Interview | Nationalisation of Water Is Not an Option for India: Mihir Shah

India’s new National Water Policy (NWP) argues that limits are now being reached on solving the country’s water problem from the supply side. The seven-member Mihir Shah Committee proposes a shift in focus towards the long-neglected demand-side management of water.

Mitali Mukherjee spoke with Shah to understand the context of the new policy, how it was different from previous water policies and what solutions presented themselves for the dangers of urban flooding and depleting water resources. As per the Groundwater Resource Estimation Committee’s report (from 2015), 1,071 out of 6,607 blocks in the country are over-exploited; this is likely to have worsened over the years.

Thank you for speaking with me. I want to take a few steps back to the germination of the New Water Policy. What was the idea behind it?

When the minister for jal shakti spoke to us for the first time, he made it very clear that he was looking for a paradigm shift in water policy, a decisive break from the past. He told us that we have so far focused on the supply side and that we must now also focus on demand management and people’s participation. He said water is a major priority for the government and it is clear that business-as-usual would not do.

He briefed us on the prime minister’s five-fold emphasis on: the need to break down the silos into which we have divided water; respect for the immense diversity of India while planning for water; greater focus on management and distribution of water; higher priority to recycling and reuse of water; and raising people’s awareness and participation in management of water. This clarity and commitment on the part of the government greatly encouraged us to (in Star Trek lingo) “boldly go where no one had gone before!”

Our determination was strengthened even further after we heard and received 124 submissions by experts, academics, practitioners and stakeholders from all over India. This included submissions by governments of 21 states and 5 Union Territories and 35 presentations and submissions by departments and ministries of the Government of India.

What we found truly remarkable is the striking consensus in perspectives and suggestions across the spectrum, from Central and state governments to stakeholders from outside government.

India is possibly the only country that has produced three versions of its National Water Policy in a span of 25 years. The first one was in 1987, the second in 2002 and the third in 2012. As chair of this committee, what was drawn from previous policies and what did the committee seek to do differently?

I do believe the previous NWPs had many good features. We have tried to carry them forward. But what we have done is to place them within a more coherent structure, provide greater clarity on how to take these ideas forward, flesh out more clearly links of water policy to policies in other sectors and suggest many new ideas that more accurately reflect the changing needs of the time and the latest understanding of water, as well as the new options available.

What would you outline as the immediate challenges with regards to a water policy at this point?

We have taken very serious cognisance of the current context of climate change and the grave crisis of water facing the country. Recent estimates suggest that if the current pattern of demand continues, about half of the national demand for water will remain unmet by 2030. With water tables falling and water quality deteriorating, a radical change is needed in the approach to water management, especially because today, more than ever before, the past is no longer a reliable indicator of what is to come. Changing patterns and intensity of precipitation, as also rates of discharge of rivers, show that it can no longer be assumed that the water cycle operates within an invariant range of predictability. This requires greater emphasis on agility, resilience and flexibility in water management, so that there could be an adequate response to the heightened uncertainty and unpredictability of the future. We need new design-driven approaches, which are able to foresee incalculable outcomes and provide novel, alternative solutions to be experimented with and tested in practice

There are concerns around state governments that have, so far, not seriously looked at any of the pointers contained in the earlier NWPs while framing their state water policies and programmes? How will this policy resolve inter-state differences as water is largely a state subject, and every Indian state has a unique water situation?

There are many who argue that India needs to move water into the Central list. The Committee strongly disagrees with this view. Nationalisation of water is not an option in a country of India’s rich agro-ecological and socio-cultural diversity. Indeed, we believe we must move in the opposite direction of even greater decentralisation, empowering Gram Panchayats and Gram Sabhas to have greater say on issues related to water. This is the principle of subsidiarity, where you move action and find solutions closest to where the problems are. Every one of our recommendations focuses on leadership of local communities, especially women, finding location-appropriate solutions to the problem of water and how governments must support and facilitate this process.

Posed in this way, the issue is not so much about a conflict between the Centre and the states or indeed, between states. What we have done, instead, is to build the NWP around the multiplicity of best practices pioneered by the states themselves and proposed mechanisms through which the Central government should facilitate the states to learn from each other on these best practices, which together comprise the solution to India’s water problem.

