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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

With fees and laws, India rushes to save groundwater

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Rina Chandran -
Indian authorities are imposing a new fee and stricter laws to rein in groundwater use, as the world’s biggest extractor struggles to find ways to conserve the fast dwindling resource.
The Water Conservation Fee for use for drinking, and domestic and commercial purposes is due to take effect from June 1, even as several states tighten laws around extraction.
But conservationists and campaigners say these efforts will fail unless the government also separates water rights from land ownership, and empowers communities to manage and use groundwater, and recharge aquifers.
“The approach so far has been: this is my land, so the water below it is mine, and I can use as much of it as I want,” said Himanshu Kulkarni of the Advanced Center for Water Resources Development and Management, an advocacy group.
“But we need to think of groundwater as a common pool resource and look at it from a rights perspective,” he said.
India is the world’s largest user of groundwater, drawing about 250 cubic kilometres per year, or more than a fourth of the global total, according to the World Bank.
More than 60 per cent of the country’s irrigated agriculture and 85 per cent of drinking water supplies are dependent on groundwater, the World Bank estimates.
With a growing population, rising demand from agriculture and industry, and increasingly erratic monsoon rains, India is suffering the “worst water crisis in its history”, according to government think-tank NITI Aayog.
About 600 million people — nearly half India’s population — face acute water shortage, with close to 200,000 dying each year from polluted water, NITI Aayog said in a report last year.
A draft Groundwater Bill, 2017 proposed a new regulatory framework that recognised the fundamental right to water, the need for decentralised control and protection of aquifers, and sought to give control to local users.
But the legislation was not passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and with national elections due by May, it has been relegated to the backburner.
“Availability of water is an issue everywhere. But water management — which should be a raging election issue — is not, because we don’t pay a meaningful price for it,” said Mridula Ramesh, founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute in Madurai.
“The Water Conservation Fee is a necessary first step,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
With its dependence on seasonal rainfall, India has long managed water with an elaborate network of canals, tanks and wells. Water was regarded as a communal resource that was managed by the community. This approach changed with the British, who imposed a centralised system, and the common law principle in the late 1800s, emphasising the rights of landowners to access water, according to Kulkarni.
The conflation of the right to water with property ownership led to landowners treating groundwater as a private resource with no thought of its conservation, said Kulkarni, who helped draft the 2017 bill.
The Green Revolution — launched by the government in the 1960s to increase food production — led to the widespread use of tubewells, which were heavily subsidised, resulting in faster depletion of groundwater for irrigation.
India has built dams and plans to link rivers to ease availability, measures that are opposed by conservationists.
The country is also entangled in disputes across the border, with its eastern and western neighbours — Bangladesh and Pakistan — accusing it of monopolising water flows.
To the north and northeast, India fears a loss of water to upstream China, which plans a series of dams over the Tsangpo river, called the Brahmaputra as it flows into eastern India. — Reuters



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