Experience and Innovative Solutions for Sustainable Groundwater Management Lessons from India Mihir Shah November 2014 IWMI Colombo

Multiple Identities Points of Departure SPS (samprag.org) PC WLE SC

WLE Perspective The goals of the CG system, as also those of governments and people the world over, of increasing agricultural productivity and attaining food security, would be best attained by adopting the paradigm shift proposed by WLE This is not about environment vs. development, it is about how best to attain SDGs This is not just about understanding trade-offs, it is primarily about articulating, documenting and building synergies

Paradigm Shift in Water in India The 12 th Plan Process Proposals on Groundwater – National Aquifer Mapping and Management Program – Breaking the Groundwater-Energy Nexus – Watershed Restoration and Groundwater Recharge

New Architecture of Plan Formulation Inclusive process of plan formulation For the first time in the history of the Planning Commission, all Working Groups in my sectors were chaired and populated by practitioners and professionals from PRIs, academia, industry or civil society Co-chaired by Department Secretaries Consensus arrived at reflects learning from best practice across States

Unprecedented Focus on Groundwater Foundation of India’s Green Revolution But also the cause of a grave crisis of falling water tables and water quality Nature of aquifers and considerations of sustainability ignored in promoting borewell irrigation (65-70% hard rock) Arsenic, fluoride, even uranium in groundwater; Punjab Cancer Express

Aquifer Mapping and Management No other comparable exercise in human history at this scale – Scale of coverage – Scale of manageability USD 1 billion over next 5 years; will take at least 15 years

Stakeholder based Groundwater Management Understanding aquifers better enables better management and governance strategies for an individually extracted CPR (Ostrom’s first design principle) Also helps discover who the stakeholders are, whose interests are “joined at the hip”, in each aquifer A million farmers in Andhra Pradesh: crop water budget management Many scattered small-scale successes in States like MP and Maharashtra, as also the Himalayan region

Breaking the Groundwater Energy Nexus Jyotigram Yojana in Gujarat Separation of Power Feeders Extended to 7 other States

Watershed Restoration and Groundwater Recharge MGNREGA: largest employment program in human history Annual Spend: USD 5 billion Recast on watershed principles

Lessons from India Huge potential of groundwater for livelihood security Make this a sustainable process (win-win) Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg Where users are small in size but large in number, command-and-control will not work There is no teleology for regulation; we do not have to make Australia and US our goals 800 million rural Indians in 2050

Lessons from India Participatory solutions based on the principle of subsidiarity do work Give them time to mature; study the conditions that enable them to work Carefully apply and test the relevance of each of Ostrom’s 8 design principles, as she did! Science needs to create awareness of emerging tipping points Communicated well, this can create opportunities and openness to new solutions

Lessons from India Protocols of sustainability can only be implemented in a decentralised manner, not through a licence-quota-permit raj – Protection of recharge zones – Sequencing of well use – Pump capacity regulation – Distance and depth norms – Crop water budgeting

Lessons from India Legal/regulatory framework does matter Need to move decisively away from British common law Public Trust Doctrine of Indian Supreme Court West Bengal: over-regulated

Lessons from India Construct Typologies that include – Macro-economic policy framework – Macro Legal and institutional framework – Level of groundwater development – Hydrogeological settings – Social history – Cultural capital Then build strategies that are type-specific

Thank you