity, is a result of looking at water systems within a traditional engineering framework, as a stock of resource to be abstracted as per the demands of the economy. In the context of wide spatial and temporal inequity in the monsoon dominated precipitation over India, the macro-level picture comparing demand and availability of water is hardly reflective of the realities in smaller parts of the country. Nevertheless, official projections indicate that the total water requirement of India
would outstrip the total availability of about 1100 billion cubic metres by the mid-part of the present century. If the business as usual practice continues, such a situation would create widespread conflicts of immense political significance. Addressing such emerging conflicts, between the perspectives of water as a stock and as a flow, is thus an imperative. With the quantity of abstractions of water from the natural sources growing rapidly, their impacts on the functioning of the ecological processes involving water systems have become more and more conspicuous. If the initial signals of such ecological degradations are ignored by policy makers, the ecosystem services start to get restricted, making it increasingly difficult to both maintain livelihoods dependent on its sustained availability and to abstract water for meeting other economic demands.
degraded to such an extent that the water future for India in both supply terms and ecological sustainability appears uncertain. As a result, conflicts over water are growing, an expression of the dichotomy between the economic perception of water as a stock and its ecological perceptions as a flow in the hydrological cycle. Addressing such conflicts demands ecological knowledge for the identification and articulation of related ecosystem functions and services, which needs time. The need for regulating the abstraction of water from rivers, lakes or aquifers is now widely accepted.
flows relate exclusively to the flows of managed water systems, where human interventions have already been made or are likely to be made. This management may involve an addition to the natural flow (as in the case of the Farakka Barrage and river Hooghly-Bhagirathi) or an abstraction of the flow (as in the case of irrigation projects) or a temporal modification of the flow (as in the case of hydropower projects).
growing insecurity about the future availability of water has led to new arrangements about its quantitative sharing, across boundaries and across sectors. The numerous transboundary treaties and tribunal awards over shared rivers like the Ganga, Cauvery, Krishna or Godavari, to name a few, exemplify how water sources are seen as a stock from a narrow quantitative viewpoint. The recent disagreement between the Government of India and that of the state of West Bengal on the question of quantitative sharing of river Teesta reflects the same mindset. Further, the website of Indias Ministry of Water Resources clearly reveals the commitment of water engineers to the traditional perspective of supplyside solutions, guided by what is now increasingly being known as arithmetical hydrology. The sources of water in rivers, lakes and aquifers have now been
any documents present the nonhuman requirements of water in the rivers, lakes and aquifers in terms such as minimum flow, environmental water allocations, etc. These are, however, ad hoc and not based on an ecological understanding of water; rather, they are at best a reluctant concession of arithmetical hydrology to silence the ecologically informed critics. Nevertheless, such an understanding is crucial for ensuring the sustainability of water systems, and hence, to the continued supply of water in the future days. The term environmental flows, which has now come in circulation, is advanced as the golden solution to the already emerged conflicts between economic use and eco-systemic sustainability related to water systems. As a starting point, it is important to decode the term environmental flows and uncover its implications in management, policy and laws related to water. In the absence of such a clarity in the public understanding, the term itself may run the risk of being misused. An early articulation of the term was advanced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.1 In this perception, environmental
s a result of such interventions, the aquatic ecosystems are affected, reducing them to a sub-pristine state of existence (the pristine state being one without any human intervention). Similarly, the recent initiative by several IITs for making a new management plan for the Ganga river basin defines environmental flows as a regime of flow in a river or stream that describes the temporal and spatial variation in quantity and quality of water required for freshwater as well as estuarine systems to perform their natural ecological functions (including sediment transport) and support the spiritual, cultural and livelihood activities that depend on these ecosystems.2 Abstraction of water is necessary and interventions are unavoidable for meeting human water requirements. In the perception of the IUCN, environmental flows constitute a flow pattern moderated by human interventions, but in a manner that while the water related ecosystems are altered to a sub-optimal state, they would continue to function, albeit in a partially degraded manner. The scale and type of abstraction of water from a river, lake or an aquifer would be deter-
1. IUCN, Flow: The Essentials of Environmental Flows. Gland, IUCN, 2003. 2. GRBMP, Report Code: 012_GBP_IIT_ EFL_SOA_01_Ver 1_June 2011
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mined by informed negotiation among stakeholders on an acceptable level of ecological degradation. Hence, the claim is that the modification of the flow of water and its ecological impacts would be acceptable to all stakeholders, on the basis of the satisfaction of human water requirements and a sub-optimal functioning of the related ecosystems.
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t needs to be clarified that environmental flows consist not only of the quantity of water but represents the annual hydrograph, establishing the periodicity of the flows. They represent a package of water flows and its periodicity throughout the year. Such a modified flow pattern that maintains the periodicity of flow in rivers, lakes or aquifers but changes the quantity of flows by abstraction, is known as mimicking of the natural flows. Under the managed hydrological regime, while the flows would exist in a sub-pristine state, a mimicking allocation would ensure that the aquatic ecosystems and services provided by them are not threatened with extinction but are damaged to an agreed and predetermined extent. In principle, such an arrangement of compromise offers a platform for negotiated settlement of conflicts over short-term economic use and long-term ecological sustainability of water systems. This will be most useful for policy making and management related to large structural interventions on water systems. Such a mechanism for conflict resolution based on environmental flows is, however, in a nascent stage and needs substantial theoretical and methodological refinement before it can help decision making in government, judiciary, etc. In the absence of such a refinement and clear conceptualization, decisions run the risk of being premature and counter-productive.
The approach is based on the fact that rivers and other aquatic ecosystems need both water and other inputs like debris and sediment to stay healthy and provide benefits to people. Environmental flows are a critical contributor to the health of these ecosystems. Depriving a river or a groundwater system of these flows not only damages the entire aquatic ecosystem, it also threatens the people and communities who depend on it. At its most extreme, the long-term absence of environmental flows puts at risk the very existence of dependent ecosystems, and therefore the lives, livelihood and security of downstream communities and industries. The question thus is not whether water abstraction projects are needed, but whether and for how long society can afford not to provide for environmental flows.3 The starting point for moving towards this goal would be the drawing up of a more complete framework for ecological functions and services related to the river, lake or aquifer in question, both in their pristine state and at present, if they are now regulated systems.
rom recent discourses an impression seems to have gained ground in the public mind that a win-win mechanism has finally emerged, with which water from rivers, lakes and aquifers can be substantially abstracted without hurting their ecological integrity as long the proper quantity of environmental flows is left out for meeting the needs of the natural ecosystems. Such a concept is simplistic and risky. Environmental flows must not be considered as an unique volume of water that can be estimated ad hoc as the need of the natural ecosystems, say 25 per cent of the annual flow. The con3. GRBMP, 2011, op cit.
cept also does not support the idea that the remaining 75 per cent of the water from rivers, lakes or aquifers can be abstracted without payment for ecological damages. The concept of environmental flows only offers a quantitative indicator, relating managed supply of water with stability and functioning of the aquatic ecosystems. Starting from the pristine flow, any abstraction or addition should be based on a negotiated sub-optimal state of the aquatic ecosystem that is acceptable to all stakeholders and compensation paid for damage to ecosystem services and related livelihoods. Thus, there is no fixed amount called environmental flows, but flows that are allocated on the basis of agreed levels of degradation of the natural ecosystems when compared with the pristine. If, for instance, the agreement is that a river should remain in pristine state, the total flow of the river would constitute the environmental flows. Elsewhere, in another river, a large part of the total flow may be abstracted, leaving it almost dry. In such a case the agreed environmental flows would be very small. In all instances, the abstractions need to ensure compensation for damages to the functioning of ecosystems and livelihoods. Environmental flows, accordingly, do not prescribe any minimum flow that many policy documents have started to project as the allocation which, if retained in the stream, would justify abstraction of all the remaining flows.
ssessment of environmental flows must be subject to a proper understanding of the diverse ecological processes and ecosystem services related to water systems. Tharme has pointed out the very underdeveloped nature of this new area of water science.4 Assessments of environmental
flows can only be made in relation to identified degradation of ecosystem processes and services, like that of the movement and growth of specific fish species. At present, however, only a small part of the totality of ecosystem processes and services related to rivers, lakes or aquifers can be clearly identified and thus subjected to such assessment processes.
n addition, the totality of environmental flows can be categorized first, as biological, and second, as geomorphological. For the first group, an example can be taken of the flows that are needed to sustain the movement and spawning of fish population, as in the case of the high value hilsa fish in the lower parts of the Ganga basin. The flow of water also generates sediment loads in the uplands and transports them to the floodplains and the delta, generating fertile land for humans and habitat for diverse aquatic biodiversity. Flood flows flush heavier sediments out to the deltas and coasts, clearing the river bed. All these are vital ecosystem services and need adequate flows for their continuation. For example, when a river flow outpours into the ocean, it is often described by arithmetical hydrologists as wastage of freshwater. For the ecologically informed, however, such flows are necessary for clearing the confluence and also to reduce the ingress of salinity from the oceans. The absence of such ecosystem services would damage the estuaries and coastal habitats and the rich fishing economy based on them. Environmental flows needed for maintaining such individual ecosys4. R.E. Tharme, A Global Perspective on Environmental Flow Assessment: Emerging Trends in the Development and Application of Environmental Flow Methodologies for Rivers, River Research and Applications 19, 2003, 397-441.
tem functions and services can be approximated by modelling, and as of today, hundreds of models are being tried out. However, if ecosystem functions and services of a river, lake or aquifer without human interference are seen in their totality, the related total environmental flow requirements will be very similar to their natural annual flows devoid of any extraction. Since it is also important to provide water supply to meet human requirements, engineering interventions, large or small, are needed. Any engineering intervention, however small, will invariably impact the ecosystem processes and services related to the source. The challenge is to arrive at acceptable environmental flows based on an agreeable trade-off in which the abstraction of water is socially acceptable, and ecologically sustainable as also ensure that all the damages to livelihoods and ecosystems are adequately met.
projects without paying the necessary compensation. In needs to be stressed that environmental flows do not provide free lunches to any water project.
xisting procedures for project assessment in India cannot be called scientific from such an ecological and holistic perspective. There is a clear tendency for the promoters of water abstraction projects to disregard ecological linkages and deprive the people whose livelihoods are negatively impacted by water projects. In the absence of a deeper scientific understanding, vested description of environmental flows may be used to get a blanket approval for abstraction
5. V.U. Smakhtin, C. Revenga and P. Dll, Taking Into Account Environmental Water Requirements in Globalscale Water Resources Assessments. Research Report of the CGIAR Comprehensive Assessment Programme of Water Use in Agriculture. International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka,2004, 24 pp, (IWMI Comprehensive Assessment Research Report 2); V. Smakhtin, C. Revenga and P. Dll, A Pilot Global Assessment of Environmental Water Requirements and Scarcity, Water International 29, 2004, 307-317.
ven though there cannot be a unique environmental flow independent of an agreed ecologically nonpristine status of water systems, various estimates giving unique amounts of environmental flows have been made for India.5 The estimate turned out to be about 476 km3, which constitutes approximately 25 per cent of the total renewable water resources in the country. This, however, was not in fact an estimate of EF per se, but rather an estimate of the total volume of EF. Somehow, in this instance, the environmental flows are being shown as absolute, not negotiable and a pro-duct of technical research alone! This closes the door for arriving at a negotiated path for the regulated water systems. And this is a dangerous confusion! It needs to be stressed that our current state of knowledge of water systems and ecological modelling related to flows of water, what to speak of projecting a single quantitative figure of water requirements as shown above, is inadequate. Such a unilateral prescription of environmental flows or water requirements of aquatic systems as a method for the resolution of water conflicts may actually become the source of many new conflicts. All stakeholders related to water systems need to increasingly understand the basis, scientific or otherwise, of various claims of assessing environmental flows, so that the conflicts between economic demands on and the ecological sustainability of water systems can be proactively resolved and a more robust holistic process of decision making on Indias rivers, lakes and aquifers can be put in place.
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Contested constructions of water