Many states do not face a physical scarcity of water, but are struggling with urban flooding and flash floods – is there a solution to this now worldwide phenomenon?

The NWP pays close attention to the problem of floods. The central focus of flood policy since Independence has been the construction of large dams and embankments. But the problem has only got worse over time, aggravated by breaches in embankments and unused, poorly designed and maintained canals, as also because settlements have been encouraged on flood plains and drainage lines.

The precise processes leading to rising sediment loads in our major river systems need a far deeper understanding for which a larger number of monitoring stations, located at siltation hotspots are required. Intensive catchment treatment plans would be needed at these hotspots.

The recent floods in Uttarakhand and Kerala illustrate the importance of the health of catchment areas. Reckless (and largely illegal) construction activity and quarrying in the eco-fragile Himalayas and the Western Ghats has exponentially increased the probability of landslides. The invaluable eco-system services provided by catchment areas in mountain and forest regions need to be urgently recognised, valued and protected.

Once a system of compensation for these eco-system services is put in place, especially for the marginalised people in the forest and mountain regions, nature will begin to play its role in protecting us from excess run-off, soil erosion, landslides and flooding. Construction and mining activities must be banned in designated eco-sensitive hotspots and strictly regulated in catchment areas.

What has further aggravated the problem of floods, especially in urban areas, is the destruction of natural pathways of water through the city towards the river or the sea. Blocking these has resulted in floodwater entering our homes and workplaces. Our cities also had a large number of water bodies. These water bodies act as sponges for excess water and their natural drainages provided a safe exit for flood-waters. But over time we have badly neglected them, dumped our waste into them and encroached upon them, destroying the vital role they have played in natural flood management.

The overall approach of flood management needs to shift from “flood control” to one of “building resilient life and livelihoods in the context of floods” or “flood-informed development”. “Room-for-the-river” projects need to be taken up in flood-prone river systems in a river-specific, location-specific manner, to provide more space for water bodies to be able to manage floods by relocating embankments at some distance from the river. River Regulation Zones, as proposed under the Environment Protection Act, 1986, including Prohibited, Restricted and Regulated Activities Zones, must be demarcated and notified to regulate development interventions on riverfronts and floodplains.

Better weather and flood forecasting systems need to be deployed, along with flood insurance and demarcation of flood diversion areas. The inflow forecast network must be expanded to cover all reservoirs with automated data collection, transmission and flood information dissemination. Using state-of-the-art equipment like doppler radar satellite-based monitoring, ensemble forecasts, reliable flood modelling, etc must be expanded. The lead-time for flood forecasting can be improved through the use of hydraulic and hydrologic models, which are linked to the weather forecasting system, the real-time data acquisition system, and the reservoir operation system. It is possible to improve the current forecasting methods by using satellite-based information for better estimates of rainfall and snowmelt. Urban flood forecasting systems, scenario building and an ensemble of models must be deployed at a large scale, based on experience gained in certain cities of India.

Alternative strategies for dam reservoir management need also to be worked out, especially where multiple dams exist in a river system, so that this does not become an aggravating factor in the incidence of flooding and can instead be used to moderate flood impacts.

So far states have been unwilling to charge for irrigation water on the basis of either the cost of supplying or the marginal returns from crop production. What does the NWP suggest?

We reject marginal cost pricing for irrigation water but that does not mean the water should be supplied free. The NWP has a whole section on “Water Use Charges”. We clearly recognise that water found in its natural form in the streams, rivers, ponds, lakes and aquifers is very different from water available in a household tap, an irrigation channel or a factory. It takes physical infrastructure and management systems to make water a usable resource wherever and whenever one wants it. It involves costs. So we argue that it is important to generate a social consensus on how this cost is to be met. This is because, in some states, collected service fees are not enough to meet even costs of fee collection, resulting in steady deterioration of public irrigation infrastructure, impacting the quality of service. Because of the deterioration in the quality of service, farmers are increasingly unwilling to pay. This has become a vicious loop. Again, people who live in slums or at fringes of cities, where the municipal water supply does not reach, have to pay much more for water, as they depend on informal water markets, compared to those who get municipal supply.

