Rahul Banerjee

Guest Post: Rahul Banerjee

Ramaswamy Iyer has made a commendable effort to draft a National Water Policy that tries to reform the current unsustainable approach to water resource management in this country  (EPW Vol XLVI Nos 26&27 Supplement pp 201). Assuming that this draft is an invitation to a larger public debate on the issues involved I would like to make a few comments on it.

The paper reviews contentious issues related to water governance in the Narmada river basin like the riparian rights of States over apportionment of the use of the waters for large dam-centered canal irrigation and hydro-electric power development and the later disputes around the appropriateness of this model of development given the tremendous environmental and social costs associated with it.

The report looks at water governance in the Man basin, a medium sized sub-basin of the Narmada river basin in tribal dominated western Madhya Pradesh. It deals with problematic issues of water governance in the basin and generates insights and guidelines that are important for both grassroots and policy level interventions in future.

It attempts to present a methodology to study the relationship between water availability and water use to see if it is sustainable and suggest measures for improvement. It also presents an analysis of the use of agricultural water and energy in the basin.

It begins by discussing the relevance of the new concept of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) for water governance in river basins. It then sets out the reasons for the choice of the basin, its characteristics, the problems encountered with computation of water balance, the revised methodology for estimation of water use developed to suit the present study and the results of applying this methodology. It then presents a political economy analysis of the prevailing water use in the basin.