Managing water needs statesmanship

April 19, 2015 01:57 am | Updated 02:01 am IST

WATER IN THE COMING DECADES'

WATER IN THE COMING DECADES'

This book deals with all aspects of water resources — irrigation, flood control, drinking water, groundwater, sustainability, climate change, resettlement and rehabilitation and the legal framework — comprehensively, and captures both the developments in and the challenges facing the sector in India. The writing is lucid and well referenced.

Early in the book, the author refers to the “absence of water-centric approach to overall development and policy.” His point that despite its importance, water was not factored into input-output matrices in our planning exercises is well taken. However, the sequitur does not follow. Even had water had been included like cement, steel, etc. to work out the material balances in the various Five Year Plans (FYP), it does not follow that the required priority would have been accorded and we would be in a water-sufficient situation today. Cement and steel shortages had continued till recently despite our per-capita usage being among the lowest.

He laments the “declining emphasis on water resources development in India” citing the falling share of the outlay on irrigation from 22.54 per cent in the First FYP (1951-56) to 5.81 per cent in the Eleventh FYP (2007-12). He also points out how even within this dwindling share, renovation and consolidation projects are crowding out resources for new starts. There are a number of reasons why this sympathy with larger Plan outlays may be misplaced.

The essence of planning is that sectoral outlays get rebalanced over time, as needed. That irrigation must account for 20-25 per cent of successive Plan outlays is antithetical to the very concept of planning. Sure, a number of multi-purpose, capital-intensive projects were taken up on priority in the earlier years. But priorities have changed subsequently. Not just the anti-large dam lobby targeted by the author, but anyone looking at India’s poor social indicators and the outlays on education and health would argue in favour of redeploying resources away from irrigation. Obviously, the author’s love of the sector trumps his knowledge of public finance.

The composition of the outlays is more important. The rigour and discipline that were integral to the earlier projects are conspicuously absent today. Revised cost estimates are routinely approved all the way up to the CWC and Yojana Bhawan. Revision is necessitated not only by time overruns but because the original designs and cost estimates are based on inadequate survey data, sub-soil investigations, etc. Contractors are only too happy to file supplemental claims for excavation in hard rock or for blasting, etc. The entire charade adds considerably to the original cost without bringing an extra hectare under irrigation. ‘Water-centric’ becomes a proxy for contractor-centric!

Two other developments have driven this vicious downward spiral. The approval process has now become increasingly politicised. There are numerous instances of project configurations being tinkered with to promise water to far away constituencies, ignoring evapo-transpiration and other losses en route . A large number of on-going and new projects are Lift Irrigation Schemes for pumping water from the river or canal and not mere gravitational flow through distributaries and field channels. The extra capital cost of the pumping machinery and the O & M cost on energy consumption are not adequately factored into the viability analysis. There is no political will to enforce even basic project assumptions like the cropping pattern and rotational irrigation. Canals designed for light irrigation of coarse grains end up with vast pockets under water-intensive paddy and sugarcane, creating second-generation problems of drainage, salinity, etc. The other contributing factor is the poor design and supervision skills of irrigation engineers. Ad-hoc recruitment and placement policies have resulted in senior positions in irrigation being held by engineers with roads or drinking water backgrounds. Raising irrigation outlays without addressing such structural issues may only drain public resources. Nor can multi-disciplinary basin authorities be set up and run on such a weak and mismatched HR base.

The book then goes on to highlight the numerous challenges facing the sector in India today. However, in offering suggestions on how to meet them, the author appears content with generalities or wishful thinking. It may be politically correct to argue that all options must be kept open. But this ‘all-of-the-above’ approach evades the responsibility of properly prioritizing and blending the component solutions into a total cost-effective response. After describing water variously as” “everybody’s business” , “a multifaceted resource” and “a highly precious resource”, the author concludes that “it requires an integrated multi-level planning and control system with devolution of required power and fund at different levels, along with an efficient inter-agency coordinating and dispute resolution mechanism so that reasonable needs at all levels are taken care of without generating conflicts.” Tathastu! But how and where do you start?

Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) with a greater role for Water Users’ Associations (WUA) is a non-starter because our farmers are smart enough to realise that this is the thin end of the wedge to eventually transfer all O & M responsibilities to them. Panchayats and municipalities, riven by local politics and lacking professional manpower as they are, are hardly in a position to shoulder any responsibility in the near future, least of all regulation, such as for groundwater.

It is a pity that an otherwise scholarly book offers superficial and inadequate recommendations. One reason for this is that the book underestimates the role of leadership. Given that water has become such a contested resource within and across states, the need of the hour is not even leadership but statesmanship. Visvesvaraya, famously associated with the Krishna Raja Sagar Dam across the Cauvery, had also worked as an irrigation engineer in Poona, Bombay, Gwalior, Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam and Aden. Even to this day, he is revered as the Engineer-Statesman!

WATER IN THE COMING DECADES — Policy and Governance Issues in India: Kamta Prasad; Foundation Books, 4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 895.

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