So we regard service fees as a facilitator to ensure affordable water as a right to cover basic needs, while achieving financial sustainability by generating revenue through charging more for commercial and luxury uses. O&M costs should be fully recovered through water service fees. The capital or fixed cost should be primarily met by the state and could be also partially recovered through a higher water charge for various types of commercial users (commercial farming, industries, commercial establishments, etc). A graded fee system needs to be adopted. Basic service should be provided to everybody at an affordable cost, at a level that meets O&M costs. Economic services (like commercial agriculture, industrial and commercial use) should be charged at a rate where O&M costs and part of the capital cost could be covered. Concessional rates should be provided for vulnerable social sections and care should be taken not to price out the poor from basic water service.

Irrigation water fees should shift from crop/area/season basis to a volumetric basis, to encourage water saving. Water meters need to be set up at all levels of the water distribution network within the next five years, while providing realistic and accurate estimates on water availability to WUAs and PRIs. WUAs need to be given the power to collect and retain a portion of water charges. These charges must be determined in a transparent and participatory manner. Many states have pioneered the way in this regard with excellent results. Volumetric estimates of groundwater use should be introduced through fees decided by the groundwater user groups. Electricity charges should be based on metered consumption and not on a pro-rata basis. For domestic water supply, it must be similarly ensured that water charges result from a truly bottom-up, user-driven, transparent and participatory process, led by women, rather than one imposed arbitrarily from above. This would ensure cross-subsidisation that incorporates considerations of social and economic equity and would vary based on each local context. Metering of urban water and volumetric charges need to be introduced, while taking into confidence the urban local self-governments and water utilities. Charges of raw water for industries, especially those which use a lot of water in their products (all beverages, breweries etc) must be revised and regulated to prevent excess water use.

The underlying concern has been what principles are followed while looking at water – some experts believe using economic principles does not address the issue of inter-sectoral water allocation, and this would mean compromising on equity and social justice, water for environmental use etc. How would you respond to that?

The NWP is very clear in its enunciation of the principles to govern water. These include:

• Moving from the one-size-fits-all command-and-control approach towards location-specific strategies, reflecting the enormous agro-ecological and socio-cultural diversity of India;
• An attitude of humility and the principle of subsidiarity, leading to a spirit of service and an ethic of care;
• Ecological balance, sustainability, equity, inclusivity and democratisation as guiding principles to ensure water for life to all, to end, as far as possible, all discrimination based on gender, caste, class, ethnicity, location etc;
• Given the finitude of water, and palpable limits to the endless quest to increase supply, a much greater emphasis on demand-side management, to bring down the overall water footprint;
• A trans-disciplinary approach, to reflect the multi-dimensional character of water, with its myriad values and significance for the primary stakeholders of water, as also the complex challenges of water management that require leveraging multiple disciplines at the same time;
• Bridging the silos into which water has been divided, to reflect the deep inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of different elements of the water cycle, across the multiple uses and users of water;
• Building partnerships across all stakeholders of water: governments at all levels, primary producers (especially farmers), academia, civil society and industry, in a way that builds respectful dialogue with indigenous ecological knowledge, so that diverse perspectives get a voice and representation in the formulation of policy.

What do you see as the biggest challenges around water in urban living areas? What are the suggestions and solutions on water for domestic use, more equitable distribution and usage etc?

Rapid urbanisation is leading to more informal sourcing of water, mainly through tankers using groundwater, increasing demands for import of long-distance water and encroachment upon urban water bodies. In most cities, water supply is sourced from long distances, increasing the costs of infrastructure and maintenance. There are losses in the distribution system because of leakages and bad management. Only 47% urban households have individual water connections. Urban areas produce 62,000 million litres of sewage every day. According to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the installed capacity to treat this sewage is only 37% and just 30% is actually treated. Some of these plants do not function either because of high recurring costs or because they do not have enough sewage to treat. In most cities, only a small, unestimated proportion of sewage is transported for treatment. Very often the treated sewage gets mixed with the untreated sewage, resulting in pollution. Conventional sewage treatment plants are expensive, consume a lot of energy, have a large carbon footprint, and are also not that effective against non-point sources of pollution that dominate urban spaces.

