DINESH KUMAR
After the submission of the report A 21st Century Institutional Architecture for India’s Water Reforms, the Chairman of the Committee appointed by the Ministry of Water Resources http:// wrmin.nic.in/writereaddata/Report_on_Restructuring_CWC_CGWB.pdf), Govt. of India on Restructuring CWC and CGWB, Dr Mihir Shah, had given several interviews to national dailies, arguing how the recommendations in the report for ‘reforms’, if implemented, could herald a new era in India’s water sector. Similar claims were made while changes in the guidelines of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and national watershed development programme for rainfed areas were recommended.
The latest issue of Economic and Political Weekly carried 13 articles which are supposed to be critiques of the Committee report, but written mostly by people who are close associates of the Committee chairman (http:// www.epw.in/ taxonomy/term/ 28686). Most of these critiques were biased and opinionated, barring two exceptions (from Rohini Nilekani of Arghyam and KJ Joy of SOPECCOM, which expressed scepticism about the ‘reform’ claim).
By doing this, the Committee seems to have succeeded in manufacturing public opinion in favour of the recommendations of a report, which otherwise carries no substance, in terms of their ability to bring about reforms in the water sector.
We have already analyzed the report and posted an article ‘There are no low hanging fruits in water management (dated October 04, 2016), explaining how the Committee has seriously faltered in their analysis of India’s water sector vis-à-vis the problems it confronts and the ‘remedies’, which was used to build a case for the kind of reforms proposed therein.
Also, an article was published in Int. Journal of water Resources Development titled Proposing A Solution to India’s Water Crisis: ‘Paradigm Shift’ or Pushing Out-dated Concepts? by M. Dinesh Kumar). A critical analysis of the interview of the Committee’s Chairman with a reporter from the Hindu (dated August 19, 2016), presented below http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/%E2%80%98Time-for-a-National-Water-Commission%E2%80%99/article14578590.ece) explodes the myth that the report contains a reform agenda for the water sector in India.
Our comments on Dr Mihir Shah’s response to the interviewer’s questions are in italics.
The proposed National Water Commission (NWC) subsumes the Central Water Commission (CWC) and Central Ground Water Board (CGWB). How specifically does it improve national water management?
The CWC (set up in 1945) and CGWB (set up in 1971) were created in an era when India faced a very different set of challenges. Then it was crucial to create irrigation capacity to ensure food self-sufficiency. But today the challenge is different. At huge cost (around Rs.400000 crore) we have created 113 million hectares of irrigation potential.
But is this water reaching the farmers? No. As the Chief Minister of Maharashtra has said, the State has 40 per cent of the country’s large dams, “but 82 per cent area of the state is rainfed. Till the time you don’t give water to a farmer’s fields, you can’t save him from suicide. We pushed large dams, not irrigation. But this has to change.” Our report is trying to address this challenge.
We also highlight the fact that groundwater is the main source of water in India. This means we cannot go on endlessly drilling for groundwater through tube wells, which is what CGWB has promoted thus far. This has actually aggravated India’s groundwater crisis, as water tables fall and water quality declines, with arsenic, fluoride and even uranium entering our drinking water.
Comment: These contentions by the Committee chairman raise five important issues. First one concerns the irrigation investments. For an investment of 4 lac crore rupee (60 billion dollars) for irrigating 113 m. ha of land, the unit cost of irrigation comes to Rs. 35,000 per ha. If we annualize this using an average life of 25 years, it comes to a meagre Rs.3000 per ha per year. This is not a huge cost, if we consider a modest net income of Rs. 50,000 per ha of irrigated land over an entire year.
The second issue is of changing the goal post. It is not clear why the author resorts to highlighting the issue of 82% of the area remaining rainfed in Maharashtra while looking at the national scenario. The 113 m. ha of irrigation is spread all over the country and not just Maharashtra. In Punjab, 95% of the cultivated area is irrigated. The fact is that India has a gross cropped area of 180 m. ha, that brings down the area irrigated to just 50 per cent. If we want to increase the irrigation intensity, we need to invest more.