SHAILAJA FENNELL
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WATER is a scarce resource that lies at the heart of much of the political and social contestation in local, subnational and national arenas in South Asia. This is reflected in the increasing attention it now receives in both the scientific and social science research agendas. The consequences of a drastic reduction in water flow in South Asian rivers is prominent in the earth sciences while the danger of large dams to local ecologies and livelihoods, illustrated most famously
by the case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, has become a global symbol of poor ecological management. The strength that is unleashed from institutional management of water is also manifestly evident: historical analysis points to state institutions gaining considerable clout from ownership of water, an extreme case being that of oriental despotism. Similarly, debates about the marketization of water raise concerns about unfair advantage to the private
sector and the possible exclusion of the poor. The literature on water management currently emerging from new inter-disciplinary work, in particular the sub-field of institutional design of natural resource management, indicates that institutional mechanisms must incorporate both technical dimensions such as scale of the resource alongside social specificity, such as heterogeneity of users to ensure sustainable solutions (Ostrom 1990, 2005).
here are now specific formulations for advancing our understanding of water resource management that incorporate the presence of water resources in different physical forms, river and groundwater, as well as its different use by location, rural and urban, to provide finer distinctions on the supply side features of fit. The fitting of water management to administrative and hydrological boundaries ensuring an interplay between water management and other forms of governance, and evaluating dimensions of scale at various levels has been uncovered in recent institutional analysis (Mollinga 2007). There has also been more careful analysis of the demand-side institutional differences that emerge in the management of natural resources due to the contextual aspects that are based on different needs in individual countries (Bandaragoda 2009). The importance of identifying and incorporating both supply-side and demandside features in relationship to water ownership and pattern of use drawing on both scientific and social science perspectives foregrounds the need for further inter disciplinary framework for sustainable water resource management. The implications of the new thinking in institutional design point
to a need for devising an interdisciplinary framework of water management, as policy advisers tend to work within a single academic discipline. This restrictive policy framing makes it difficult for policy makers to identify the most appropriate academic construction of water to provide the blueprint for policy design and analysis. This article recommends an institutional analysis of water and begins by identifying the difficulties confronting natural resource management within national policy frameworks based on a single disciplinary framing. The case of forest management is illustrative. This is followed by a discussion of how a construction of water resource management that draws on a range of social science disciplines can identify gaps in the valuation of water to improve estimation of both returns as well as risks. The paper concludes that giving a greater social contextualization to access and ownership of water resources will permit a better balance between demand and supply side aspects and involve a fuller array of stakeholders to ensure sustainable water resource management.
that using a one-size fits all approach to natural resources was not viable and that one needed to incorporate the topographical and social particularities of natural resource, e.g., whether water was located in an inland lake or a river valley and the nature of the groups who had access to the resource (Ostrom 1990).
atural Resource Management has been a subject of study within a number of science and social science disciplines, ranging from botany to management studies. Within social science thinking a shift took place in the 1980s, from a singular focus on economic valuation methods using quantitative techniques such as costbenefit analysis to an understanding of the technical and social features of a particular natural resource. The move from market economics to institutional design came about as part of a new understanding of how problems of the environment should be addressed. The starting point was an admission by economic analysts
he physical and social context within which a natural resource is managed became the starting point for new cost calculations that focused on how the concerned individuals conserved resources. The framework of analyzing water management that was devised within the school of New Institutional Economics (NIE) focused on identifying economic costs associated with mechanisms for the conservation of resources. The NIE framing regarded the property rights assignment among individual users of the natural resource as central to ensuring efficient resource use and thereby conserving the natural resource. NIE thinking, consequently, directs governments and other institutions to give primary importance to the pattern of the allocation of ownership, favouring those individual users who have the greater stake in a resource as priority owners (Libecap 1989, Ostrom 1990). The impact of such a framing that has been influenced more by North American rather than the European approaches to institutional analysis in the social sciences has resulted in a greater interest in contracts between government and individuals (or groups) than in mapping the complex use of the resource by individuals and communities. The preference in the NIE approach for identifying natural resource management with particular owners and users, rather than the pattern of use and its relationship to the social context, has resulted in a narSEMINAR 626 October 2011
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row notion of management rather than provide a socially constituted basis for sustainable resource use.
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he limitation of the NIE framework lies in the assumption that optimizing individual preferences drives the decisions of individuals in the management of natural resources (Saravanan 2009). A discussion of natural resource management is consequently reduced to the desires of individual players and does not incorporate the larger social context within which these decisions are taken. The focus on individual decisions also prohibits an explicit incorporation of norms that might operate in time periods that exceed that of an individuals life (Fennell 2010). In particular, it does not help in understanding the role of factors that function across generations and have inter-generational effects. The contribution that long-term social norms play in the lives of local communities in managing natural resources has been disregarded not only by NIE but also the mainstream development institutions. This oversight has resulted in supply-side decisions being made by national governments and their designated institutions regarding ownership and contracting without taking on board the demand-side considerations that affect the livelihoods of local communities dependent on these natural resources. The inability to incorporate the role of social groups demanding access to and in managing natural resources has resulted in a partial and lopsided understanding of management design. The shortcoming of both traditional economic thinking and NIE thinking on institutional design exposes the limits of costing and contracting approaches to natural resource management. Thus the need for policy formulation on water manSEMINAR 626 October 2011
agement to go beyond single disciplinary perspectives and comprehensively incorporates social and technical dimensions (Ostrom 1990). A restrictive policy framing which denies the role of communities and groups in conserving natural resources also prevents them from being involved as active agents who can contribute to appropriate blueprints for policy design and analysis.
he significant role played by communities in the management of natural resources has become an important area of study in ecological social sciences in the last decade. The sub-field of forest management has been particularly helpful in improving our understanding of the challenges posed by state policies that do not take into account the needs and perspectives of local forest communities. These stu-dies focus on the institutional diversity present in both the supply and demand-side features of natural resource management, using a combination of natural and social science tools (Ostrom 2005). The purpose of these new techniques in natural resource management is to ensure that faulty methods drawn from narrow single-disciplinary approaches are no longer applied in institutional design. One sub-field where the dangers of narrow approaches became evident by the end of the 20th century is that of forestry (Moran and Ostrom 2005). The diminution in forest cover across the globe, and a number of national contexts makes it evident that supply-side concerns far exceed the demand-side analyses of the manner in which forests are managed. The evidence in the national examples below shows the consequences of such a one-sided approach to natural resource management. The increasing colonial demand for Asian wood gave rise to a new
commodity trade during the 19th century in South Asia and East Africa (Sivaramakrishnan 1995). The lucrative market opportunities arising from the considerable commercial value of particular species of timber resulted in private contracts being provided by the state for the removal and use of wood and other forest produce. While such contracting was initiated during the colonial era, it continued into the post-colonial period with little consideration for the historical denial of community rights in and usage by the public of the forests (Guha 1989). This disregard for traditional, communal and indigenous rights to forest resources by the state resulted in a confrontation with the community and groups in civil society.
clash over the ownership of the forest and its primacy as a form of life and livelihood has resulted in distributional conflict and contestation over rights. At the heart of this conflict is the manner in which the state uses politics, rhetoric and knowledge to privilege current economic value and market opportunity over cultural, traditional and indigenous forms of society. In the case of forests, we need a deeper study of the history of ownership and stakeholder usage for there is a dialectical relationship between discourses of rules and discourses of protest, and we can advance the study of this relationship by treating resistance as a diagnostic of power (Sivaramakrishnan, 1995: 3). The nature of and reason for contestation reveals the problems that emerge when demand-side factors are not adequately recognized and incorporated into policy design. Malaysia: The case of the Orang Asli, the original peoples of Malaysia who were excluded from any legal deed to their traditional lands, sets out the difficulties faced by local commu-
nities in getting formal recognition of their systems of natural resource management. The formal position of the British colonial administration was in support of the laws promulgated by the princely Malay states which decreed that all land was the property of the kings. After independence, the same understanding was carried over into the national policies of Malaysian government. The National Land Code that was introduced in 1965 to provide a uniform system of land ownership, continued to draw on the system of land registration that had initially been introduced by the British colonial administration during the 1930s (Means 1985).
s independent Malaysia was a federation of thirteen princely states, it required the promulgation of laws that could operate across all states. The National Land Code proceeded to vest land rights of individuals only upon registration in the land registry. Though this was approved by each of the princely states, the legislation was contradictory to the practices of indigenous groups viz. the twelve tribes of Orang Asli whose practice was to pass on their collective rights from generation to generation through customary law, and not to vest it in an individual (Cheah 2004). The inability of state law to recognize the rights of the Orang Asli became a matter of public concern when the federal government used the Land Code to compulsorily requisition the land of the Orang Asli Temuan tribe to facilitate a road link between the new Kuala Lumpur international airport and Kuala Lumpur city. The Temuans complained to the High Court of Malaysia and sought the restitution of their right to ancestral land. In its 2002 decision, the court recognized that the rights of the Orang Asli were different from the private
land rights determined within market contexts, and that the Orang Asli did not obtain only economic products from the land, but that their very way of life was directed by the spirits of their ancestral land. It, therefore, decreed that the native title of the Orang Asli could not be treated as though land was a mere commodity and on par with private land holdings but rather that it should be regarded as a way of life that was based on a system of beliefs linked to the land (Cheah 2004). India: The colonial policies of forest management that had been introduced during the 19th century continued unaltered till the 1970s. Forest agitations, most particularly that of the Chipko agitation in the mountainous regions of Uttar Pradesh, resulted in changes in the forest legislations in the 1980s (Damodaran and Engel 2003). Even though the new laws recognized the rights of hill communities, their traditional systems of governing access to resources were not incorporated in subsequent forest policies.
he difficulty of striking a proper balance between state policy and community demands is best illustrated in the Joint Forestry Management (JFM) programme introduced in the 1990s. The JFM was designed to initiate a participatory form of forest management. However, these programmes failed on account of official interference and were unable to vest any power in the local communities, whether by intent or poor design, and prevent premature exploitation of the trees (Sundar 2000). This new managerial form of organized resource use became the official state framework for a wave of social forestry programmes in Indian districts for the next two decades. The participation that was to be the foun-
dation of this framework did not result in the poorest sections of the forest community, by caste or occupation, gaining equal access to forest resources (Vemuri 2008). The failure of the JFM programme to restructure the access structure indicates that the social features of demand were not taken into account adequately in what remained a top down management structure of the bureaucratic administrative and forest services. China: The difficulties faced by the state in recognizing and designing common property resources are widespread and cross over different development paradigms. After independence in 1949, all land, including forest land, in China was declared as state property. The Chinese approach to forest management during the first half of 1950s was modelled closely on Stalins understanding of controlling and exploiting nature (Bao 2006). Though from 1956 onwards, forest land was awarded to private households, this policy was revoked during the years of the cultural revolution from 1966-76 (Long and Zhou 2001). It was thus only after the start of the economic reforms of the 1980s, that there was a reconsideration of the rights to the forests with regard to usage and management of resources.
n September 1984, the National Peoples Congress Standing Committee adopted the Forest Law of the Peoples Republic of China. This law was formulated to protect, nurture, and rationally utilize the forest resources so as to speed up the greening of the countrys territory. The law was designed to foreground the roles that the forest could play with regard to storing water, saving soil, adjusting the climate, improving the environment, and supplying forest products (Xi 1999). The remit of the law was largely concerned with changing incenSEMINAR 626 October 2011
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tives with regard to the cultivation, planting, logging and utilization of forests and to regulate the operation and management of forests, trees and woodlands. The strong developmental spin placed on the use and conservation of forest lands has implications for the rights and lives of indigenous people who have long established customary laws with regard to the forest lands in far flung areas of the country. The sale of user rights and the growth of tourism have emerged as large revenue earners for the provincial governments, but they have also come into conflict with the traditional ways of the indigenous groups. The market based approaches to user rights have devalued traditional ways of knowledge transfer regarding flora and fauna.
