







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 1 (2): 77–80, July 2018 

 
CONVERSATIONS 1: Water Governance 
 

Reforming Governance to Solve India’s Water Crisis 
 

Mihir Shah 

As we move into the 21st century, India faces a major crisis of water. This 
crisis threatens our citizens’ basic right to drinking water; it also puts 
millions’ livelihoods at risk. While there is growing recognition both on the 
ground and among researchers and policymakers about the gravity of the 
water crisis, what is not adequately understood is the link between this crisis 
and the ossified structures of water governance in India.  

The existing paradigm of water governance is characterised by several 
features, dimensions, and principles: 

1. Command-and-control: Whether it be rivers or groundwater, the 
dominant paradigm is of command-and-control by large, centralised, 
decaying bureaucracies. There is no scientific understanding of river 
systems or their interconnections with the health of catchment areas and 
groundwater. What has prevailed is accurately described by Ghosh, in 
this Conversation, as ‘arithmetic hydrology’. As Ghosh argues, ‘These 
definitions are clearly bereft of understanding the broader ecosystems 
and livelihoods concerns in a river basin, and are therefore reductionist 
on the one hand, and myopic on the other.’ 

2: Unidisciplinarity and unidimensionality: Since the goal is seen as dam 
construction and groundwater extraction, the only disciplines evoked are 
engineering and hydrogeology – that too in their narrowest versions. 

3. Silos: We have divided water into silos – groundwater and surface 
water, as also irrigation and domestic use. There is little dialogue across 

 
 Distinguished Visiting Professor, Shiv Nadar University. He chaired the Government of 
India Committee on Restructuring the Central Water Commission and Central Ground 
Water Board during 2015–16. Village Jatashankar, Tehsil Bagli, District Dewas 455227, 

Madhya Pradesh, India; mihirbhai25@gmail.com  

Copyright © Shah 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 

4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 

Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i2.38  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i2.38


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [78] 

silos, leading to ‘hydro-schizophrenia’ – the left hand of drinking water 
does not know what the right hand of irrigation is doing, and the left 
foot of surface water does not know what the right foot of groundwater 
is doing. 

4. Supply-side focus: The entire focus has been on augmenting supplies; 
little attention has been paid to managing water demand. 

5. No reference to sustainability: Sustainability is rarely a consideration; 
this oversight endangers the future of both groundwater and river flows. 

6. Discrimination and lack of equity in access to water: Historical forms 
of discrimination combine with the impact of growing economic 
inequalities to create severe discrimination in access to water on grounds 
of caste, class, gender, location, and community. 

7. Lack of transparency and access to water information: Needless 
secrecy of water data and information and restricted access for 
researchers and stakeholders over the years has compromised the quality 
of water management and exacerbated conflicts. 

8. British common law: The legal framework governing water belongs to 
19th century British common law, which legitimises and perpetuates 
inequity in access to water by giving unlimited powers of drawal of 
water to owners of land. 

This outmoded governance architecture has not kept pace with either 
emerging realities or the growing scientific understanding of water, which 
attempts to embrace all the scientific disciplines necessary for truly 
comprehending water. The Central Water Commission (CWC), set up in 
1945, and the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), founded in 1971, and 
their counterparts in the states continue to operate unreformed. Civil 
engineers at the CWC and state irrigation departments have little clue 
regarding the management of irrigation systems, which require a different 
set of skills and operating culture. The story at the CGWB and state 
groundwater departments is similar. Populated with hydrogeologists, they 
were created in a different era when the imperative was the construction of 
tube wells. But the current situation is very different from that of 40 years 
ago.  

Most areas in India today face a severe groundwater crisis and the challenge 
is of participatory groundwater management (PGWM) and participatory 
irrigation management (PIM), as successfully pioneered in some states. 
Today, many states have blazed the trail in which illustrates the direction in 
which we need to reform water governance in India. 



[79] Mihir Shah 

The single most important factor of drying post-monsoon flows in India’s 
peninsular rivers is the over-extraction of groundwater. Drying baseflows of 
groundwater have converted many of our ‘gaining’ rivers into ‘losing’ rivers. 
Without taking a unified view of surface water and groundwater, and 
understanding their interconnections at the river basin level, we will not be 
able to save our rivers. Not only must civil engineers and hydrogeologists 
work together, they also need to work closely with professionals from many 
disciplines, including the social sciences, management, agronomy, ecological 
economics, and river ecology. This has been correctly underscored by 
Ghosh in his contribution to this Conversation. 

With this in mind, it has recently been proposed to the Government of 
India that the CWC and CGWB be merged to create a multidisciplinary 
national water commission (NWC). It should operate in a decentralised 
manner within each of India’s major river basins (Committee on 
Restructuring the CWC and CGWB 2016). As Arthington emphasises in 
this Conversation, ‘Environmental flow requirements vary with location 
along a river, from river to river, basin to basin and region to region, 
depending on climate, hydrology, geomorphology and landscape 
characteristics, as well as the social-ecological characteristics of the river 
basin.’ This has to become the guiding principle of the NWC. The NWC 
must build, institutionalise, and appropriately manage an architecture of 
partnerships with knowledge institutions and practitioners in the water 
space. The water challenges of India are too large and complex to be left to 
the government alone. 

Simultaneously, we need a national water framework law (NWFL), which 
enunciates a series of principles and practices that all states must sign up to. 
The recently drafted NWFL of the Ministry of Water Resources, 
Government of India provides an essential corrective to British common 
law and builds upon the public trust doctrine enunciated by the Supreme 
Court whereby the state, at all levels, holds natural resources in trust for the 
community. This would ensure that no one’s use of water would deprive 
anyone of the right to water for life as defined under the NWFL. 

Unfortunately, over the past three decades, not merely in India but across 
the globe, reform has come to connote a policy shift in the direction of 
privatisation and a reduction of the state’s role in the economy. Such a 
narrow view fails to understand that each sector of the economy has some 
very specific features and reform needs to be defined with reference to 
these differentia specifica of each sector. The state’s role remains critical in 
many instances, but this role itself needs profound reform. 

A key element of the reform needed in the governance of a natural resource 
like water is the recognition that the economy is but a small part of the 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [80] 

larger ecosystem, and proceeding with an inadequate recognition of this fact 
and a narrow notion of economic development can only lead to disastrous 
outcomes, as evidenced by the fate of the planet currently in this age of the 
Anthropocene. 

 

REFERENCES 

Committee on Restructuring the CWC and CGWB. 2016. A 21st century institutional 
architecture for India’s water reforms. Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India 

 


