Water Management and Political Leadership

M. Dinesh Kumar

"While water professionals see water as the most important issue facing countries, no leader of any country, save Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, has shown sustained interest in water in the last 50 years", says, Prof. Asit K Biswas, who is universally acknowledged as one of the World’s leading authorities on water. That is the real tragedy of our society, even while political leaders give long and emotional speeches in election rallies on how the life on earth cannot exist without water and what they would do to solve the problems of the constituency they would like to represent.

The point is not that our leaders do not do anything to solve water problems; they do. But it is only when water scarcity or water-related problems like flooding turn into major crises, they wake up. The result is that in most situations, the ‘quick fix solutions’ being attempted to solve the problem are merely knee-jerk reactions rather than an outcome of a long-term perspective planning with a clear vision. As a result, we are not aware of a single Indian state which has done a long-term perspective planning for the water sector, based on its future growth needs.

Unfortunately, as one would expect, the ‘quick fix solutions’ often lack scientific basis. Such schemes easily become part of the political agenda of the ruling parties of many states. Planting trees on the banks on rivers in hot and dry regions, indiscriminate rainwater harvesting works in rural and urban areas are just two of such solutions. The long-term negative consequences of such initiatives for hydrology and ecology are never thought about, leave alone their economics. The biggest danger in democracies like India is that the political leaders tend to get carried away by romantic ideas that quickly catch people’s imagination, and use them as part of their election agenda.

The disturbing tendency found with several state governments is to keep a bunch of ‘experts’, essentially people who propagate their pet ideas like ‘evangelists’, in their close circuits to provide advice on water-related matters, rather than having experienced water professionals and water experts who have several decades of experience in the sector, in their official advisory panel. 

Needless to say, this lack of strong political leadership in the water sector is taking a heavy toll on the country’s water future, with economically unsound decisions by the state governments. Even after seven and a half decades of Independence, we are struggling hard to find drinking water supply solutions for rural and urban areas that are sustainable. We continue to invest in hand pumps and small village water supply schemes based on bore wells in hard rock areas of the country, despite the fact that such schemes fail during the summer months even in normal years, with excessive dependence of farmers on groundwater for irrigation. The logic often given for the choice of this technology is that it promotes decentralization of drinking water management. When these bore wells go dry, new bore wells are drilled.

We have sufficient expertise in hydrology and geohydrology in the country. The groundwater scientists of our country know that the drinking water sources based on such technologies won’t sustain during the lean season. The water engineers are capable of designing infrastructure that can take water from dependable (reservoir-based) sources and distribute across hundreds of villages for drinking water supply. The economists working in water supply sector know that it is the life cycle cost of the system that matters rather than the initial investment, and in that respect, the bore well-based schemes with very short life would be more expensive (in terms of unit cost of water production and supply) than the systems that include big reservoirs, pumping machinery and distribution pipelines. 

Yet, we are not able to convince our politicians of the need to make investments in programmes and projects that ensure sustainability. The main issue is that there is little integration of the knowledge from various fields (hydrology, geohydrology, water engineering and economics) which is essential for designing sound water management systems. The hydrologists and groundwater scientists never work together. The economist makes his/her own plans for water security, with very little information and knowledge from water sciences. A state groundwater agency, which is mandated to build water supply schemes, would only be interested in building bore wells, no matter whether they would last long or not, as that is what they are capable of. For them, a reservoir-based water supply scheme is a forbidden fruit. When the bore well based schemes fail, they come up with artificial recharge schemes to strengthen the source! Needless to say, there is a problem with the crafting of our water institutions as well.

The irrigation sector is no different. On the one hand, several state water bureaucracies invest money in building hundreds of thousands of small water-harvesting structures under popular schemes with no hydrological assessment and planning to please their political masters. On the other, some mega schemes costing several billions of dollars are planned without much consideration of the economic viability, as it becomes part of the political agenda of the ruling party. The Kaleshwaram project is one such scheme. The idea of transferring water from the water-rich Godavari river to the parched lands in several of the districts in Telangana state (which lack dependable sources of irrigation) is surely a welcome step. The social benefits of such projects will be high, reducing rural-urban migration and raising rural wages, apart from boosting agricultural production. It can indeed transform the rural landscapes of the state.

But the decision to allow farmers to use this water for irrigating paddy and groundnut doesn’t seem to be prudent. The returns from these crops will be too little in comparison to the high cost of water that they guzzle in the arid areas. Apart from the astronomically high capital investment (roughly 16 billion US dollars), the annual O & M cost of the project, which involves large-scale lifting of hundreds of millions of cubic metres of water, is enormous. Most of the money goes for electricity required to pump the water. The economic viability of the project is under serious doubt.

Here the tragedy is that the politicians do not want to charge for the water that is supplied at a heavy cost to the society, fearing that such decisions would be unpopular. Since the water is available almost free, the farmers don’t have any motivation to take risk and allocate it for growing crops that yield high returns per unit of water, but involve production and markets risks. The irrigation economists are not capable of advising the political class of the grave danger of pursuing such a policy of offering free water and that will be an economic disaster.

There is absolutely no doubt that the future water projects in India (especially those involving transfer of water from one basin to another) would be prohibitively expensive. However, we cannot shy away from such projects citing high costs because of the very reason that the social cost of not implementing such projects would be huge, as our water demands in various sectors shoot up with rising population, urbanization and economic growth. But what we need to do it to put in place effective instruments for promoting water demand management in agriculture and improving the financial working of the scheme. This requires intelligent planning and a strong political will. That would be the real test of governance capability of the political class and the bureaucracy it commands. 

If that doesn’t happen, projects like Kaleshwaram will become a huge drain on the exchequer of the state, in loan servicing and paying the huge annual electricity bills. On the other hand, the demand for water from the farmers will only increase over time as they stick to paddy and groundnut. While planning a big water transfer scheme for irrigation is essential, equally essential is the need to design a sound water management system wherein the water resources department is able to ration water allocation to individual farmers on volumetric basis, fix volumetric water charges that promote efficient use, supply water with some degree of reliability and the farmers generate high returns from the use of water by growing high value crops along with paddy and groundnut, and the state generates sufficient revenue through water charges enough to recover the operation and maintenance costs, if not part of the capital cost of the scheme. That would bring about rural prosperity and economic growth.

There is no doubt that the future of India’s water sector would depend as much on visionary political leaders who understand the importance of water as a key input for human development and an engine of economic growth, as on able technocrats and bureaucrats who run the water administration of the states. That said, we also need bold officers who could tell their political masters how hard measures, however unpopular they could be, would help bring prosperity in the long run, thereby also building a strong constituency for the political class to win elections. Water security should become not only part of political agenda, but also central to economic agenda of every country.

M. Dinesh Kumar is Executive Director of Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy, Hyderabad, INDIA. Email: [email protected]. The views are personal.