Bypassing Community Rights: The National Water Policy
SummaryText
India's National Water Policy emphasises continued government control over water, ignoring pleas by environmental groups to involve local communities in order to overcome looming shortages. This report includes a critique of the policy, a draft policy of 2001, and the modifications made in 2002.
"Successive droughts and the growing water scarcity are creations of government policy and this new policy will only perpetuate the disastrous policy framework of the past," said Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), which has vigorously campaigned for community control over water resources.Narain regretted that the new policy also ignores the potential of rainwater harvesting and the importance of involving local communities in simple methods to ensure that rainwater is trapped and refills natural aquifers in the ground.
"The National Water Policy will remain inert and ineffectual because it is far removed from the two simple but important challenges of water management today -- rainwater harvesting and community management in this initiative," Narain said. The CSE and other leading environmental NGOs and activists hold that India has been hit by water shortages because of a shift away from traditional methods of storing and using rainwater to exploiting rivers, by damming them up through costly and centralised irrigation and drinking water schemes.
According to LC Jain, a former member of India's Planning Commission, India has over the last 50 years spent $50 billion on developing water resources and another $7.5 billion on drinking water with little to show for the money - much of which was siphoned out through a corrupt contractor system. Apart from big dams and irrigation systems, the government has encouraged the digging of millions of tubewells and borewells energised by electric and diesel-driven pumps that now provide half of the country's irrigation.
As more and more water is pumped out of the ground, there has been a dramatic lowering of the water table across the country. Groundwater in states that have taken to intensive agriculture under the so-called Green Revolution of the '70s are now turning brackish or are ridden with fluorides or arsenic. By 1991 a review of the irrigation sector by the World Bank showed that one of the world's largest irrigation investments was performing unevenly and far below potential, mainly because the focus was on construction of new projects rather than management of existing ones.
Ranjit Devraj is a correspondent with Inter Press Service, a global news resource faciliating south-south and south-north dialogue on important economic, social, environmental and other issues. This is an IPS feature.Click here to view this report online.
"Successive droughts and the growing water scarcity are creations of government policy and this new policy will only perpetuate the disastrous policy framework of the past," said Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), which has vigorously campaigned for community control over water resources.Narain regretted that the new policy also ignores the potential of rainwater harvesting and the importance of involving local communities in simple methods to ensure that rainwater is trapped and refills natural aquifers in the ground.
"The National Water Policy will remain inert and ineffectual because it is far removed from the two simple but important challenges of water management today -- rainwater harvesting and community management in this initiative," Narain said. The CSE and other leading environmental NGOs and activists hold that India has been hit by water shortages because of a shift away from traditional methods of storing and using rainwater to exploiting rivers, by damming them up through costly and centralised irrigation and drinking water schemes.
According to LC Jain, a former member of India's Planning Commission, India has over the last 50 years spent $50 billion on developing water resources and another $7.5 billion on drinking water with little to show for the money - much of which was siphoned out through a corrupt contractor system. Apart from big dams and irrigation systems, the government has encouraged the digging of millions of tubewells and borewells energised by electric and diesel-driven pumps that now provide half of the country's irrigation.
As more and more water is pumped out of the ground, there has been a dramatic lowering of the water table across the country. Groundwater in states that have taken to intensive agriculture under the so-called Green Revolution of the '70s are now turning brackish or are ridden with fluorides or arsenic. By 1991 a review of the irrigation sector by the World Bank showed that one of the world's largest irrigation investments was performing unevenly and far below potential, mainly because the focus was on construction of new projects rather than management of existing ones.
Ranjit Devraj is a correspondent with Inter Press Service, a global news resource faciliating south-south and south-north dialogue on important economic, social, environmental and other issues. This is an IPS feature.Click here to view this report online.
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