The third issue concerns the criterion for analyzing the performance of irrigation sector. If one has to analyze the performance of irrigation sector against the investments made, the ‘aggregate area under irrigation per unit of investment is what should be considered as the performance indicator, and NOT the percentage of cropped area irrigated. The attempt here seems to be to distort the facts and obscurantist. That said CWC cannot be held accountable for the ‘poor’ performance of state irrigation agencies.
The fourth issue is of the failure to understand the causes and the effects. It is inappropriate to blame CGWB for groundwater over-exploitation , which is because of free or heavily subsidized power supplied to agriculture sector, the institutional financial and subsidies for well drilling, and the lack of well- defined rights in groundwater. CGWB, which is purely a technical agency, had no role in this, whatsoever. Their mandate is scientific exploration and assessment of groundwater resources in the Country.
The last issue is of fractured thinking about water resources development. The Committee looks at surface water development and groundwater development in a segmented fashion. In the process, a fact, which the Committee conveniently ignored, is that the groundwater over-exploitation problems would have been far more severe, had we not developed surface irrigation.
As per the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation (MoWR, RD & GR) own estimates the contribution of unlined canals to groundwater recharge is about 0.15-0.3 cu. m/day/sq. m of wetted area. The committee, which is so vocal about integrated surface and groundwater management, should understand this basic fact about how integrated surface and groundwater development helps sustain groundwater use in canal command areas.
That said, the Chairman of the Committee does not have anything to offer when confronted with the question: ‘How the NWC would improve water management in the country?’
What are the key shifts in water management your report recommends?
One, we must take a multidisciplinary view of water. We require professionals from disciplines other than just engineering and hydro-geology. Two, we need to adopt the participatory approach to water management that has been successfully tried all over the world, as also in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. Three, we must view groundwater and surface water in an integrated, holistic manner. CWC and CGWB cannot continue to work in their current independent, isolated fashion. The one issue that really highlights the need to unify CWC and CGWB is the drying up of India’s peninsular rivers, the single most important cause of which is over-extraction of groundwater.
If river rejuvenation is the key national mandate of the Ministry of Water Resources, then this cannot happen without hydrologists and hydro-geologists working together, along with social scientists, agronomists and other stakeholders. Four, we need to focus on river basins which must form the fundamental units for management of water. We have carefully studied the regional presence (or absence) of the CWC and CGWB and proposed a way forward whereby the NWC is present in all major river basins of India.
Comment: Firstly, for river rejuvenation in terms of cleaning of river waters, there is no need for hydrologists and geo-hydrologists to work together. Please see how this has been done in many countries in Europe. We can introduce either market instruments or effective regulations, neither of which is there in our country.
Nor the Committee dealt with it in the report. On the other hand, if water withdrawal from river basins has to be cut down to reduce the environmental water stress of rivers we need an effective institutional framework for regulating land use in catchments, water resource development and groundwater withdrawal. The report is silent on these aspects. Simply taking river basin as the unit for planning doesn’t change anything.
There has to be legitimate institutions which can undertake basin-wide water resources management (at the state level), with powers to enforce management decisions. That constitutes the real reform in the water sector.
Secondly, to unify CWC and CGWB into National Water Commission and make their involvement in water resource planning of basin in different states will require constitutional amendments. A simple change in nomenclature of these Central Agencies will be insufficient as the state agencies have rights and control over the water resources within their territories (as per entry 17, List-II, Seventh Schedule, Art. 246 of the Indian Constitution).
It will be worthwhile to examine whether anything has changed in India’s watershed development programme after National Rain-fed Area Authority was created in 2007.
It is intriguing that someone who was a great champion of NREGS, a scheme which mostly promoted only digging of pits in rural areas for nearly 8 years without paying any attention to the hydrological integrity of catchments, is now very voluble about integrated surface and groundwater management!
