This book critically engages with the emerging issues in the Indian water sector. It brings together brings together well-known names in the Indian water sector to engage with critical issues, and also suggests ways forward and a new water vision.
When it comes to water, we flush and forget. We use, abuse and almost never recycle.
Water sector in India, since the 1990s, has seen some new ideas formalised legally and institutionally, while others are still emerging and evolving. Confronting the reality of current water management strategies, this volume discusses the state of the Indian water sector to uncover solutions that can address the imminent water crises.
This book:
- Analyses the growing water insecurity, increase in demand, inefficiency in water use, and growing inequalities in accessing clean water;
- Sheds light on water footprint in agricultural, industrial and urban use, pressures on river basin management, depleting groundwater resources, patterns of droughts and floods, watershed based development and waste water and sanitation management;
- Examines water conflicts, lack of participatory governance mechanisms, and suggests an alternative framework for water regulation and conflict transformation;
- Highlights the relationship between gender discourse and water governance;
- Presents an alternative agenda for water sector reforms.
This volume, with hopes for a more water secure future, will interest scholars and researchers of development studies, environment studies, public policy, political studies, political sociology, and, NGOs, media and think tanks working in this area.
Foreword
1. Introduction: India Water Futures: Emergent Ideas and
Pathways
2. Water Resource Development in India: Achievements, Shortcomings
and Remedial Measures
3. Managing River Basins: Re-Examining the Biophysical
Basis
4. Changing Land Use, Agrarian Context and Rural Transformation:
Implications for Watershed Development
5. Environmental Flows in the Indian
Context: Prospects and Challenges
6. Changing Water Use Practices of the
Urban Middle Class in India: Insights from Metropolitan Calcutta
7. The
Centralized Approach to Wastewater Management and Implications for Sanitation
Governance: An Analysis of the Intent and Practice of the National Urban
Sanitation Policy in India
8. Canal Irrigation Performance and Impacts:
Applying Contingency Theory to Irrigation Management in India
9. Out of
Balance: Agricultural Growth and Groundwater Depletion in Two Backward States
of India
10. Reducing Water for Agriculture for Improving Productivity:
Adapting and Up-scaling Innovative Approaches
11. Gender and Water: Why We
Need Alternatives to Alternative Discourses
12. Inter-state Water Conflicts
and Linguistic Identity in India: The Case of the Cauvery
13. Dams and
Environmental Clearances: Learnings and Way Forward
14. Rationale for
Independent Regulatory Agency for Water in India: Reconceptualizing Credible
Commitment
15. Reforming Indias Water Sector: Which Way Forward?
K. J. Joy is Senior Fellow with Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune, India, and is the Convener of Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water Conflicts in India.
S. Janakarajan is a professorial consultant at Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India and is the President of South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies, Hyderabad, India.