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he politics of forest resource management is contest-ridden in Asia. Indigenous and tribal groups continue to be overlooked by the bureaucratic and forest institutions and supplyside matters such as contracts take the upper hand. Similarly, official laws are rarely invoked by the local communities who would rather turn to their customary laws to deal with forest disputes. The gap between contractual supply-side models of forest use and the group demands arising from social norms of forest use indicate that all is not well in the world of forest policy modelling. There has been an attempt to reduce confrontation between state and civil society by relying on community approaches that use interdisciplinary tools to ensure sustainable forest resource management. The biggest challenge to managing these resources is the difficulty that players on the supply and demand sides face in creating a common platform through a process of collaboration as a way
forward (Vira, Daniels, Dubois and Walker 1998). This collaborative process is based on the understanding that sustainable resource management is more likely in a situation where all players have a shared urgency of risk in natural resource use. The central plank in this approach is that all stakeholders identify a common need for a valued resource that permits the use of procedures to reduce risk by using collective mechanisms to mitigate costs. If such collective mechanisms can be made to work, despite the presence of social and economic hierarchies, the process of collaboration is likely to succeed. In situations such as those seen in the development trajectories of the forest sector in Malaysia, India and China, where there is little effort to identify all the stakeholders on the demand and supplyside, it is not surprising that the institutional design for resource management suffers from poor computation, resulting in an underestimation of relative costs and benefits (Adams, Brockington, Dyson and Vira, 2002).
The importance of carefully linking law to policy and administration has also been recognized with regard to water resource management. In particular, water law, policy and administration have been identified as three pillars of water management in international literature (Saleth and Dinar 2000). These formulations are also finding favourable reception among scholars of Indian water policy.
he lessons from the poor record of forest resource management highlight the difficulty of identifying the full range of players on both supply and demand sides of natural resource management and usage. Simple interventions based on legislative reform do not provide a sufficient basis, as the legal framework alone is not able to ensure equality of access for all players, nor can it reverse top-down bureaucratic administrative and forest institutional structures. The limitations of these early management frameworks have led to a review of natural resource management that goes beyond relying on contract and formal laws to a more careful inclusion of social norms and informal practices (Ostrom 2005).
ven as the focus on law, policy and organizations as central themes for an improved institutional analysis of water management has been welcomed, there is concern that these global policy formulations have yet to devise tools that can analyze how societies adapt to the supply side interventions by the government and other institutional players (Shah 2005). Additionally, there is concern that the lessons from the international sphere should not be seen as the magic mantra that can solve water management problems. In fact, the reverse process by which Indian water resources experiences have helped fashion national and international water policy frameworks should also be recognized (Mollinga 2010). The possible solutions for Indian water resource management thus lie in the overlapping spheres of these two processes. The complexities of Indias water-bodies demands detailed knowledge of social and technological processes (Shah 2003) alongside a more astute evaluation of the hydrological and other ecological dimensions (Bandaragoda 2006). The case of rural water management has been of particular significance in devising management structures. The context of this phenomenon emerged with the rising power of the rural farmers lobbies in the 1960s. Another dimension of rural action emerged with the increas-
ingly vocal protests by subordinate groups such as marginal farmers and landless labour in anti-dam movements such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan from the 1980s. The political economy of rural water management has thus been played out in the battleground between national architects of development policy and local advocacy groups for the poor and marginalized groups in the last few decades. The backdrop to this story of conflicting claims to water is the increasing demand for water resulting from the introduction of thirsty high-yielding varieties (HYVs) brought in by the Green Revolution technologies of the 1960s, and the associated increase in rentseeking opportunities alongside the growing revenue accruing from water delivery (Mosse 2003). The political posturing of the rural elites and their use of irrigation facilities to gain private wealth through the proliferation of corrupt practices in water delivery and usage became endemic in the sector. It is within this social context that we need to understand the specific characteristics and types of water resource management in rural India.
consequence for Indian rural water management has been that there is no strong lobby to demand irrigation reforms and activist movements in the matter of water distribution have so far not come to the forefront in any consistent manner.
he technical aspects of such inequalities have also received attention. The first feature is known as the head end-tail end problematic. This terminology relates to the topographical feature in an irrigation system where farmers on the upstream side of a canal are able to appropriate more than their due share of the water, depriving those at the downstream. Such differentiation is compounded by the fact that richer farmers tend to occupy or to manipulate access to the upstream land and this results in an unhealthy overlap between social and spatial inequality with regard to rural water resources (Mollinga 2003). One
he second aspect regarding technical differences in irrigation relate to the heterogeneity of irrigation types: for instance, how well irrigation has been overlooked in relation to canal irrigation. In the former, water is restricted to examination of a single source while in the latter case, water availability is dependent of the ability of individual tube well pumps to draw up ground water. The preference in the economic approach to water management based on the existence and operation of water markets is related to the importance of tube well extracted water for the accumulation of rural wealth in regions such as the Punjab. It is the economic costs rather than the social and political aspects of water access to non tube well owners and inequities that exist with regard to small farmers and tenants that have been the subject of study (Dubash 2002). The existing management structures for groundwater extraction have focused on evolving a contractual framework that is based on rationing of water extraction across claimants. Such an approach is ineffective, as it does not permit an institutional analysis of individual household demand nor the pattern and purposes of water use by each household (Shah 2005). The third aspect regarding the technical features of water resource management is that of false conceptualization, as in the case of tank based irrigation. Despite the tank being a human construction that is located within a community, a limited analysis of the social differentiation in a village results in poor management
practices. This shortcoming arises out of a shallow understanding of both community and small villages as nonhierarchical spaces. This is a manifestly faulty proposition as we see caste based and use based conflicts in water usage that are prominent in these communities (Shah 2003). Tank irrigation is therefore presented as a simple form of water resource use and conservation. This is not accurate as there are social features and social relations that affect water usage: e.g., where elites undertake mechanical recharging of water basins that change the water levels in tanks in the locality and consequently the water availability to households from traditional water use arrangements.
here are numerous shortcomings of a narrow economic and technical analysis of Indian water resources which have been highlighted by Indian scholars. This failure is further compounded by the existing management practices undertaken by administrative and water bureaucracies at district, block and cluster levels in rural India. These bodies continue to operate within a top-down institutional framework. This has resulted in a history of confrontation between communities asserting group rights and the state claiming natural resource ownership. The claims of subordinate and marginal groups are resisted by national development architects who advocate a trickle down policy, claiming that it will eventually benefit these groups as economic growth proceeds. This market based approach to development has been unable to accord rights to marginal farmers, landless labour and other marginal groups in local communities whose rights to water resources have consequently diminished over the last few decades.
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This situation prevails despite the attempt of new management approaches to include the community, possibly because the water resources that are located in these community spaces are becoming increasingly attractive to the state as contributors to new sources of wealth (Shah 2003). This head-on collision results in conflicts regarding the institutional design of natural resource management frameworks between the supply side interventions being devised by bureaucrats, national and international agencies and the patterns and purposes of use among heterogeneous users of water across a range of water resource types (Shah 2005).
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he inequity perpetuated by such poorly designed institutional mechanisms for water management has resulted in regressive social and economic consequences within local communities. Furthermore, there are additional social fractures created by an overlap of social and spatial differentiation. These complex social features imply that legal reform by itself cannot ensure that water resource management can be improved through remedying ownership assignment. The reason is that legal reform in a narrow economic framing is restricted to only those who have rights of ownership, such as landowners, tube well owners, and tank irrigation owners, while regarding all other groups as mere tenants of the state (Fennell 2010). This binary separation of members of a local community creates a basis for conflict within the community and works against forging a common identity that is necessary for sustainable natural resource management. The focus on identifying ownership and contractual rights does not take into account of the processes or purposes of usage by those in the comSEMINAR 626 October 2011
munity who do not have access to these privileges. Consequently, legal reforms that reorganize the principles of rationing water or of redistributing water use, only value the economic benefit from such usage but fail to take into account livelihood or cultural dimensions that do not have a market equivalent. A legal perspective that reduces individuals varied use of water to mere economic motivation and eschews the cultural, political and social experience results in poor computation of the costs and benefits of particular mechanisms of water resource management. It also militates against a securing of all three pillars of water management law, policy and administration required for sustainable institutional design.
f the institutional design of water resource management mechanisms fails to incorporate tenets of social justice in relation to both supply and demand side features, there is less chance of constructing a common identity around resource use. Social justice, defined in terms of equity rather than individual equality, appears to be a more effective starting point, as it permits individuals to be treated fairly so as to address social and economic inequalities. The call for equality based on a notion that all individuals are identical and can therefore be fully functional in a market context without caste, class or gender hierarchies is not likely in situations marked by a variety of inequities in water access and use (Fennell 2010). The limitations of existing water resource management mechanisms in India cannot be overcome by looking only at legal reform without ensuring that proposed legal changes dovetail with policy and administrative reforms. This is particularly pertinent in the current legal environment where the right to property is regarded
as sacrosanct. Note that it was only after the green revolution in agriculture became widespread in India and the powerful landlords became rural capitalists that the state changed its views on private property in land holdings. These forms of persistent inequity in treatment by the courts have cast doubt on the ability of the law to transform social relations. It is the current challenges to ensuring that legal reform is transferred to policy and administrative spheres that make the new interdisciplinary mechanisms based on multidisciplinary perspectives so promising. The possibility of using institutional features such as the fit between administration and hydrology, provides a way to disentangle parts of supply features that could make for more careful legal redress such as regulatory reform of delivery mechanisms and the monitoring of use; in the case of interplay there could different methods of creating synergy between water management and other local management structures, whether these are social or market-based could be determined by the use of participatory evaluation; and finally scale could be incentives provided for both administrative and water bureaucracy to reduce any rentseeking opportunities from top-down management.
he possibility of moving across the three pillars from administration, to policy and finally the law facilitates community-led initiatives that focus on both the process and the purpose of water usage by each household in the community. Using the appropriate methods to identify household usage can provide contextualized and location specific evidence on water availability, access and ownership. The heterogeneity, and possible conflict, between diverse groups in the com-
munity can be an entry point for uncovering the challenges to establishing a platform for resource management. In recent years there have been academic initiatives to use multidisciplinary teams and approaches to devise a broader basis for conceptualizing the management of natural resources that takes into account the social, political, and ecological systems that interact with the economic motivation of individuals (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010).
tested and subsequently monitored when the framework is operational.
he identification of the specific social, cultural, political and economic values that each group accords to water availability and access can lead to a better estimation of the benefits and costs of current ownership patterns of water resources. For instance, if there is evidence showing that the lives and livelihoods of marginal groups are adversely affected by existing water ownership patterns, it would be a more effective strategy to provide new water markets that favour the most disadvantaged, whether by caste, class or gender. The ability to incorporate social and power relations through the mapping of lived experiences facilitates the study of individual choice in terms of community norms and locally constructed attributes and values (Cornwall and Scoones 2011). The move from earlier governmental and market notions of ownership of natural resources to models that draw on stakeholder management encourages collaboration across groups to maintain the resources in the water sector. Simultaneously, the movement away from legal diktat for natural resource management frameworks to an administrative process based on a mapping of heterogeneous demands within a local community, ensures that both demand and supply features of institutional design can be
he growing concerns about water, both globally and within India, have brought to the fore the difficulties of creating a platform for sustainable water resource management in a conflict ridden policy environment. The divisive elements are not only in the actual field of water management but also in the combative attitude taken by individual disciplines regarding the appropriate policy framing for the institutional design of water resource management. An alternative framing of academic disciplines in new resource management analysis shows how the intersections of various disciplinary perspectives can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the supply and demand side features of water resource provision and usage. The most important feature is the ability to bring in contextualized and locationspecific analysis of water availability, access and ownership. The possibility of using these process and purpose based mapping of heterogeneous usage within a community permits the drawing up of a water resource design that has the ability to identify the difficulties of attempting natural resource management within national policy frameworks. Such a framework permits a construction of water drawing on natural, scientific and social science disciplines to identify gaps in the valuation of water which lead to poor estimation of both returns as well as risks in a range of environments. As indicated in the review of challenges of forest resource management, it is clear that following a narrow approach that focuses on economic valuation and regards law as a starting point for devising a framework for natural resource management is fundamentally flawed. The need to regard
