Water Policy leaves a lot to be desired

The revised draft of the National Water Policy has been published online by the water resources ministry for submission of public comments through the ministry’s website and e-mail. The consultations before the preparation of this draft were carried out at places like Pune, Bengaluru, Shillong, Hyderabad, etc.

The revised NWP draft, despite recognising the right to water as a basic building block, leaves much to be desired, especially from the substance of a pro-people policy perspective. This is in addition to the process-related aspects of revision of the NWP. The draft for consultation of the policy should have been translated into all major regional languages of the country, and consultations should have been carried out at as many places as to ensure elicitation of comments from all stakeholders all over the country.

A policy is a non-justiciable document. That is, the provisions of the policy cannot be legally enforced as such. The policy should aim to influence the thought process and the deliberations, setting the overall direction of developments in the country’s water sector. From this perspective as well, the draft of the NWP needs a number of changes. It recognises the economic and the scarcity value of water. However, due to water’s unique nature as a resource, the social value of water should gain primary focus. This value is the essence of importance of water for sustaining lives and livelihoods. Without effective policy safeguards for securing lives and livelihoods, even a hint of regarding water as an ‘economic good’ can be misused to establish a water market that would prove detrimental to the broader socio-economic interests of the sector. The NWP’s encouragement also to private sector participation in water provisioning sector should be qualified carefully by protecting the greater good of the sector, as well as securing sustainability of lives and livelihoods essentially dependent on water.

More specifically, to strengthen this position on priority to water for lives and livelihoods, the NWP should include a complete system of priority of water allocation and use. The ‘Lokabhimukh Pani Dhoran Sangharsh Manch’, a coalition of civil society organisations, discussed and proposed such a sequence of priority of water allocation and use.

The Policy does address the issue of efficiency of water use; however, instead of building in provision for encouraging (often capital intensive and exclusive) technology improvements, the policy should only spell out that water use efficiency should be improved, and losses, inefficiencies, and pilferages in distribution systems should be minimised.

With the intent of further enhancing the availability of water for use, the NWP proposes encouragement of inter-basin water transfers. While doing so, vital safeguards for environmental carrying capacity and sustainable and secured lives and livelihoods should not be excluded from the policy.

The need for reduction of distribution losses and pilferages is even more underscored in the context of water tariffs. The lesser the losses and pilferages, the more the availability of water, and the lower the per-unit water tariff would be. The policy needs to clearly establish this inter-linkage. Further, such efficient handling of water on the supply side as well as on the demand side may also reduce the pressing need for the ‘multi-purpose’ water resource projects mentioned in the Policy, which are large and complex, may involve high inefficiencies, and have large negative social, environmental, and financial and economic implications.

One way to ensure appropriateness of various aspects of water management is a water regulatory authority. The concerns and critiques about, and the lacunae and improvements required in the current models of Independent Water Regulatory Authorities must be addressed. At the same time, a separate system is actually required to resolve the local as well as universal issues related to water governance. This resolution needs to be from the political, economic, financial, social, and cultural aspects. Therefore, instead of suggesting establishment of mere water regulatory authorities, the policy should explicitly recommend water regulatory authorities that operate in a transparent, participatory, and an accountable manner, and that truly reach out to all the stakeholders. In addition to addressing these and such specific points, the policy needs to incorporate at an overarching level the principles of Transparency, Accountability, and Participation for all decision-making in the water sector.

Revision of the NWP is an opportunity to push for these and such positive changes in the framework governing the country’s water sector. Comments and suggestions on the draft of the NWP would be accepted until February 29 2012, on either the link http://mowr.nic.in/nwp/ or by email to nwp2012-mowr@nic.in

The writer is from the Resources and Livelihoods Group, Prayas, Pune