The fastest growing segments of urban India are peri-urban areas and small towns. These areas often provide water for urban expansion, while receiving wastewater in return. They are typically weak in institutional and infrastructural capacities. However, these are also the areas with the greatest opportunity for leapfrogging over the outmoded capital- and energy-intensive technologies of the 20th century and to move straight into an innovative 21st-century paradigm of urban water management.

The NWP outlines nine key strategies, which together constitute a paradigm shift in urban water and wastewater management:

i. Demarcation, protection, restoration and recharge of traditional water bodies, including their functional parts – drains, catchments and aquifers. Cities must get funds for water projects only when they have accounted for the water supply from local water-bodies and roof-top water harvesting.

ii. 21st century Blue-Green Infrastructure urban planning approach to enable better utilisation of water-related ecosystem services, improve water quality, and help in temperature moderation and flood mitigation. Specifically curated infrastructure such as rain gardens and bio-swales enable harvesting of run-off and filtration of contaminants and sediments into the soil. This can also include restored rivers with wet meadows, where they can meander, or wetlands constructed for bio-remediation, urban parks, permeable pavements, sustainable natural drainage systems, green roofs and green walls. All government buildings should be built (including retrofitting of all the older public sector buildings) in accordance with sustainable building codes, adopting water management with recycling, reuse and closed circuit technologies.

iii. Compensation for eco-system services so that cities contribute towards protecting and treatment of the catchment areas of their water bodies. Building requisite capacities among ULBs and water utilities will help develop this green infrastructure – the gold standard of urban water supply across the globe.

iv. Management and governance of aquifers must be mainstreamed into urban water planning. Participatory aquifer mapping leading to the management of urban recharge and discharge areas and groundwater quality through multi-stakeholder platforms, involving citizens, educational institutions and urban utilities, must be urgently initiated.

v. The thrust of urban water planning must move decisively towards demand management of water. Reduce, Recycle and Reuse must form the basic mantra of integrated urban water supply and wastewater management, with primacy given to treatment of sewage and eco-restoration of urban river stretches, as far as possible through decentralised wastewater management. All non-potable use, such as flushing, fire protection, vehicle washing, landscaping and horticulture must mandatorily shift to treated wastewater, efficiency of water-using appliances must be increased and water-efficient sanitation alternatives must be adopted, as per local conditions.

vi. Low-cost technologies with high eco-restorative value must be adopted with hybrid, integrated, energy efficient treatment units comprising anaerobic, micro-aerophilic and aerobic processes to combine organic pollution treatment with nitrate and phosphorus removal. All these processes, occurring in different treatment units, create a cumulative effect in the soil-scape process for point source pollution or green bridge system for non-point source pollution.

vii. A key thrust area is the improvement of water distribution, which should involve extensive use of IT-based sensors to ensure equitable distribution, leak detection and plugging, and for quality improvement.

viii. ULB and water utility capacity must be built to take managerial and technological decisions regarding essential public services and to implement and deliver these services to all. This internal capacity is even more important in a situation where urban services are contracted to private companies.

ix. Use of private sector agencies must not lead to privatisation of water. The overall control and ownership must remain in public hands. Regulatory capacity must be strengthened to ensure clear accountability so that the responsibility of the state as public trustee remains even if some functions are entrusted to any specific agency. Non-negotiables include provision of adequate quantity, quality and physical accessibility, affordable charges, timely and proper repairs and maintenance of the system, clear processes of accountability, transparency and redressal.

To your mind, how do we address the groundwater crisis?

Groundwater is the lifeline of India’s economy and society. India draws more groundwater every year than any other country, more than China and the US (the second and third largest groundwater using countries) combined. Thus, the NWP gives the highest priority to sustainable and equitable governance and management of groundwater.

Drilling to greater depths and pumping at higher rates have caused a precipitous fall in both water tables and water quality. A very large number of districts are facing a problem of over-exploitation, severe contamination or both. This is a direct consequence of atomistic, competitive extraction of what is a shared, common pool resource (CPR), without taking into account the enormous diversity in the nature of India’s aquifers. The vital ecosystem services provided by groundwater have also been endangered. The most striking manifestation of this is the drying up of rivers, which depend on base-flows from groundwater during the post-monsoon period.