policy as primarily constituted by political and social contestation to prevent further reduction in the water resource availability in India points to legal reform as the final stage rather than the starting point for institutional design. Undertaking an analysis of state institutions and how they regard water, particularly in relationship to ownership and contractual considerations, shows that there is an exclusion of the poor and marginalized groups in the local community.
overnance mechanisms for sustaining natural resources need to take into account the technical dimensions to create a better fit, interplay and scale dimensions within any management mechanism. In the case of water resources, given the presence of water resources in different physical forms canal, tube well and tank as well as the particularities of rural political economy in India, opportunities for sustainable water resource management will be enhanced by focusing on those individuals and households most inequitably treated by existing ownership assignment. This use of equitable rules of inclusion can remedy existing binary forms of social structure with regard to resource use and facilitate the creation of a common platform that is required for sustainable water resource management principles to operate.
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Further reading
SOUTH ASIA WATER SECURITY Aiyaz, Rumi. Water for Indian cities: government practices and policy concerns. Issue Brief 25: September 2011. Available at http://www.orfonline.org/ cms/export/orfonline/modules/issuebrief/attachments/Issue_brief_25_1284629003854.pdf Ali, Saleem H. Water politics in South Asia: technocratic cooperation and lasting security in the Indus basin and beyond. Journal of International Affairs 61(2): Spring/Summer 2008: 167-182. Allan, J. A. Virtual Water: part of an invisible synergy that ameliorates water scarcity, in L. MartinezCortina, Peter P. Rogers and M. Ramon Llamas (eds).Water crisis: myth or reality. Taylor & Francis, 2006. Virtual Water: the water, food, and trade nexus: useful concept or misleading metaphor? Water International 28(1): 2003: 4-11. Biswas, Asit. Indus water treaty: the negotiating process. Water International 17(4): 1992. Briscoe, J. Indias water economy: bracing for a turbulent future. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2005. Brown, Lester R. Outgrowing the earth: the food security challenge in an age of falling water tables and rising temperatures. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. Chellenay, Brahma. Water: Asias new battleground. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. Climate change, Food and Water Security in South Asia: critical issues and cooperative strategies in an age of increased risk and uncertainty. 2011. Available at http://www.gwp.org/Global/About%20GWP/ Publications/Colombo%20Synthesis%20 Report%20Climate%20Change%20Food%20 and%20Water%20Security%20in%20South% 20Asia,%20final.pdf Grail Research. Water: the India story. Grail research report. Noida, India. IDSA Task Force. Water Security for India: The External Dynamics. A Report. New Delhi: 2010. Available at http://www.idsa.in/sites/default/files/ book_ WaterSecurity.pdf Iyer, Ramaswamy R. Indias water relations with her neighbours. USI National Security Series 2007. K.W. Publishers, 2008. The politicization of water. www.info changeindia.org/age, Accessed on February 21, 2006. http://www.grailresearch.com/pdf/Conten PodsPdf/Water-The_India_Story.pdf Rivers of discord. The Times of India, 6 November 2002. John, Wilson. Water security in South Asia: issues and policy recommendations. Issue Brief 26: February 2011. Available at http://www.orfonline.org/ cms/export/orfonline/modules/issuebrief/attachments/water_1297246681981.pdf Joy, K. J., Biksham Gujja, Suhas Paranjape, Vinod Goud and Shruti Vispute (eds). Water conflicts in India: a million revolts in the making. Delhi: Routledge, 2007. Mandel, Robert. Sources of international river basin disputes. Conflict Quarterly: Fall 1992: 25-56. Mckinsey Consulting. Charting our water future. A Report. November 2009. http://www.mckinsey. com/App_ Media/Reports/Water/Charting_Our_ Water_ Future_Exec%20Summary_ 001.pdf Mukherji, A. Groundwater markets in the Ganga Brahmaputra Meghna basin: theory and evidence. Economic and Political Weekly 39(31): 3514-20. National Advisory Council. Drinking water security in rural India. A concept paper. New Delhi: Government of India, 2008. Rogers, P. et al. (eds.) Water crisis: myth or reality? London: Taylor and Francis Group. Rotberg, Fiona and Ashok Swain. Natural resources security in South Asia: Nepals water. Institute for Security and Development Policy, 2007. www. silkroadstudies.org/new/docs/Silkroadpapers/ 2007/0710Nepal.pdf Sahni, Hamir K. The politics of water in South Asia: the case of the Indus waters treaty. SAIS Review 26(2): Summer-Fall 2006: 153-165. http://www.
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bupedu.com/lms/admin/uploded_article/eA. 264.pdf Shah, T., O.P. Singh and A. Mukherji. Some aspects of South Asias groundwater economy: analyses of a survey in India, Pakistan, Nepal Terai and Bangladesh. Hydrogeology Journal 14: 2006: 286-304. Stimson Centre. Indias water relations with her neighbours. Washington DC: 27 October 2008. http://www.stimson.org/rv/pdf/Ramaswamy_Iyer_ Presentation.pdf Strategic Foresight Group. The Himalayan challenge: water security in South Asia. Mumbai: SFG, 2011. Thapliyal, Sangeeta. Water security or security of water? a conceptual analysis. India Quarterly 67(1): March 2011: 19-35. Tripathi, Jayant K., Barbara Bock, V. Rajamani and A. Eisenhauer. Is river Ghaggar, Saraswati? Geochemical constraints. Current Science 87(8): 25 October 2004:1141-1145. Understanding water conflicts in South Asia. Available at http://www.saciwaters.org/CB/water%20 and% 20equity/water%20and%20equity/IV.%20 Readings/4.%20Conceptual-ormative/4.2.%20 understanding%20water%20conflicts.pdf United Nations. Beyond scarcity: power, poverty and the global water crisis. Human Development Report. New York: UNDP, 2006. Verghese, B.G. Water conflicts in South Asia. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 20: 1997:185-194. http://werzit.com/intel/classes/amu/classes/lc514/ LC514_Week_14_Water_Conflicts_in_South_Asia.pdf Water Issues in South Asia. ORF Discourse: May 2011. Available at http://www. orfonline.org/ cms/export/orfonline/modules/orfdiscourse/attachments/odv_8_130526 2176430.PDF Warikoo, K. Indus water treat: view from Kashmir. Himalayan and Central Asian Studies 9(3): JulySeptember 2005: 18-23. WASSA Project Report. Water and security in South Asia: water sharing conflicts within countries and possible solutions (Vol 2): 2003. Available at http:/ /www.gee-21.org/publications/Water-SharingConflicts-within-Countries-and-PossibleSolutions.pdf Wolf, A. T. Conflict and cooperation along international waterways. Water Policy1: 1998: 251-265. World Bank, Indias water economy: bracing for a turbulent future. A report. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2005. Zawahri, N. A. Internationl rivers and national security: the Euphrates, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus,
Tigris, and Yarmouk Rivers. Natural Resources Forum 32: 2008: 280-289. WATER PRIVATIZATION Abernethy, C. Financing river basin organizations, in M. Svendsen (ed). Irrigation and river basin management: options for governance and institutions. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, IWMI, 2005. Amarasinghe, U. A., T. Shah and O. Singh. Changing consumption patterns: implications for food and water demand in India. IWMI Research Report 119. Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute, 2007. Barker, R. and F. Molle. Evolution of irrigation in South and Southeast Asia. Comprehensive assessment of water management in agriculture research report 5. Colombo: International Water Management Institute, 2004. Barrows, C.J. River basin development planning and management: a critical review. World Development 26(1): 1998: 171-86. Biswas, A.K., O. Varis, and C. Tortajada. Integrated water resources management in South and Southeast Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Briscoe, J. The financing of hydropower, irrigation and water supply infrastructure in developing countries. Water Resources Development 15(4): 1999: 459-91. Budds, Jessica and Gordon McGranahan. Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Environment & Urbanization 15(2): October 2003. http://www.environmentandurbanization.org/ documents/budds_mcgranahan.pdf Budds, Jessica. Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Environment and Urbanization 15(2): October 2003: 87-114. Haie, N. and A.A. Keller. Effective efficiency as a tool for sustainable water resources management. Journal of the American Water Resources Association 10: 2008:1752-1788. Joshi, Gopal. Overview of privatization in South Asia; available at http://www2.ilo.org/public/english/ region/asro/bangkok/paper/privatize/chap1.pdf Kijne, J.W., D. Molden and R. Barker (eds.). Water productivity in agriculture: limits and opportunities for improvement. Comprehensive assessment of water management in agriculture series no. 1. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2003.
Kumar, M.D. Impact of electricity prices and volumetric allocation on energy and groundwater demand management: analysis from western India. Energy Policy 33: 39-51: 2005. Molle, F. and J. Berkoff. Irrigation Water pricing: the gap between theory and practice. Comprehensive assessment of water management in agriculture series, no. 4. Wallingford, United Kingdom: CABI Publishing, 2007. Cities versus agriculture: revisiting intersectoral water transfers, potential gains, and conflicts. Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture Research Report 10. Colombo: International Water Management Institute, 2006. Perry, C.J., Michael Rock and D. Seckler. Water as an economic good: a solution or a problem? IWMI Research Report 14. Colombo: International Water Management Institute, 1997. Shiva, Vandana. Resisting water privatization, building water democracy. 2006. Available at http:// www.globalternative.org/downloads/shivawater.pdf Wegerich, K. Groundwater institutions and management problems in the developing world, In Tellam (ed). Urban groundwater management and sustainability. Holland: Springer, 2006, pp. 447-458. Westerhoff, G.P. The use and management of service contracts: participation in the private sector. International Report. London: International Water Association, 2000. HYDROPOLITICS Bakshi, Gitanjali and Sahiba Trivedi. The Indus equation. Strategic Foresight Group, 2011. www. strategicforesight.com/110617.pdf Brichieri-Colombi, J.S. Hydrocentricity: a limited approach to achieving food and water security. Water International 29(3): 2004: 318-328. Islam, Yeadul. Hydropolitics: a techno-political tangle in South Asia. Available at http://www. dscsc.mil.bd/upload/mirpur_papers/3/Yeadul% 2520Islam.pdf Jones, Garth N. Hydropolitics in the 3rd World: Conflict and Cooperation in International River Basins. Journal of Third World Studies: Spring 2003. Lele, Ajey, Namrata Goswami and Rumel Dahiya. Asia 2030: the unfolding future. New Delhi: Lancer, 2010.
Michel, David and Amit Pandya. Troubled waters: climate change, hydropolitics and transboundary resources. Washington, DC: The Henry L. Stimson Center, 2009. http://www.stimson.org/images/ uploads/research-pdfs/Troubled_WatersComplete.pdf Mustaffa, Daanesh. Social construction of hydropolitics: the geographical scales of water and security in the Indus Basin. The Geographical Review97(4): October 2007: 484-501. http://www. amergeog.org/gr/oct07/mustafa.pdf Salman, M. A. and Kishore Uprety. Conflict and cooperation on South Asias international rivers: a legal perspective. Washington, DC: A World Bank Publication, 2002. Hydro-politics in South Asia: a comparative analysis of the Mahakali and the Ganges treaties. Available at lawlibrary.unm.edu/nrj/39/2/05_ salman_ ganges.pdf Siddiqui, Iqtidar H. Hydro politics and water wars in South Asia. New Delhi: Lancer, 2011. Wirsing, Robert G. Hydro-politics in South Asia: the domestic roots of interstate river rivalry. Asian Affairs 34(1): 2007. FLOODING IN PAKISTAN Government of Pakistan , Economic Affairs Division. Countrywise update of Foreign Assistance for Flood Affectees (17 September 2010). http://www.infopak.gov.pk/Flood%20Relief %20Fund/17_9_2010ForeignAssistance_a. pdf. Gronewold, Nathanial and Climatewire . Is the flooding in Pakistan a climate change Disaster? Scientific American: 18 August 2010. http://www. scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-theflooding-in-pakist Haq, Noor-ul. Pakistan floods 2010. Available at http:/ /www.ipripak.org/factfiles/ff126.pdf Kronstadt, K. Alan, et al. Flooding in Pakistan: overview and issues for congress. 18 November 2010. Available at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/ R41424.pdf Singapore Red Cross (September 15, 2010). Pakistan floods: the deluge of disaster facts and figures as of 15 September 2010". http://www.reliefweb.int/ rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/LSGZ-89GD7W? OpenDocument. The World Bank. Response to Pakistans floods: evaluative lessons and opportunity. The World
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Bank, 2010. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ EXTDIR GEN/Resources/ieg_pakistan_note.pdf TRANSBOUNDARY WATER SHARING Barham, E. Ecological boundaries as community boundaries: the politics of watersheds. Society and Natural Resources 14(3): 2001: 181-91. Karthykeyan, Deepa. Conflicts and cooperation on transboundary waters in South Asia. 2011. Available at http://athenainfonomics.in/wp-ontent/uploads/ 2011/08/Conflictandcooperation.pdf Mohan, Shantha, Salien Routray and N. Shahikumar (eds). River water sharing: transboundary conflict and cooperation in India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. Sneddon, Chris and Coleen Fox . Rethinking transboundary waters: a critical hydropolitics of the Mekong basin. Political Geography 25: 2006: 181202. http://perso.univ-lemans.fr/~ffortu/Develop pement_environnement_et_agriculture/Asie/ %5Bcoleen%20Sneddon%5D%20transboundary %20waters%20a%20critical%20hydropolitics% 20of%20the%20mekong%20basin.pdf Wolf, Aaron T. and Joshua T. Newton. Case study of transboundary dispute resolution: the Indus water treaty. Available at http://www.transboundary waters.orst.edu/research/case_studies/Documents/ indus.pdf WATER LAW Babcockt, Hope M. Reserved Indian water rights in riparian jurisdiction: water, water everywhere, perhaps some drops for us. Available at http://scholar ship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? article=1502&context=facpub Chauhan, B.R. Settlement of international and interstate waters dispute in India. Delhi: Indian Law Institute, 1992. Settlement of international water law disputes in international drainage basins, 1981. Cullet, Philippe and Sujith Koonan. Water law in India: an introduction to legal instruments. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gulhati, N.D. Development of interstate rivers: law and practice in India, 1972. Iyer, Ramaswamy R. Water and the laws in India. New Delhi: Sage, 2009. Singh, Chattrapati (ed.). Water laws in India (containing a collection of papers by various authors on
water rights in India. Delhi: Indian Law Institute, 1992. Sitarama Rao, V. Law relating to water rights. A.I.R. Manual 31 (5th ed.): 1996. Water law and the commons: proceedings of a workshop, 2009. Available at http://www.ielrc.org/ activities/workshop_0612/content/d0623.pdf URBAN WATER CHALLENGES Baker, Lawrence A., Peter Shanahan and Jim Holway. Principles for managing the urban water environment in the 21st century. Chapter 14. Available at http://www.jlakes.org/book/WATER-ENVCITY/fulltext(26).pdf Challenges of integration in urban water management: a mid-term assessment in Alexandria, Egypt, 2008. http://www.switchurbanwater.eu/outputs/ pdfs/W6-0_CALE_REP_Challenges_of% 20integra tion_ in_UWM.pdf Khatri, K.B. Challenges for urban water supply and sanitation in the developing countries. UNESCO IHE Institute for Water Education. www.unescoihe.org/.../file/9.paper%20urbanisation% 20kala%20draft.pdf Mays, Larry (ed). Integrated urban water management: arid and semi-arid regions. UNESCO-IPH, CRC Press, 2009. McKenzie, David and Isha Ray. Urban water supply in India: status, reform option and possible lessons. http://erg.berkeley.edu/publications/Isha %20Ray/McKenzieRay-India-urbanwaterforWP.pdf Rygaard, Martin et al. Increasing urban water selfsufficiency: new era, new challenges. Journal of Environmental Management 92: 2011: 185-194. http://www.kysq.org/docs/Rygaard%20et% 20al..pdf Shah, T. Groundwater and human development: challenges and opportunities in Livelihoods and Environment. Water Science and Technology 8: 2005: 27-37. The World Bank. Urban water supply and sanitation. South Asia rural development series. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2000. Uitto, Juha I. and Asit K. Biswas (ed). Water for urban areas: challenges and perspectives. Water resources management and policy series, 2008. Vaidyanathan, A. Depletion of groundwater: some issues. Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 51(1-2): January-June1996.
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Comment
The not-so-discreet burdens of Indian communism