Finally, what is also not clear is why do we need a separate wing of NWC for river rejuvenation, when the whole approach is going to be integrated surface and groundwater management? The Committee’s thinking on the issue is simply fragmented, which will only create silos.
When the Committee is so voluble about inter-disciplinarity in water management, it makes a curious case by not having anyone from disciplines such as hydrology and water resources engineering.
The Central Water Commission has opposed the NWC on the grounds that several reform measures are already in place. Are you throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Not at all; we have taken great care to ensure that all existing functions and personnel of the CWC find their appropriate place in the eight divisions of the NWC, which include Irrigation Reform, River Rejuvenation, Participatory Groundwater Management, Urban and Industrial Water, Water Security (including droughts, floods and climate change) and Water Quality.
Comment: It is not clear, how CWC and CGWB can contribute to wings such as urban water, flood management and water quality. There is already a Central Pollution Control Board, which is primarily concerned with water quality of all aquatic ecosystems. Further, there are two agencies, vi., the National River Conservation Directorate and National Mission for Clean Ganga which are responsible for improving river water quality. Similarly, Ministry of Urban Development and Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation are in-charge of developing water supply infrastructure and providing water services in urban and rural areas respectively.
Also, there is Ganga Flood Control Commission, a subordinate office of MOWR, RD & GR, to deal with floods and its management in Ganga Basin. So for NWC to be operational, not only CWC and CGWB but other organisations, including many from other Ministries, should also be re-structured. This was simply not within the scope of the ToR given to Dr Mihir Shah committee. Further, it is unclear what additional actions will the new agency have to perform for achieving objectives like river rejuvenation, when the entire accent is on integrated water resources management.
This isn’t the first time that you have recommended an integrated water commission…
I think this kind of fundamental change takes time to be fully understood and get actualised in policy. In actual fact, professionals involved in CWC and CGWB will get an even better chance to improve their technical capabilities and career prospects within the NWC.
Comment: It is difficult to understand the assumptions behind this unique proposal for improving the technical capabilities of professionals in both CWC and CGWB, put forth by the Committee. Normally in any government agency, professionals are hired following stringent rules and regulations pertaining to their education, experience and skills required for performing a particular job.
Tailor-made training programmes are organised by reputed government institutes, such as National Water Academy at Pune and Rajiv Gandhi National Ground Water Training and Research Institute at Raipur, to further enhance their skills. One can understand lack of representation of other disciplines, such as agricultural sciences in these organisations but these can be handled by employing professionals relevant to such disciplines.
Also, MoWR, RD & GR through various MoU with different countries and donors such as the World Bank are already having projects with substantial capacity building components on river basin planning, IWRM, data management, etc. How NWC can improve technical capabilities and career prospects of CWC and CGWB officials is not clear.
How are we going to enhance the knowledge and capabilities of the training institutes such as the National Water Academy (NWA)? The Committee has made no suggestions towards this. On the contrary, they want to burden these central agencies with the task of training farmers! The NWA needs more autonomy to source experts in different disciplines from the industry and compensate them adequately. Administrative reforms are needed for that.
Water is frequently a political issue in several States. Why should States listen to an NWC?
As a Committee, we took great care to get views of States on board. We have suggested that appraisal must become a demand-based exercise, done through a partnership between the Central and State governments, as also institutions of national repute.
This is a key part of the reform we are proposing. We are not for a monolithic NWC. The NWC will be a knowledge institution providing solutions to water problems faced by state governments, farmers and other stakeholders, on demand, in a truly user-friendly manner.
Comment: MoWR, RD & GR have been trying for quite some time to facilitate better coordination between Central and State Water Institutions for sustainable planning, development and management of river basins. However, water being a State subject and absence of a National Water Law, which makes it obligatory on the States (sharing river basins) to come under a common platform for water management, has not led to any positive outcomes.