Given that groundwater is a CPR and considering the large number of groundwater sources – over 40 million wells and tubewells and 4-5 million springs – spread across diverse socio-ecologies, effective management of groundwater cannot be based on a license-based bureaucratic approach. Thus, Participatory Groundwater Management (PGWM) must form the backbone of our groundwater programmes. Information on aquifer boundaries, water storage capacity and flows in aquifers should be provided in an accessible, user-friendly manner to primary stakeholders, designated as the custodians of their own aquifers, to enable them to develop protocols for sustainable and equitable management of groundwater, including distance norms, regulation of pumping capacities, crop-water budgeting, matching cropping patterns to agro-ecology, reuse and recycling of water etc.

Government agencies in collaboration with civil society must enable and facilitate this process by providing all the necessary technical and social support, apart from the large-scale community mobilisation that will be required to implement PGWM at scale. The periodic national assessment of groundwater provides an overall picture but has limitations in capturing the micro-scale complexities on the ground. The National Aquifer Management Programme (NAQUIM) also takes a broad-based, regional view and is unable to provide higher resolution information needed by the primary users of groundwater. The periodic national assessment of groundwater must be conducted regularly, on an annual basis. The assessment should be progressively integrated with the results from NAQUIM, which needs to be redesigned to incorporate a bottom-up approach and provide maps at a scale of 1:10,000, to enable the involvement of primary stakeholders in managing groundwater sustainably and equitably. There is an urgent need to considerably enhance the coverage of the groundwater observation wells monitoring network (which can be used for monitoring both groundwater levels and quality), providing one groundwater observation well for every 500 hectares. A similar density for monitoring spring discharges and quality is also necessary.

Quality of water – how do we work at ensuring clean water availability and reducing the wastage via reverse osmosis (RO) plants?

The NWP considers water quality as the most serious unaddressed issue in India today. It proposes that every water ministry, at the Centre and states, must include a Water Quality Department, run by a team of multi-disciplinary professionals. The policy advocates adoption of state-of-the-art low-cost, low-energy, eco-sensitive technologies for the treatment of sewage. 26,000 tonnes of plastic waste is generated every day in India, of which 10,000 tonnes end up in water. Thus, the policy proposes a national action plan for the phase-wise replacement of plastics by green alternatives. Widespread use of RO has adverse consequences for water quality and health. A large proportion of input water is wasted and reject water from ROs has high concentration of contaminants. Hence, the policy suggests that RO units should be discouraged if the total dissolved solids (TDS) count in water is less than 500mg/l.

The “polluter pays principle” has at times almost served as a license to pollute. Thus, the NWP argues that payment for violations must be high enough to have a deterrent effect on polluters as “extended producer responsibility”. Licenses for polluting units must be temporarily suspended in cases of repeated violations, till corrective actions are taken.

We also suggest that the CPCB and state pollution control boards (SPCBs) need to be strengthened if they have to perform the tasks expected of them. This includes adequate funding, autonomy in functioning, improved multi-disciplinary HR profile, eliminating conflict of interest in governance by excluding potential polluters, and building partnerships with PRIs and ULBs, premier academic institutions, CSOs and associations of industries.

The policy suggests that the Government of India form a task force on emerging water contaminants. Recent studies indicate uranium and manganese are beyond safe limits in groundwater in some areas. Climate change could also produce unexpected, often interlinked, consequences. The release of certain pathogens due to permafrost melting is only one such example. The task force needs to anticipate these dangers and prepare mitigation and adaptation plans, to keep the country as safe as possible.

Finally, do you believe the policy can be implemented in full spirit without the presence of an institutional mechanism, what kind of mechanism should that be?

The NWP makes several radical suggestions for reforming the governance mechanisms of water in India, both at the Centre and in the states. Ever since Independence, the governance of water has suffered from at least three kinds of “hydro-schizophrenia”: that between irrigation and drinking water, surface and groundwater, as also water and wastewater. Government departments at the Centre and states have generally dealt with just one side of these binaries, working in silos, without coordination with the other side. As a result, critical inter-connections in the water cycle have been ignored, seriously aggravating our water problems.