Weighed down by various forms of orthodoxy, Indian Communism exhibits an indifference to many of the expanded critiques of power and domination, as well as to the viable institutional alternatives, that have emerged since the second-half of the twentieth century. Reconstructing a meaningfully ethical and democratic left may require a fresh start. Election installation, Democratic Youth Federation of India, Tiruvalla, Kerala
THE recent article by Sumanta Banerjee (SB hereafter) in the November 2010 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly1 raises important issues about the state of actually existing Indian communism or what should rather be called Indian Collectivist Bureaucratism (ICB hereafter). It represents a significant initiative in initiating conversations around reconstituting and reconstructing a transparently democratic left in India, with the accompanying themes, institutions and practices that this would entail. This note is meant to be suggestive, a contribution to the conversations that have been unfolding in various forums. With all its limitations, established Indian communism or ICB has managed (in Kerala and West Bengal), however unevenly, some tangible social gains in
1. End of a Phase: Time for Reinventing the Left, Economic and Political Weekly XLV(46). The present article references Banerjees article as a point of departure. Since the state assembly elections in April and May of 2011, a number of articles on the theme have appeared: Badri Raina, The State of the Left, http:// www.zcommunications.org/the-state-of-the-left-by-badri-raina, 24 May 2011. Sukumaran Banaji, et al., End of the Left in India?; Sumanta Banerjee, West Bengals Next Quinquennium, and the Future of the Indian Left, both in Economic and Political Weekly XLVI(23) and Pranab Bardhan, The Avoidable Tragedy of the Left in India-II, Economic and Political Weekly XLVI(24).
the arenas of land reform, literacy and health care, the latter especially for women and children. To avoid any confusion or misinterpretation, deliberate or otherwise, it is important to clarify what this comment is not about. It is emphatically not, even by default, an apology for formations like the BJP, the Congress and others, whose politics draws on gradations of caste, region, communalism and on serving the interests of corporate capital. Situated in a society which is overdetermined by feudal authoritarianism, brutality and hierarchy, all derived from the multiple interlocking viciousness of patriarchy, caste, class and other forms of exclusion, ICB cannot but help reproduce these features in its institutional discourses and practices.2 Indian society with its multiple overlapping oppressions, old and new, is a Pandoras box, a bottomless dungeon of power, domination, antagonism and violence. Rather than be limited only to the key notion of alienated and exploited labour that has been the dominant discourse of ICB and orthodox Marxism in general, Indian society is the tem2. Indian society is... composed of hierarchical systems within families and communities. These hierarchies can be broken down into age, sex, ordinal position, kinship relationships (within families), and caste, lineage, wealth, occupations, and relationship to ruling power (within the community). When hierarchies emerge within the family based on social convention and economic need, girls in poorer families suffer twice the impact of vulnerability and stability. From birth, girls are automatically entitled to less; from playtime, to food, to education, girls can expect to always be entitled to less than their brothers. Ela R. Bhatt, We Are Poor But So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India . Oxford University Press, New York, 2005. 3. ...Necessary to broaden Marxs critique of the alienation of labour to include all aspects of domination, class, race, gender,
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plate par excellence for discovering, understanding and dismantling the expanded categories of the myriad categories of nested dominations and vectors of power that haunt everyday experience.3 Caste continues to undermine the assumption of and the hope for working class solidarity, given that it (caste) functions to fracture society into splinters, and inserts hierarchy and domination even into the interstices of subaltern groups. B.R. Ambedkar, paraphrased by Omvedt observed: To build the strength of the working class, the mental hold of religious slavery would have to be destroyed; the precondition of a united working class is the eradication of caste and untouchability.4 The dynamic of caste denies the assumption of fundamental human equality enshrined in the Indian and other modern democratic and republican constitutions. Lohias concept of the intersectionality of caste, class, gender and language is of crucial importance in this sense, and points the way towards a necessary but insufficient political programme.5 For a German educated Indian socialist to champion language exclusiveness is intriguing, given that language has frequently functioned and continues to function in enabling contexts as a powerful medium for the continuous reproduction of hierarchy, exclusion and oppression. The variously traumatized and brutalized Indian psyche, both within the confines of the family and in larger Indian society and culture, constitutes a hopelessly inadequate and non-existent basis for reconstructing even the rudimentary elements of a humane, democratic and ethical, socialistic practice that is congruent with the best traditions of a self-critical modernity. Worse yet, these traumatized psyches in their discourses and practices within ICB were and continue to be thoroughly fixated and mesmerized by the equally if not more retrogressive mindsets, texts and practices of Soviet and Chinese peasant societies, wartime collectivist juntas and gulags, inflected through the Indian cauldron. Themes such as the oxymoronic democratic centralism are just so much more grist for
nature, Ben Agger, The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1992, p. 8. 4. Gail Omvedt, Ambedkarism, The Theory of Dalit Liberation-1, http://www.ambedkar.org/D-Mag/D-MagAmb.pdf, 14 April 2001, viewed on 9 July 2011. 5. Anand Kumar, Understanding Lohias Political Sociology: Intersectionality of Caste, Class, Gender and Language, Economic and Political Weekly XLV(40).
the unapologetically authoritarian and congenitally male-supremacist world of ICB. Convinced of the inevitable installation of dogmatic and positivist versions of Marxist and/or Maoist dystopias, and drunk on industrial era scientism and gigantism as in the former Soviet Union, or rural labour camps a la the Khmer Rouge, the need for critical, historicist and normative caution was thrown to the winds. The despotic figure of the Indian father, husband, religious authority, teacher, landlord, employer, bureaucrat, party apparatchik, etc., dovetails seamlessly with the all too familiar personality structures of an absolute god, policeman and tyrant, most often rolled into one. Indian collectivist atavisms may closely resemble many of the traits highlighted in The Authoritarian Personality, published in the mid-20th century, by members of the critical theory tradition.6 ICB in its discourses and behaviour seeks to substitute its version of an anti-humanistic moonscape for the institutionalized multiple viciousness of the Indian status quo. SB succinctly summarizes the experience of various collectivist junta regimes: We find a continuity in the use of terror as a means of creating a socialist order in the praxis of communists from Stalin, through Mao to Pol Pot, and the present CPI(M) leaders and Maoists in India.7 The everyday experiences of life even under the parliamentary segment of ICB, the CPI(M), leave a lot to be desired. Historian Mukul Kesavan observes that because he is an outsider, he hasnt had to suffer the countless (and seemingly endless) little tyrannies of Left rule in Bengal, the hubris of its leaders and the thuggery of its cadres.8 Ironically, ICB reflects in reality (not just in a mirror) the pathologies of larger Indian society, disguised as they may be through manipulative populisms, opaque ideological formulas and inscrutable innerparty dynamics. ICB seems oblivious to the enormous corpus of humane and ethically informed socialist theory and practice that has been accumulated in other parts of the world. Even while the Soviets, their Eastern European satellite juntas and the Chinese peasant communists were setting up their doleful, collectivist, flat earth/ scorched earth deserts, parts of northwestern Europe,
6. Theodor Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice. Harper, New York, 1950. 7. End of a Phase: Time for Reinventing the Left, see fn 1, above. 8. Turn, Turn, Turn, http://www.hindustantimes.com/Turn-turnturn/Article1-697197.aspx, viewed on 17 May 2011.
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were concurrently establishing working models of what are still enviably decent societies (albeit within the ecologically problematic accumulationistproductivist-militarist paradigm).9 ICB has not, does not and will not want to understand the complex themes and processes that go towards constituting individual and social subjectivity, the womanist-feminist critiques of pervasive, aggressive and far-reaching patriarchy, physical, verbal and psychological violence and the complexities, limits and fragility of the ecosystem. It is almost deliberately innocent of and (possibly) dismissive of the critiques of personality and social-psychological structures on the one hand, and on the other, the substantive democratic themes/practices advanced by the civil rights, womens, ecological, peace, indigenous peoples10 and subjectivity (lesbian, gay and transgender) movements that captured the imagination and principled commitment of significant civil society sectors in Europe, the Americas, and parts of Oceania, in the second half of the 20th century. The various sections of ICB have failed to address, even in theory, the deification of the political and ideological state, the apparatuses of the administrative bureaucracy and its machinery of repression. On this issue, ICB competes with other bankrupt political formations in their zeal for meanness, or worse. Most significantly, many of the themes and practices of ICB converge with the predatory bureaucratic state which has been grafted onto the familiar pre-existing socio-cultural power structures outlined above. In the Indian context the inability, incompetence, and failure of the congenitally rent seeking and archaic paper pushing, rubber stamping, public administrative system to deliver even the most elementary levels of hygiene, sanitation, safety and ordering of public spaces and amenities should count as rank dereliction.11 The utter disregard for the dismal condition of public amenities is to be seen everywhere be it state
9. Even though the erstwhile social-democracies of northwestern Europe constructed their welfare societies on conventional industrial models, there is growing evidence that they are actively cultivating the transition to a green economy. 10. A number of indigenous peoples movements raised extremely salient questions about human survival and quality of life issues, against economic, industrial and technological hubris and onedimensionality, and were some of the earliest and most eloquent advocates for ecological sanity. See for example, Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. Crown Books, New York, 1988. 11. For a fictionalized but provocative narrative of the system by a former insider, see Upamanyu Chatterjee, The Mammaries of the Welfare State. Viking, New Delhi; New York, 2000.
transport buses; a lack of interest in the upkeep of public assets shown by both management and employees; the shabby and dilapidated public and private buildings and spaces; the pervasive pollution of air, water and land; the spectacular absence of sanitation and hygiene and the list goes on. It is the mass production of such spaces of misery and the programmed helplessness of society as a whole in adequately addressing this misery, that is an ubiquitous experience of Indian realities, past, present and future. Even in the arena that ICB claims a monopoly on, i.e. on building alternative economic institutions, it appears like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. While it has been obsessed with the social and economic dead-end models of the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, etc., it has spectacularly missed the boat on a range of substantive alternatives in India and in other parts of the world. It is by systematically deconstructing and destroying the idea, promise and potential of a modern, successful and ethically responsible public administrative and enterprise system that ICB and all other political formations have opened the door to the frenzy of neoliberal fantasies about a minimal or non-existent public sector, except as a wholly owned subsidiary and enabler of the corporate sector. Rotating a few faces out of the edifices of actually existing ICB will at best be a symbolic exercise and at worst, a sure recipe for more of the usual. What is needed is a definite break with the assumptions, institutional legacy and the one-dimensionality of Indian Collectivist Bureaucratism. In his closing remarks, SB alludes to various social movements in India as providing a broader canvas for the process of left reconstruction. One can only agree with this suggestion, but what is left untheorized are the essential themes that these movements here and elsewhere have contributed towards transforming and expanding the ambit of left critique and practice. The multiple axes of social domination in this society have been referred to in earlier parts of this article to indicate the social and cultural field that ICB operates in and by which it is significantly influenced. Here, I would like to very briefly and indicatively touch upon two specific universes about which ICB has been particularly remiss the domination and invisibility of women and ecology. The womens movement has clearly shown how women contribute massively to social reproduction (without which there would be no production), as well as to production conventionally understood (one phrase from the movement that expresses this well is
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Women hold up more than half of the sky). Womens bodies, work, emotions, time, dignity, nurturing, imagination, intelligence are all relentlessly consumed on the altar of patriarchal society and in fact make the very existence of that society possible. Yet, women are condemned to social and cultural invisibility, segregation, overwork and low or no wages, to sexual exploitation inside and outside marriage and so on. The womens movement has also shown that while male politicians are exclusively focused on the public arena, a range of womens oppressions are experienced in the private sphere of the family and extended kin networks. Dismantling the pillars of patriarchal society demands that mechanisms of power, domination and violence that operate in the private sphere also become the objects of inquiry, critique and transformation. Reflecting its contemporaneity with the first wave of industrialization, orthodox Marxism and its offshoots like Indian Collectivist Bureaucratism were, and continue to be, wedded to the Promethean paradigm of massive industrial production and the open-ended and instrumentalist use of ecological endowments, even after the projected dismantling of the capitalist order. As Rudolf Bahro, one of the theorists of the German green movement who coined the need for both military and industrial disarmament, observed: Even a thinker as profound as Antonio Gramsci was still able to view technique, industrialization, Americanism, the Ford system in its existing form as by and large an inescapable necessity, and thus depict socialism as the genuine executor of human adaptation to modern machinery and technology. Marxists have so far rarely considered that humanity has not only to transform its relations of production, but must also fundamentally transform the entire character of its mode of production, i.e. the productive forces, the so-called technostructure.12
12. R. Bahro, Socialism and Survival. Heretic, London, 1982, p. 27, quoted in Kate Soper, Greening Prometheus in Ted Benton (ed.), The Greening of Marxism. Guillford Press, London, 1996, p. 84. This section relies on Bentons useful compilation of key debates between various strands of Marxism and left informed Ecology. 13. By modernist one means to suggest the historic liberating themes signified by democracy, and the phrase liberty, equality, solidarity, converging with universal human rights, multi-dimensional justice, anti-authoritarianism, anti-patriarchy and ecological integrity. 14. As Tariq Ali, the British commentator, has observed (paraphrase): India and Pakistan spend millions of dollars on weapons of mass destruction while ordinary people (in these societies) eat dirt.
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Both the hidebound cliques of the various sections of ICB and perhaps even some of the emergent social movements have yet to consciously break with the archaic deep structures of grassroots communities in our society and the very real tendency for their apparent leaders to continue to work implicitly or explicitly within those deeply problematic frameworks. The institutionalization of archaic, puritanical mindsets and practices within ICB and its resolute resilience to modernist social and cultural sensibilities is highlighted in one of ICBs bastions, Kerala. Despite the fact that women have access to relatively high levels of literacy and health outcomes, there is scant evidence, even in the 21st century, of any meaningful expressions of autonomous social, cultural and (for the most part), economic agency for women. Even a cursory glance at the grim, dour-faced, agit-propagandist displays and unimaginative conclaves of ICBs top brass, reveals monotonously male characteristics (the token female presence being the exception that proves the rule). Further, these conclaves are marked by the scant representation of the young and in that sense reflect the patriarchal ethos of the Indian family where the reigning motto is father and only father knows best. The challenge for grassroots social movements that seek to become the kernels of a reconstructed left is to articulate in clear and unequivocal terms, multidimensional critiques of the Indian wasteland in combination with an emphatically modernist,13 ethical, democratic left vision, and meaningful practices of personal integrity, social reconstruction and creative institution building. Indian Collectivist Bureaucratism, saddled as it is with multiple and irreparable craters such as authoritarianism and patriarchy, its ambivalences about militarism14 and rank ecological blindness, is an inadequate vehicle for social and cultural reconstruction. Nobody can accuse ICB of enthusiasm, dynamism and/or creativity in ideas and practice, a curious fate for political formations that claim to be the inheritors of a form of analysis once associated with the cutting edge in social, cultural, economic and political modernity. Yet the possibility of a minimally sane society is dependent on a fresh start that imaginatively draws and builds on themes articulated by transparently democratic, ethical and non-communalist social movements, including those of workers in this society, as well by the global democratic left. Santosh George
India against corruption

