Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management

This paper argues that the crisis in humanity’s relationship with water reflected in rapidly escalating demand and dangerously depleting freshwater and groundwater reserves, can be understood as the outcome of the anthropocentric assumptions underlying our current development models. These assumptions have given rise to both the challenge of severe water scarcity as well as to the kind of policies used to address it. Drawing on principles from an environmental justice framework, it calls for a drastic restructuring of the water sector on more equitable, sustainable and democratic lines. Some of the guiding principles for water governance that are suggested include ensuring that interventions in nature or river systems are along the contours of nature, focusing on managing the demand for water as against the present emphasis on supply augmentation, recognition of structural and historical inequities which determine access to water, adoption of an approach to water management that is adaptive to rapidly changing circumstances and promotion of the participation of all stakeholders in governance and knowledge production.

This article addresses a gap in the water equity literature arising from the simultaneous use of surface water and groundwater in India. Using two diverse case studies – one agricultural (Kukdi) and one urban (Chennai) – we demonstrate how gaps in planning, design and policy exacerbate inequity. Groundwater abstraction from user wells allows wealthier users to both free-ride and capture a greater share of the resource. By converting a public resource to a private one, it worsens inequity and jeopardizes the sustainability of water projects. The article suggests that better monitoring, inter-agency coordination and rethinking water entitlements and norms are needed for going forward.

Contemporary socio-economic transformations in South Asia are creating increasingly serious water problems (scarcity, flooding, pollution) and conflicts. Conflicts over water distribution, water-derived benefits, and risks often play out along axes of social differentiation like caste, wealth, and gender. Those with least power, rights, and voice suffer lack of access, exclusion, dispossession, and further marginalisation, resulting in livelihood insecurity or increased vulnerability to risks. In this paper we propose analysing these problems as problems of justice – problems of distribution, recognition, and political participation. Drawing on wider environmental justice approaches, a specific water justice focus needs to include both the specific characteristics of water as a resource and the access, rights, and equity dimensions of its control. We argue that recognising water problems as problems of justice requires a re-politicisation of water, as mainstream approaches to water resources, water governance, and legislation tend to normalise or naturalise their – basically political – distributional assumptions and implications. An interdisciplinary approach that sees water as simultaneously natural (material) and social is important here. We illustrate these conceptual and theoretical suggestions with evidence from India.