Tushaar Shah
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read
Small-holder irrigation in India

Improving Water Governance: Missing the Woods for the Trees

Tushaar Shah

In July 2016, a high level committee constituted by the Modi government and chaired by Mihir Shah delivered a comprehensive report on improving water governance in India. The report recommended a 21st century institutional architecture that India needs for meeting our increasingly serious water challenges.

One year on, the wide-ranging recommendations of the Committee remain largely ignored. Instead, the debate is centered around merging Central Water Commission (CWC) and Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) under a National Water Commission.

The real issue the Report highlighted is that both these organizations are at risk of becoming by-standers to the goings on in the Indian water scene. Merely merging two such organizations will only yield a larger entity at risk of marginalization.

CWC was created in 1952 as a technical organization staffed with civil engineers for planning large irrigation and hydropower projects. Similarly, CGWB was founded in 1968 as a groundwater investigation and monitoring agency staffed with hydro-geologists. Both built solid technical capabilities and met the need of those times rather well.

But the water challenges today are very different and far more complex. CWC and CGWB need to break out of their narrow technical groove and morph to meet these new challenges. If not, they will lose significance.

We have nearly exhausted our best sites for irrigation and hydro projects. The challenge now is of managing these projects well. On this, CWC needs to be our pathfinder. Since 1990, the more money we have invested in canal irrigation, the less irrigation we have got. CWC ought to know why. It needs to guide states in closing the widening gap between irrigation potential created and utilised. This requires more than engineering.

When Shivraj Singh Chauhan wanted Madhya Pradesh’s canal systems to irrigate to their potential, CWC was not his go-to place for knowhow. Chauhan used a generalist-bureaucrat to squeeze four times more irrigation out of his canal systems simply by tightening irrigation management. As the custodian of the country’s irrigation systems, CWC should have made a thorough assessment of MP’s irrigation success and launched a nationwide campaign to replicate this success in other states.

Likewise with the CGWB. Over past 30 years, India has emerged as world’s largest groundwater economy with complex hydro-geological, socio-economic and institutional dimensions. As the custodian of this economy, CGWB must not stop at mapping aquifers. It needs to master its socio-economics, its institutions and its eco-system implications.

Is it not odd that some of the biggest water initiatives in India during recent times have originated from chief ministers of states rather than from apex technical organizations? Telangana’s Mission Kakatia or Maharashtra’s Jal Yukt Shiver program or Rajasthan’s Jal Swavalamban Yojana or Gujarat’s Sardar Patel Sahabhagi Jal Sanchay Yojana are all flagship schemes of state governments. But neither CWC nor CGWB have a role in their design or implementation, or even in assessing them and drawing lessons of success and failure. This is a measure of how far removed these have got from water action on the ground.

Can merely merging such organizations into a National Water Commission by itself produce a 21st century architecture for water governance? Hardly. The need is to implement a deep change management program within CWC and CGWB.

This needs to begin with changing their view of themselves. CWC needs to break out of its limited role of project design and planning, and reinvent itself for a far more ambitious role of irrigation governance. It should be judged not by irrigation potential created but by potential utilised. It should herald irrigation management reform, work to improve financial viability of irrigation systems, promote conjunctive management of surface and groundwater, and lead farmer participatory irrigation management. States should not resent CWC for its coercive power, but indulge it for its expert and referent power.

CGWB likewise needs to transcend way beyond its groundwater investigation and monitoring role. Its scientific capability is formidable and its resource monitoring role critical. But it needs to learn to preside over a complex groundwater irrigation economy that supports over Rs 400,000 crore/year by way of crop and milk revenue in the hands of our small farmers. In 1996, the Supreme Court gave CGWB a God-sent opportunity by designating it as India’s Central Groundwater Authority. But the CGWB made nothing of this opportunity and remained a mere paper tiger.

Transforming CWC and CGWB into truly strategic water organizations requires vigorous and patient work with their organizational culture, development and processes. In all successful technical organizations, new entrants are preoccupied with technical specialities. But those who reach top management grow into generalists with a broad view of the world and a strategic view of their organization. In CWC and CGWB, opportunities for such broadening of outlook and developing a transdisciplinary worldview are absent or limited. This needs to change.

Top leadership of CWC and CGWB needs to be selected on merit, even if from within. They need to get at least 5 years term. Broad-based capacity building needs to be carefully planned for the top management cohort to include interaction with leading practitioners of their craft around the world.

How organizations groom their people is the best indicator of how seriously they pursue their mandate. CWC and CGWB both have their captive training schools. But their limited faculty and narrow training focus is ample indication that they are stuck in a narrow groove. Reform needs to begin here by preparing their technical professionals for a larger role.

The Shah committee recommended that social scientists should be inducted in these organizations. This has not worked in our 16 Water and Land Management Institutes (WALMIs). Alternatively, a practical strategy may be to keep the core technical competencies of these institutions but arrange, from the beginning, regular exposure of engineers and hydrogeologists to economics, social sciences, eco-systems and relevant management concepts.

A key aspect of the change management program is creating an organization-wide drive for performance. Both CWC and CGWB are ploughing along year after year without clear short or medium term performance targets. Superordinate goals like Aviral Dhara, Nirmal Dhara, Swachch Kinara require long term society-wide mobilization. These are great as a vision, but are of little help in holding strategic organizations to account for performance.

With a stroke of his pen, the Prime Minister can merge CWC and CGWB into a National Water Commission. But to expect that doing this will create a 21st century institutional architecture for water governance would be optimistic. The long and arduous road to water governance reform needs careful and painstaking change management within CWC and CGWB.

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