THE recently concluded large scale protest triggered by Anna Hazares indefinite fast on the Jan Lokpal Bill issue arguably had a distinctive urban middle class support base. The protest showed the resolve of the urban middle classes (upper/lower) to undertake a cleansing act emanating from their moral concern for growing corruption in the existing state and political institutions. It also revealed their distinctive lack of confidence in the political class across party divides. The capitulation of an otherwise recalcitrant government and opposition in the Parliament, as it finally agreed to accept the core demands of the campaign, duly exhibited the growing clout of the middle classes in Indias democracy. As with corruption in high places at the moment, the political drive to cleanse the system in the coming months as proposed by civil society (read Anna team) is likely to compel the political regime to focus with greater alacrity on issues that are of utmost concern to the largely discontented middle classes in a rapidly urbanizing India. The protest raised two pertinent questions that need to be explored. First, how does one make sense of the growing trust deficit among the urban middle classes in the entire political class and, more importantly, in the formal democratic institutions and the procedures which enjoy constitutional sanction and have endured all these years despite grave challenges? Second, how does one make sense of the keenness of the political class as a whole or more specifically the two polity-wide coalition making parties, the Congress and BJP, to not alienate the middle classes, come what may. The question assumes significance given the middle classes relative lack of presence in numerical terms, a distinct disadvantage in a single plurality electoral system in India. The urban middle classes growing disenchantment with electoral democracy, evident in terms of its relatively lower level of electoral participation even as India witnesses a democratic upsurge, may be attributed to the following two factors: the first is the urban middle classes wariness with the emergent identity based electoral politics that encourages populism and patronage along the lines of ethnic cleavages. Political apathy can thus be viewed as a backlash of the upper caste urban middle classes, a progeny of the Nehruvian middle class, against emergent political processes that veer around regionalism and lower caste resurgence. Being both secular and a votary of meritocracy, the urban middle classes, along with the
Indian diaspora, tend to look at the emergent sectarian political culture as antithetical to its avowed dream of a harmonious great nation state. Second, the apathy may also be attributed to the urban middle classes overwhelming concern with economic, rather than political, issues. There is a growing realization among the new metropolitan middle classes that the rampant corruption prevalent in the state institutions and services, constitutes a serious impediment to the ongoing process of neoliberal market-oriented growth that is propelled by infusion of global capital and arrival of the corporate sector and with which its class interests are crucially linked. As to why the political class, cutting across party lines (including the mainstream left), can ill-afford to alienate the middle classes, one can refer to the following factors: First, in terms of numerical presence, the middle classes form the fastest growing segment of Indias population. While the exact number varies, depending on the criteria used for enumeration, the middle classes in India are widely estimated to be between 250 to 350 million, making it the second largest middle class in the world after China. So whether 20 or 30 per cent of Indias population, the Indian middle class in terms of sheer numbers is bigger than the entire population of most countries of Europe and is almost as big as the US population in size. Second, the middle classes, in a somewhat muted way, continue to retain their inherited caste/community based privileges and loyalties, even as they also seeks to delegitimize the language of caste in the realm of politics. As such the middle classes, more often than not, reflect the interests of and influence the ways their own communities would operate in the democratic system.1 Third, the middle classes are equipped with cultural capital that give them access, not only to the higher echelons of state institutions involved in policymaking but also to print and visual media and global audiences in a web-connected world of Facebook, SMS and Twitter. Fourth, the metropolitan middle classes tactical alliance with the entrepreneurial class (due to shared spatial and sociological origins, uncritical support for economic reforms and adherence to consumerist culture) contributes to its political influence.2
1. Andre Beteille, Classes and Communities, Economic and Political Weekly, 17 March 2007; also D.L. Sheth, Secularisation of Caste and the Making of New Middle Class, Economic and Political Weekly, 21 August 1999. 2. Leela Fernandes, Indias New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reforms. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007.
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After all, with campaigns increasingly becoming costlier, it is only the entrepreneurial class that is in a position to make serious money available to political parties (and also to civil society campaigns like the present one). At a more general level, there are several other questions raised in the aftermath of the campaign that at the moment remain unanswered. Would the increasing proclivity of the ascendant elitist middle classes, with the ordinary citizens as foot soldiers in toe, to dictate to state institutions and circumvent democratic procedures, as evidenced during the recent campaign, pose a threat to the ongoing silent revolution in the form of political power being steadily transferred to the lower castes/class through the electoral route? Would Indias present and future democratic regimes, in facing the onslaught of the now confident, promarket middle classes, be able to accommodate lower caste/class based claims by continuing with antireform affirmative policies and actions that enable direct and indirect transfer of public resources in the form of subsidies and protective discrimination to the lower castes/class with the same zeal? Would the urban middle classes, having experimented and tasted success with the non-electoral technology driven civil society route (referendum/recall/ consultation) for exerting political power and influence, finally succeed in hegemonizing the national agenda (recall the India Shining campaign)? And what about the distinct economic and political choices and concerns of the plebeian middle class of lower caste/rural origin who are dissimilar in terms of its sociological as well as spatial origins? As the metropolitan middle classes push hard for promoting a nonparty new politics based on legal activism/theatrical media powered campaigns like the recent one that was built around the support of local associations in civil society (NGOs funded by global capital) and the new middle class icons like a saintly Anna Hazare and Medha Patkar or even spiritual/yoga feel good gurus/swamis like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Baba Ramdev, the question remains whether all of this will further deepen the crisis of democratic governance. Ashutosh Kumar
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State response to movements