The state level water agencies must feel that they need the support of central institutions for informed decision making in the field of hydrology and water resources planning. It can construct a million small WHS in a river basin falling in its territory; farmers can drill as many wells as they want in their farms. The central agency will only be a silent onlooker.
Thus, creation of NWC, without institutional reforms comprising establishment of clearly defined water rights/water entitlement and effluent discharge norms, with laws and regulations for restricting the development and use of water resource and water pollution, will end up as a futile exercise.
On the flip side, when the Committee itself has decided the water agenda for India, by writing an obituary of large dams, what scientific knowledge it expects the NWC to generate and provide to the state governments?
Your report doesn’t encourage interlinking of rivers, one of the most vocal commitments of Water Minister Uma Bharati
Our report contains a summary of all the scholarly work available on interlinking of rivers (ILR). This work demolishes the engineering myth that water must not be allowed to flow “wastefully” into the sea. Scientists fear that the humongous ILR project could even endanger the integrity of India’s monsoon cycle, which depends crucially on fresh river water flowing into the sea. However, our report is not centrally concerned with this question and is not really into the pro- versus anti-big dam debate.
It is much more concerned with the challenge of ensuring that the water stored in dams, present or future, actually reaches the farmers. This is low-hanging fruit that can give us an increase of millions of hectares of irrigated area at much less than the cost of the ILR and in much less time, avoiding all inter-State conflicts, land acquisition problems, as also corruption that has become a big issue in irrigation projects over the years.
Comment: First of all, the Committee did not refer to any scholarly work, worth the name on inter-basin water transfers, to comment on an issue as complex as ILR. How can there be studies on the economic and ecological viability of ILR, when the very idea itself is in the conceptual stage and not a scheme with a blue print? The committee has cited the fringe literature, which are opinionated articles, from civil society, to argue that ILR is unsound and unwise.
The fact of the matter is that even pre-feasibility studies are not prepared for most of the river links proposed under the concept of ILR. Once that is done, we will be able to say, how many of the links are actually viable based on technical, economic, social grounds. The Committee also ignored the fact that there are already many inter-basin water transfer projects under operation in our country.
The 26.0 m. ha of additional irrigation, through efficiency improvements in irrigation, as argued by the Committee (see the report), is fictitious. Such a low hanging fruit does not exist. The problem is that the Committee’s notion of irrigation efficiency is simply out-dated, and not used by water resources scientists worldwide. This is large-scale recycling of the water supplied from reservoirs and diversion systems and lost in conveyance to the farmers’ fields.
The Committee’s idea of transferring water from reservoir to every farmer’s field without having necessary infrastructure is simply untenable.We need to build infrastructure to appropriate water in places where it is available in plenty, and convey to regions of demand for every farmer to get irrigation water.
To put things in perspective, water transfer from the relatively water-rich Narmada River to the parched areas of North Gujarat, Kachchh and Saurashtra is already changing the rural scenario of these regions in terms of agricultural incomes and domestic water security. Similarly, water transfer from Godavari to irrigation tanks in water scarce Krishna basin is changing the agricultural landscape of the region.
Many of the metropolitan cities including Delhi, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad are dependent on water supply from distant surface reservoirs located to meet their daily water demands. Of course, the inter-basin water transfer projects have to be scrutinised for their impact on ecology and human displacement but simply ride them off without proper assessment is intellectual arrogance.
To ignore their role in increasing agricultural incomes and provision of water supply in water scarce regions will have its own perils. By turning a blind to this reality, the attempt of the Committee seems to be to call a moratorium on large water systems, while not proposing anything worth the name water reforms. So, there is surely an agenda, but it is not of water sector reforms.
Dinesh Kumar is a renowned Distinguished Water Sector Expert, Executive Director, Institute for Resource Analysis & Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad & Honorary Advisor, IMPRI.
The article was first published in LinkedIn as Manufacturing public opinion in favour of ‘water reforms’ on 25 December 2016.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgment: This article was posted by Shivashish Narayan, a Visiting Researcher at IMPRI.
