Author : Nilanjan Ghosh

Expert Speak India Matters
Published on May 14, 2020
The ongoing “water wars” is presently a war over two paradigms — namely the colonial engineering paradigm that is visibly reductionist, and the emerging paradigm of integrated water governance that talks of a holistic approach.
Water wars over paradigms

The deluge of discussions on COVID-19 with its political-economic fallouts has engulfed the spaces in the media to such an extent that a silent war waged in the water sector in India has been going unnoticed. Practically, there has been less than desired discussion in the public discourse over the last 4-5 months on this extremely critical unfolding force that is slated to change the course of water governance in India.

From an epistemological perspective, this is another “water war” not over the resource itself, but over the paradigms of governance of the resource. Despite the worldwide call for a change in water governance paradigm in favour of demand management and ecosystem restoration (also known as Integrated Water Resource Management), India still adheres to its archaic notions of water resource development entirely based on the reductionist-engineering paradigm. This old paradigm looks at short-term economic benefits, ignoring the long-term sustainability concerns.

Despite the worldwide call for a change in water governance paradigm in favour of demand management and ecosystem restoration — also known as Integrated Water Resource Management — India still adheres to its archaic notions of water resource development entirely based on the reductionist-engineering paradigm.

With the establishment of Thompson Engineering College at Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee) during the British era, the reductionist paradigm of water engineering to “train the river” spread across civil engineering departments in India over time. Early British projects had been exemplified by the Sarada Barrage, flood control of the Kosi, and the Upper Ganges Canal to divert water from the Ganges at Hardwar near Roorkee, all of which altered the flow regime of the river system, thereby causing irreversible changes in the basin ecosystem structures. This “structuralist” legacy has been inherited by the Central Water Commission (CWC), which is now dominated by civil engineers brandishing their claws and teeth to whoever intends to challenge the status quo.

The ‘structuralist’ interventions in the colonial and post-colonial era hardly incorporated the concerns of —

a. Eco-hydrology, treating floods and droughts as integral components of the eco-hydrological cycle;

b. Hydro-meteorology, understanding the relation between meteorological variables and extreme events;

c. Seismic science, making the structures resistant to earthquakes; and

d. A holistic WEBS perspective of the Himalayan-Hindukush river systems that acknowledge that a river system is not merely a flow of water (W), but a dynamic equilibrium of flows of sediments (S), and energy (E) along with water to sustain the basin-scale biodiversity (B).

The aggravating problems of the Ganges delta including Sundarbans due to upstream sediment trapping in the Farakka barrage, the emerging unsustainable water use of the Teesta river leading to Bangladesh-India transboundary water problems, the raging inter-state water conflicts in the Cauvery, aggravation of flood disasters in Bihar, the problems of rehabilitation and loss of ecosystem services due to hydropower constructions over Brahmaputra are all examples of fallouts of mindless, myopic structuralist interventions based on the reductionist engineering paradigm.

CWC, however, has no intention to change their traditional thinking despite being shown the mirror many times. Rather, any call for a change has been subjected to attacks from the pro-CWC lobbies. This has been the fate of many such recent crusaders of change like Mihir Shah. When Shashi Shekhar was the Secretary at the erstwhile MoWR, we witnessed glimmers of hope in favour of this changing thinking with setting up of three important committees under Mihir Shah. In 2016, the committees produced two draft bills and a report titled A 21st Century Institutional Architecture for India’s Water Reforms. The report recommended dissolution of the Central Water Commission (CWC) and Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), and creation of a multi-disciplinary National Water Commission (NWC) given that there is no scientific justification of treating groundwater and surface water as two different entities under an integrated basin ecosystem governance approach.

The report called for greater involvement of social scientists, professionals from management and other specialised disciplines, thereby acknowledging that water needs a multidisciplinary approach that far exceeds the capacity of reductionist engineering and myopic neoclassical economics. This did not go well with the archaic reductionist engineering thinking of the CWC, which sent a strong note to erstwhile Minister of Water Resources, stating that the Committee’s “anti-dam” and “anti-development” approach would affect India’s food security. Nothing can be more far away from the truth than such a position by the CWC.

It seems that the idea of the multidisciplinary approach to water governance as suggested in the report seems to be resonating well with the Ministry of Jal Shakti.

Yet, it seems that the idea of the multidisciplinary approach to water governance as suggested in the report seems to be resonating well with the Ministry of Jal Shakti. The Ministry has constituted a new committee to draft a new National Water Policy (NWP) in November 2019 chaired by Mihir Shah, and 11 members, including Shashi Shekhar. Much in contrast to the past trend, this is not a committee dominated by engineers but also consists of a group of multidisciplinary professionals. This author was recently invited by this committee to make a submission.

I summarise a few of my submissions to the committee through these following points.

1. Water should be viewed as an integral part of the global hydrological cycle, and not as a stock of material resource to be used for the satisfaction of human requirements.

2. Supply of ever increasing volumes of water is not a pre-requisite for continued economic growth and food security. Water and food are already delinked in the new heterodox economics of water. Better practices can ensure “more crop per drop.”

3. Clear and strict prioritization of various types of needs and demands for water is needed, including those of the ecosystems.

4. There is a need for comprehensive assessment of the water development projects keeping the integrity of the full hydrological cycle. With ecological economics being the pivotal discipline for such assessments, a new trans-disciplinary framework for assessment needs to be adopted.

5. There is a need for an interdisciplinary knowledge base with clear acknowledgement of the interactivity of economic, social and ecological forces.

6. The basin ecosystem should be understood as the unit of governance.

7. The river flow should be understood in association with the sediments and the ecosystems associated.

8. Appropriate insitutional mechanisms for integrated basin governance needs to be designed carefully taking into consideration the multiplicity of the problems of water governance.

9. There is a need for shifting to a new globally accepted state-of-art definition of “environmental flows” replacing the presently followed definition entailing barely percentage of total flow.

On 29 February 2020, Mail Today published my article on the great importance of this committee for India’s hydrological future. The very next day, I received an email from an association named Central Water & Power Engineering Services (Group A) Association — CWPESA, stating the great achievements of the CWC, and the flawed designs of the 2016 Mihir Shah committee report in not very kind words.

What I intend to state in this article is that the ongoing “water war” is presently a war over two paradigms, namely the colonial engineering paradigm that is visibly reductionist and the emerging paradigm of integrated water governance that talks of a holistic approach. This is also a war waged by a conscientious few not merely against any “brick and mortar” institution, but against an archaic thought process that such institutions represent. Disciplinary shifts and paradigm changes have always been marked by scholastic antagonism and cognitive dissonance. No doubt, the metabolic rift between humans and nature that was embodied in the old paradigm has to be replaced by a more interdisciplinary thinking combining engineering with social and ecological sciences. The new 2019 committee under Mihir Shah seems to be our crusader in this paradigmatic war.


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Author

Nilanjan Ghosh

Nilanjan Ghosh

Dr. Nilanjan Ghosh is a Director at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), India. In that capacity, he heads two centres at the Foundation, namely, the ...

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