THE Seminar issue of September 2011 is devoted to the problematic of Combating Corruption and contributors, a majority of them from civil society, have
offered rich analysis focused on the Anna Hazare movement of August 2011. There is, however, need for broadening the discussion on the role of social movements in a democracy. Politics is the driving force in every society and it is no ones case that the activity of politics can be caged within the rules of the game as defined by the constitutional system of a democratic politics. The pillar of politics in democracy is the freedoms that are available to citizens to exercise their right of dissent against the legally constituted institutions of the state. And dissenters and nonconformists define their own boundaries without caring for the limits imposed by the legal-institutional apparatuses of the state. The question is: How does the state respond to social movements launched by public spirited dissenters and diverse kinds of opposition groups? The Indian state, during the sixty four years of its post-independence journey, has dealt with a large variety of movements which have emerged on the basis of felt-grievances of different segments and regions of society in a variety of ways. It used its organized and well-equipped armed forces in dealing with the Communist party-led Telangana movement from 1947 to 1950, despite the fact that it was an armed struggle of the peasantry against feudal oppression and exploitation. The state did not address the genuine demands of an oppressed peasantry because it always uses its coercive forces against angry social groups, particularly if they launch an armed struggle against an unresponsive state which is protecting the interests of the exploiting classes. The policy of bullet versus bullet has been consistently followed by the Indian state against armed groups which sought to opt out of Indias territorially defined boundaries or against peasants and tribals who took to arms because the state was seen as protecting the oppressor landlords and mafias who have exploited the poor tribals and their natural resources. It is not without reason that the managers of the Indian state have publicly observed that the Maoist insurgency is the greatest threat to the security of the state and have sought to crush it. The above narrative clearly shows that our democratic state has little concern for peoples struggles if solutions are demanded by launching armed movements, either by suffering peasants or tribals or groups which claim to have the right to opt out of the Indian Union. A democratic state on the basis of its claim of moral superiority and democratic sanctions has legitimized its use of coercive power against anti-state armed struggles of groups who are fighting for their rights.
While this is one facet of the relationship between state and movements, the other is that the functionaries of the state also negotiate with and accommodate the demands made by social movements which are described as normal activity of dissident groups in a competitive electoral democratic political system.The Jayaprakash Narayan or Anna Hazare-led movements may rhetorically be described as extra-constitutional, but the functionaries of the state go out of their way to negotiate, bargain and accommodate the demands of these so-called social movements of civil society. Every such movement is concerned with the reform of the political system and while the state may resist some demands, it always keeps its doors open for settlement with the leadership of such intra-state reformist movements because they are spearheaded by leaders and social groups who are not outsiders as far as the state system is concerned. The JP movement was launched in 1974-75 to purify a corrupted electoral system with a view to cleansing the democratic institutions by limiting the entry of MLAs and MPs accused of electoral malpractices. Jayaprakash Narayan launched his struggle against polluted governmental institutions because those holding the reins had adopted foul means to come to power. He wanted to restore the majesty and legitimacy of democratic institutions through his proposals for electoral reforms. Reforming democracy was the main agenda of the JP movement. Similarly, numerous other movements for the reorganization of state boundaries too have received a royal treatment from negotiators and interlocutors of the governmentin-power, by the opposition parties and media, both print and audiovisual. Annas movement too was for a negotiated settlement on the issue of an appropriate mechanism to check corruption in public life and public institutions. Anna led a popular struggle for a Jan Lokpal bill and like many other democratic struggles in post-independence India, this movement too achieved its goal on the basis of democratic accommodation by the powers-that-be. Clearly the state itself decides to adopt different yardsticks while dealing with different movements in a democracy. Depending upon the basic social issues raised by the movement and the methods chosen for achieving its goal, the state decides either to ruthlessly crush the movement or negotiate with its leaders. If on the one hand, the demands of a surplus generating peasantry or rural oligarchy, as articulated by the late Mahendra Singh Tikaits Bharatiya Kisan Union, are negotiated and conceded, struggles launched by land-
less agricultural labourers, share croppers, marginal farmers and tribals receive a cavalier response, often pushing them into taking up arms against the state. The Anna Hazare movement too needs to be examined on the basis of its demands, and the support it garnered from the emerging middle classes who used modern means of communication to spread their message across the country. Is the emergence of the phenomenon of movements, actively supported by upwardly mobile technocratic, professional middle classes, any surprise? Instead of berating a social movement, which may have a broad social base among the rising Indian middle classes, the focus should be on analyzing the ideological driving force of this segment of our society, since middle class activism is here to stay. By and large this moneyed class is insecure and socially conservative, even status quoist. It is not sympathetically oriented towards movements for the rights of the real poor, the basic classes, and usually supports every state action which, in its judgement, is needed to maintain and protect the existing social order. The mainstream of this new class, a product of fast-changing material forces of production, is status-quoist, right-wing conservative and, in the specific Indian situation, a believer in and practitioner of ritualized religion. Hence, the upshot is that the rapid, ongoing social change is creating a new strata of society and movements articulating demands which cannot be dismissed in a contemptuous manner. Social movements should be properly analysed. Further, historical evidence also testifies to the fact that even the essentially socially conservative middle class can become an agency for basic social transformations in society. The Indian middle class, old and new, has revealed its two faces or two tendencies during the different struggles of the 20th century. At one level, every tall leader of the Indian national struggle against British colonial rule, despite different ideological persuasions, came from the middle classes and made every kind of personal sacrifice for the liberation of the country. The Indian middle class has been actively involved both in right of centre or left-of-centre or even fullfledged Communist party-led struggles. It is this complex and contradictory character of the emerging middle classes which influences both the goals and directions of the social movement, as also the response of the state. C.P. Bhambhri
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Books
ELITE AND EVERYMAN: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray. Routledge, New Delhi, 2011. THE middle class is an elusive and yet popular category. Be it lay discourses on social and political life, or serious academic writings on economy, history and cultures of contemporary India, the category of middle class is used in a large variety of contexts. But what exactly is (or are) middle class(es)? What is specific about the Indian middle class? What role does it play in contemporary Indian social life? While recent writings by Indian economists have mostly concentrated on its size as an income category, the term has a broader sociological and conceptual history, both in the western context and in India. The edited volume by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray brings together essays that draw upon and indicate a wide range of scholarship that has recently emerged on the Indian middle class. The essays, first discussed in a workshop at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi, discuss a wide array of concerns about the Indian middle class, ranging from the simple economics of middle class in terms of its numbers or income levels, to its history, changing social and occupational profile, and even the ways in which it is represented in sex surveys.
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As the editors suggest in their introduction, the arrival of the middle class, or the growing scholarly interest in the subject, is also a consequence of the economic progress that a section of Indians have made over the last 50 or 60 years. Though their numbers in relative terms are still small, estimated to be anywhere between 10 to 26 per cent of the population, in absolute terms they have been growing, particularly during the post-liberalization period. More importantly perhaps, the middle class in India has also gradually occupied centre-stage, displacing the poor and the peasant, the common man. The pre-liberalization common man was a rather quiet and humble creature. The popular media articulated his concerns in terms of roti, kapda aur makan. The growing presence of middle class has changed this popular concern to bijli, sadak aur pani. While this shows a degree of social and economic mobility of the aam admi, it does not mean that the entire poor population has moved up the ladder. One can equally read this shift as reflecting a further marginalization of the poor, whose number, even in relative terms, remains very large. However, the aam admi of urban India is no longer a humble and helpless creature. He is now a middle class person, a citizen, who could be better described as everyman. Unlike the common man, everyman is assertive and demanding. It is this ascendency of the middle class during the 1990s, the
post-liberalization period, that provides the context for different essays in the book. So far, with the exception of historical commentaries, writings on the Indian middle class have mostly been of a general nature, based on impressionistic notions about the urban professional and salaried classes, invariably focusing on the conceptual difficulties of using the term in the Indian context. They often critiqued the Indian middle class for not being like its western counterpart, as being self-serving or nonsecular. In contrast, the papers presented in the volume mostly draw on empirical evidence. Even the conceptual discussions have moved beyond the earlier moralistic commentaries. The introductory chapter by the editors and the paper by Leela Fernandes are good examples of this tendency. Similarly, Sanjay Joshis historical account of the middle class in Lucknow and the paper by the Rudolphs on the post-land reform Rajputs of Rajasthan, raise interesting conceptual questions about the specific context of the emergence of a middle class in India. In the same vein, the paper by Roger Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffrey and Craig Jeffrey provides a fascinating ethnography of the mobile Jats of western Uttar Pradesh, their growing desire to be a part of the middle class and their efforts at changing their lifestyles. The post-1990s context and the rise of a new middle class is the subject of several papers. Working through numbers, E. Sridharan provides a comprehensive analysis of the data on employment, income and consumption categories through different data sets. In another paper, Carol Upadhya and Smitha Radhakrishnan present their work on the software professionals. The book also has several papers on the personal or private life of the middle class. While Nita Kumar focuses on the reproduction of middle class through education by looking at the child, Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray present their work on changing practices of servant-keeping in Kolkata and the challenge that middle class households face in negotiating their relationships with servants vis-a-vis their self-identities of being modern. Another study of Kolkata by Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Timothy J. Scrase look at the lower middle class among the Bengali bhadralok, their experience of relative downward mobility and the growing pressure of conforming to the new normative of middle class life, where success in English medium education has increasingly become critical. In another essay in the section, Patricia Uberoi analyzes the changing sexual character of the Indian middle class by comparing a survey done
by the famous sociologist G.S. Ghurye conducted during the late 1930s with a 2007 sex survey published by India Today. Continuing with the changing 1990s, the last three chapters of the book look at the emerging nature of middle class politics and urban public sphere. Focusing on cinema, the first of these chapters by William Mazzarella, looks at the manner in which a new liberal discourse on censorship emerged around the freedom of consumer choice for the urban educated viewer, even while it accepted censorship for the masses. Similarly, Amita Baviskar and Sanjay Srivastava discuss the reconfiguring of urban spaces in their contributions. However, they focus on two very different contexts and with differing perspectives. While Srivastavas ethnography of the Akshardham temple in Delhi shows how the appeal of the temple lies in its ability to present itself as a tableau of consumption, Baviskar examines the ongoing emergence of the public sphere on Delhis street and the restructuring of urban space to make it fit the bourgeois notion of environmentalism and modernity. Though one can always quibble about or identify what has not been addressed by the book, it is hard to ignore its contribution to the scholarship on the Indian middle class. The range of subjects covered and the quality of scholarship makes reading of this book an imperative for anyone interested in understanding the changing character of the middle class and contemporary India. Surinder S. Jodhka REFLECTIONS ON NATION BUILDING: A Gypsy in the World of Ideas by Rajen Harshe. Pentagon Press, New Delhi, 2011. MEMOIRS of teachers seem to be curiously nonexistent today. And yet, names such as S. Radhakrishnan, K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, V.V. John and C.D. Narasimhaiah were widely known to the teaching community in post-independence India. Full of scintillating wit and humour, their accounts accomplished several goals at the same time: they mapped the contours of the teachers intellectual and spiritual evolution, captured the history of learning, especially with regard to the institutional and pedagogic aspects, recorded the changing attitude of society towards the university and finally, offered reflections that could serve as an effective road map for the future. Indeed, for a great many of the leaders of our national freedom
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struggle, education and nation building, went hand in hand. And thus, we think of Gandhijis interest in Basic Education, Tagores endeavours in Shantiniketan and Sri Aurobindos experiments in Baroda, Bengal and Pondicherry. Paradoxically enough, post-independence Indias commitment to higher education, in terms of a massive outlay of resources of money and manpower, seems to have coincided with a gradual withdrawal of the venerable teacher figure into a private shell as a recluse. No doubt, star teachers and professors have become public intellectuals today; they command a fan following in the media and on campus. But we rarely see glimpses of their private selves, the world of their intimate thought, their anxiety, dilemma and fears, related to their vision of education. The more teaching has become a profession in terms of an increased pay packet and mandatory teaching hours under the supervision of national level bodies like the UGC (University Grants Commission), the more society has been deprived of the valuable presence of the teacher figure. That is why Rajen Harshes ruminations on men, matters and institutions in the present volume, seen from the perspective of a teacher over the last three decades, merits public attention. Written in a lucid, conversational style without the pitfalls of jargon, this is not a memoir in the conventional sense. Harshe writes with feeling; there is the personal note, the reflective persona who looks back constantly and revises his cherished views and beliefs as he goes along. It is this humanistic self of Harshe that comes out again and again in the essays. With an experience that spans many places: Pune, Delhi, Paris, Hyderabad, New York and Allahabad, he has had a rich and eventful career as a teacher, administrator and institution builder. Calling himself a gypsy in the world of ideas, he writes insightfully on personalities like Gandhi, Marx, Nehru, Tilak and Mandela and introduces the ideas of J. Krishnamurti, Sarojini Naidu and Frantz Fanon. He examines issues such as the Naxalite movement, the university system, insurgency in the North East, alienation of youth, the Partition of India, the Berlin Wall and the globalized economy. Above all, there is the all powerful presence of history. He looks closely at history with its myriad meanings, examines the nature of the past and the problems inherent in the writing of this discipline. The chapters themselves are fairly small, each written in the form of a column; many of these, we learn, were published in the form of a column called
V.Cs Diary in the Allahabad edition of Hindustan Times. As Harshe looks back, he asks a number of pointed questions: Was Nehru an enigma or tragedy? What are his lasting contributions? How did Tilak add an ideological or spiritual basis to Indias freedom struggle? What is the lasting legacy of the anti-colonial Fanon and the 13th century Marathi saint poet Gyaneshwar? He has his answers. The ideal is to avoid political correctness and all forms of dogmatic and sectarian thinking. Nehru had his strength and his failings too: Kashmir and China. So much of our schooling, he aptly says, is an unmitigated drudgery. The youth today needs role models and inspiring figures. Violence can be countered only through non-violent peaceful methods. Some of the answers seem to be familiar. Perhaps the novelty lies in the manner in which Harshe articulate these ideas and beliefs with passion and fervour and grounds them in concrete personal experience. There are primarily two reference points for Rajen Harshes personal narrative: his experience at the Golden Threshold of the University of Hyderabad, and his association with the Allahabad University. These provide a catalytic agency to his thinking. I have allowed my soul and mind to talk to (my) readers, he says aptly. In the late seventies, Rajen came to the Golden Threshold which then served as the city campus of the newly started Central University. Named after an immortal collection of poems by Sarojini Naidu, the place became more than an address or a locale. It breathed the atmosphere of Sarojini and her father Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay who, we learn, was the founder of the Nizam College, Hyderabad. There were also a host of nationalists such as Gandhiji who came to the Golden Threshold. It is at this sacred site, a beehive of intellectual activity, that Rajen reflected on teaching and teachers. What is teaching and who are the ideal teachers? In the process, he discovers spirituality through research. In the intimate bond between the teachers and taught, he sees the non-dualism of Advaita. There are kindred souls such as the philosopher Ramachandra Gandhi and poets like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Meena Alexander. But then, no idyll can be a permanent one and Hyderabad University goes through its share of turmoil and conflicts in the eighties before bouncing back. Later in his career, Rajen picks up the thread again when he is invited to lead the newly converted Central University of Allahabad in 2005. A fruitful five