For example, when we see so many peninsular rivers drying up, we do not connect it to over-extraction of groundwater, which reduces the base-flows critical for rivers to have water even after the monsoon rains are over. Similarly, dealing with drinking water and irrigation in silos has meant that aquifers providing assured sources of drinking water tend to get depleted and dry up over time, because the same aquifers are used for irrigation, which consumes much higher volumes of water. This has adversely impacted the availability of safe drinking water in many areas. And when water and wastewater are separated in planning, the result generally is a fall in water quality, as wastewater ends up polluting supplies of water. The fact that the responsibility to monitor and ensure water quality is also divided over a number of distinct and uncoordinated agencies again leads to an overall deterioration in water quality.

The Central Water Commission (CWC) set up in 1945 is India’s apex body dealing with surface water and the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) set up in 1970 is the one handling groundwater. Over several decades, even as ground realities and understanding of water have both undergone a sea-change, the CWC and CGWB have remained virtually unreformed, working in pristine isolation from each other, with little dialogue or coordination between them. The same pattern is visible in the corresponding bodies at the state level. Ironically, even as groundwater use has grown in significance, becoming India’s single most important water resource today, groundwater departments have only gotten progressively weaker over time.

The NWP suggests the merger of the CWC and CGWB to form a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder National Water Commission (NWC). The policy visualises that this exercise at the centre would become an exemplar for all states to follow. Bridging multiple silos, the NWC would include the following divisions, which would work in close coordination with each other: Water Security Division to guide the fulfilment of national goals pertaining to drinking water, with equity and sustainability; Irrigation Reform Division to more effectively meet the overarching national goal of har khet ko paani (water to every farm); Participatory Groundwater Management Division to ensure the sustainable and equitable management of India’s most important resource; River Rejuvenation Division to work towards the revival of India’s river systems; Water Quality Division to reflect the highest priority to be given to this aspect; Water Use Efficiency Division to improve performance on this parameter in all economic activities; Urban and Industrial Water Division to meet these emerging national challenges; Democratisation of Data Division to ensure the development of a 21st-century national water database, with user-friendly access to the primary stakeholders of water; Knowledge Management and Capacity Building Division to generate and disseminate knowledge on water, as also build requisite capacities among primary stakeholders, within and outside government.

Both at the Centre and in the states, government departments dealing with water resources today include professionals predominantly from just civil engineering, hydrology and hydrogeology. The NWP believes we also need experts in water management, social mobilisation, agronomy, soil science, hydrometeorology, public health, river ecology and ecological economics, without which solutions to India’s complex water problems will remain elusive. Since systems such as water are greater than the sum of their constituent parts, solving water problems necessarily requires understanding whole systems, deploying multi-disciplinary teams, engaged in inter-disciplinary projects, based on a trans-disciplinary approach, as is the case in the best water resource departments across the globe.

Wisdom on water is not the exclusive preserve of any one sector or section of society. The NWP, therefore, enjoins the state and central governments to take the lead in building a novel architecture of enduring partnerships with primary stakeholders of water. Thus, the NWC and its counterparts in the states must include farmers, water practitioners, academia, industry etc. and build respectful partnerships with all of them, based on mutual learning. The indigenous knowledge of our people, with a long history of water management, is an invaluable intellectual resource that should be fully leveraged. The unique experience and insights of women must also be actively drawn upon.

Problems have often arisen in the water sector owing to varying and sometimes conflicting understanding, perspectives and positions on key issues, between the centre and states, as also across states. There is, therefore, an urgent need for an institutional mechanism that facilitates constructive discussions, translating into mutually agreed actions on the ground that can at best prevent conflicts or at least find a time-bound resolution for existing disputes. The NWP suggests that this could be done either by creating a new inter-state Council or by recasting and activating the existing National Water Resources Council. The Council should facilitate urgent water reforms as per the needs of states and facilitate capacity enhancement required to implement the paradigm shift proposed in the NWP. The Council should be equipped with the requisite multi-disciplinary expertise and multi-stakeholder representation, to enable it to play this role in the most effective manner.