year stint at Allahabad saw him transform the place into an active centre of learning that brought back a modicum of the earlier glory of the university. There is the sense of satisfaction for a job well done! It is the chapter, Golden Threshold that I liked the most in the book. It is at G.T., as the place is known locally, that Rajen reveals his innermost self. The memories often turn lyrical and poetic as he recollects the image of the birds seen through the windows of his office. These birds, he muses, must have been writing poems on the sadness of the sky underneath the veins of green leaves with their beaks. They remind him of his students who were perennial angels in his life. The music in him takes him inexorably into the many skies traversed by the birds that fly all over. A Gypsy in the World of Ideas is a memorable account that would be of interest to a wide cross-section of society. The chapters are written at different times and therefore betray a degree of unevenness in style. Where he succeeds, Rajen is able to transfigure the academic experience into the personal, and finally in the form of lasting vignettes. Occasionally, the opinions expressed reiterate the familiar. On the whole, however, this is a book that should have a wide appeal. Attractively produced by the Pentagon Press, Rajen Harshes reflections on higher education would hopefully lead to a more full-fledged personal narrative. Sachidananda Mohanty FLOWERS FOR MY FATHER. Tributes to P. Lal and His Writers Workshop compiled and edited by Srimati Lal. Writers Workshop, Delhi 2011. Professor P. Lal called his only daughter Srimati, child of my heart, who after his death in 2010, has expressed her profound, rare and deep devotion to her father in this collection, Flowers for my Father, which has essays, reminiscences from 33 writers/colleagues, drawings by Srimati, and photographs. P. Lal, a legendary Professor of English Literature at St. Xaviers College, Calcutta, founded his highly controversial and path-breaking Writers Workshop for Indians writing in English in 1958. At the time, few thought Indians could be creative in English. I remember Philip Larkin saying that no Indian could write poetry in English! All the more incredible, therefore, was P. Lals Open Sesame to Indians writing in English, a language which he believed was as much an Indian language as any other. So finely honed was his intuition that he bravely sparked off his Writers
Workshop with an anthology and a credo titled Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry (1969). It was a radical and refreshing manifesto, rejecting even Swami Purohit and Tagore (who had been included by W.B. Yeats in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse) for syntactical Victorianisms, philosophical Gibranisms, and pious yearnings of the spirit. (Lal did, later, translate Tagores last poems.) Even more irreverently, Lal rejected Sri Aurobindos Savitri as a gushy comical experience. The stage had been set for a new poetry, a fresh language and poetic idiom, and, with increasing confidence, Indian writers began to explore and express a sense of their own world. No more poems about larks and daffodils! I remember, still, the thrill of first reading Mary Erulkars stunning poem: The Third Continent: Where Europe and America build their arches The pale women lean like fountains in the wind There, the women walk where the winds of hunger Lament in the black harps of their hair. Many who first published their work with Lals Workshop went on to become known nationally and internationally. Anita Desai published her first stories with WW. So did Shashi Deshpande, Ruskin Bond, and Farukh Dhondy. Poets Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Agha Shahid Ali, Keki Daruwalla, Vikram Seth and many others were all first published by Lal. Lal also opened up his house in Calcutta for literary meets, and among the famous who met there were Pearl Buck, R.K. Narayan, Allen Ginsburg, Mulk Raj Anand, Gunter Grass and Geoffrey Hill. He also published Miscellany, a magazine which accepted stories, poems and articles from unpublished writers. This gave new writers a sense of identity, and encouraged them to keep writing. Perhaps there could have been more critical input, and more editing. But I think Lals attitude was: Here is a boat. Get in, venture into the ocean. See how far you can go. Many drowned along the way, or just gave up. Many went on to reach distant shores! Lal was a great teacher of English literature, but no Anglophile. He was well grounded in Sanskrit, and started to transcreate (a word coined by him, now in the Oxford Dictionary) the great classics of India. He started with the Mahabharata, shloka by shloka. This he continued to do almost till the end. He also translated the Ramayana, the Upanishads, great Sanskrit plays, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, the Jap-ji, and much more.
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And to add to this phenomenal output, he was also a stylish calligrapher. I remember the thrill of receiving his exquisitely handwritten letters, addressed to Sujatha Devi! His highly developed aesthetic sense was surely the reason for his books being handbound in exquisitely coloured handloom saris by Tulamiah Mohiuddin. They were printed on an India made hand-operated machine by P.K. Aditya. What a tremendous achievement this was. Gopal Krishna Gandhi writes in his tribute to P. Lal: If P. Lal had been born in an age when scripts were emerging, he would have stayed with the mystic signs and symbols that preceded the alphabet. Since he belonged to the age of writing, of fullyformed letters and a world of evolved words, he made his choice early and clearly: he would adhere to that which was readied by the hand, read by the eyes, and retained by the enquiring mind, all in one seamless stretch. To overthrow the colonial legacy, claim our own, and yet have the stature and poise to start a movement encouraging those wishing to write in English. When everyone was debating Indianness, Lal knew that Indians could and would make English one of their own languages, and use it in a unique way. Lal wrote many poems in English himself. One of his most touching poems is For My Daughter, Srimati. In Srimatis article, Bouquets to Baba, the daughter has a vision of her father, senses his presence. He whispers to her: Forgive them all, Tepari! You know better. They know not what they say or doas usual! Remember how they didnt even know which switch worked at Belle Vue nursing home? You did. Among many other things. Smile, my little Teparismile. Do your own thing! That Lal was a genius and visionary is very clear. He was never small-minded, petty or vindictive, with a clear and open spirit, aspiring always to a life of beauty and an exalted spirit. Anna Sujatha Mathai DANGEROUS SEX, INVISIBLE LABOR: Sex Work and the Law in India by Prabha Kotiswaran. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2011. Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor is a complex and courageous interdisciplinary study of sex work in contemporary India. Its complexity lies in the sheer variety of epistemological and methodological registers that the author has chosen to navigate, drawing widely from writings in feminist theory, legal realism, postcolonial theory, and law and economics, besides herself undertaking a multi-sited legal ethnography. Its courage, in
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its attempt to provide an account that takes seriously sex workers own description of what they do as work, without collapsing into the tired (but easy) binaries of coerced victim/transgressive heroine that characterize most writing on the subject. The book is divided into three parts, with distinct but interlocking theoretical orientations and narrative styles. The first, Theorizing Sex Work analyzes the feminist skirmishes over the sex work question, painstakingly tracing the theoretical trajectories of radical, abolitionist and materialist feminist divergences and agreements. Kotiswaran then maps the effects of these diverse strands onto the contemporary international discourse on sex markets and trafficking. This is unfortunately the least compelling section in the book. The writing seems laboured, and tends to be repetitive. In chapter two alone, for instance, the author revisits, recasts, resituates, rethinks and re-modifies the debate several times over, in delineating the contours of tediously and tenaciously intractable feminist (op)positions. Despite her exploration of lesser-known feminist materialist writings on the subject, parts of the section read like a mandatory review of literature from a doctoral dissertation. For an author who is unembarrassed and vocal about her postcolonial materialist politics, her choice to foreground these predominantly western feminist genealogies, and bracket off the postcolonial into her concluding section, is somewhat puzzling. In the second section, The Political Economy of Sex Work, the book takes an unexpected and refreshing new direction. The section is based on fascinating ethnographies of two very different and highly differentiated markets for sex work, the pilgrimage town of Tirupati and brothel-based prostitution in the red light district of Sonagachi in Kolkata. The authors materialist and legal realist orientation leads her to study minutely the economic institutions of livelihood and rent, and the relationships of formal and informal legality which structure the libidinal economy of sex work in these two locales. Her study of the complexity of contractual and non-monetary economic forms, plurality of governmental, legal and social norms, and political movements and manoeuvres that variously constitute the contemporary urban sex worker as the adhiya, the chhukri, the flying sex worker, the brothel, street or lodge based prostitute working on contract or commission, seriously unsettle existing theoretical and legal frames and should be compulsory reading for every advocate for policy or legal reform. If there is a failing in this sec-
tion, it is that the thickness of Kotiswarans ethnographic description occasionally wears thin, and her writing can tend towards economic determinism, even reductionism. For instance, in detailing the kinds of tenancy agreements that exist in Sonagachi, she ends every sub-section with an assessment of its relative investment and legal risk, and profitability. Her uncritical deployment of policy and governance terminology such as stakeholders or Category A/B/or C sex workers (classified on the basis of income, and in one instance used to generalize about their relative preference for cigarettes or alcohol!) without unpacking the discursive histories of these managerial classifications flatten and diminish what is an otherwise politically engaged and carefully wrought narrative. In the final section, Toward a Theory of Redistribution in Sex Markets, Kotiswaran applies her theoretical frame to her empirical field. In the first of the two chapters that make up the section, she undertakes a leap of legal imagination, conjecturing how legislative changes such as partial decriminalization (the criminalization of customers as contemplated in the proposed amendment to the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act, but not passed by the Indian Parliament), complete decriminalization or legalization would impact the complicated world of brothel based prostitution in Sonagachi. Such modelling is premised on several farfetched assumptions (including that the law will be uniformly and perfectly enforced) which make it vulnerable to the charge of over-determinism. Nevertheless, through this hypothetical exercise, Kotiswaran successfully demonstrates that even in a model where laws have no unintended consequences, legal changes can ripple out into the social world in complicated and surprising ways. In her concluding chapter, Kotiswaran draws together the sometimes disparate themes in her work, and proposes a (postcolonial) materialist feminist theory. She provides a trenchant critique of the teleological nature of Marxist, feminist and developmental progress narratives, and instantiates through her ethnographic work, how sex markets in India disrupt any such universalist histories. The diverse disciplinary domains that Kotiswaran traverses, the depth of detail, her use of Marxist and governance terminology, and her classificatory and densely analytical descriptive style can make this book a demanding, though sometimes a difficult, read. Nonetheless, it is an important, even unique, book and for these reasons should be read. Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh
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FEW sectors, in the last two decades, have received as much concerted attention as school education. Starting with the National Policy on Education, 1986, all the way to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act in 2009, governments have tried hard to actualize the goal of Education for All. Equally critical has been the Supreme Courts intervention in the midday meal scheme, amendments to the law on child labour, and the abolition of corporal punishment. Alongside, we have witnessed an enormous increase in the financial allocations for elementary education. While all this has without doubt changed the Indian education landscape, and for the better, as the recently published Probe Revisited: A Report on Elementary Education in India, OUP, 2011, based on a detailed survey of seven Hindi belt states carried out in 2006 makes clear, progress remains uneven. Even as close to 95% children are enrolled in school, a huge increase since the earlier Probe survey of 1996, in rural North India, about half of the time, no teaching takes place in primary schools, On this count, at least, little has changed. A significant proportion of government schools continue to be plagued by old problems indifferent infrastructure, irregular teacher attendance, poor quality of teaching cumulatively resulting in unsatisfactory learning outcomes. To state sharply, when parents and children, particularly from the poor and marginalized strata, see that children are learning little and there is little hope of future benefits from schooling, there is growing despondency. The picture, however, is not all bleak. Enrolment has indeed gone up and school infrastructure and facilities are today much better. As many as 86% schools report a functional midday meal schemes and close to three-fourths of the schools have village education committees, indicating greater social participation. Most important, the gender, caste and religious gaps in school attendance have narrowed. Even accounting for the differential progress across states and regions, the Probe Report highlights a range of concerns that, despite new schemes and programmes, and legislative changes, the policy makers find difficult to tackle Some of the difficulties arise from the surge in enrolment which means that more children from disadvantaged backgrounds are now in school. Since, unlike their better-off cohorts, they cannot rely on family support, they require far greater attention and care in schools. This, unfortunately, is
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missing, in part because of a severe inadequacy of trained teachers, prevalence of mindless rote learning and the persistence of a discriminatory environment. A vast majority of the teachers in government schools are drawn from more privileged social groups. They are also unionized.Acombination of tenurial security and pre-existing social bias makes them less accountable to poorer parents and children. The end result actual attendance is far below enrolment and attendance does not automatically translate into learning. Even village education committees, usually marked by unequal power relations, are unable to ensure accountability. Clearly, the thrust towards hiring contract teachers (with lower pay and qualifications) has only resulted in swelling numbers (affecting teacher-pupil ratios) without improving quality and learning outcomes. One fallout of this unsatisfactory experience is the exponential growth in private schools, catering not only to the unmet demand for schooling but often drawing away students from government schools. Clearly, parents feel that they will serve clients better and be more accountable for fear of losing clientele. Incidentally, this trend is noticeable not just in urban areas but also in larger villages, even though many private schools do not match government schools in terms of infrastructure, financial resources and trained teachers. While it is true that classroom activity levels and achievements of basic literacy and numeracy are often better in private as compared to government schools, the quality varies a great deal. More important, though less noticed, is the fact that a privatized school system is fundamentally inequitable, accessible only to those with an ability to pay. Invariably, private schools cater more to those from a higher caste and class background and more boys than girls. A policy reliance on privatization cannot thus be a solution. This then is the quandary. Private schools, quality apart, cater to the relatively privileged. Efforts at significantly improving the quality of government schools despite numerous schemes have so far not yielded desired results. The proposal, implicit in the RTE Act, to illegalize and close down all schools (mainly private) not meeting statutory parameters may further worsen the situation. Unless government schools can be made to work better, relying merely on larger allocations and fine sounding policy pronouncements will not help. Harsh Sethi

Seminar Water Wars

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SHADES OF BLUE

a symposium on emerging conflicts and challenges around water

Lessons from the 2010 floods in Pakistan

SEMINAR 626 October 2011

Hydro-politics, the Indus water treaty and climate change

Resolving inter-state water sharing disputes

tool for conflict resolution and participatory management.

Securing water commons in scheduled areas

been made in conserving community water resources.

Ecological implications of the green revolution

Effect of Floods During Rainy Season in Punjab in India

Source: Statistical Abstract, Govt. of Punjab, various issues.

Water crisis in Delhi

Water as a public good vs. water privatization

3. Speech at the World Bank in January 2002, www.worldbank.org/wbi/B-SPAN/docs/ SAUR.pdf

Deciphering environmental flows

Contested constructions of water

SEMINAR 626 October 2011

tested and subsequently monitored when the framework is operational.

The not-so-discreet burdens of Indian communism

India against corruption

State response to movements

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