pro-poor, pro-nature & pro-women.
| "Integrated Water Resources Management Approaches: Global and National Scenario" - A Public Forum |
- by Dr.
A. Paul Appa swami |
Professor,
Madras School of Economics |
| What I want to talk is about following her (Smt. Gariyali's presentation) is about the Urban Water Sector in India and the need for Integrated Water Resource Management in connection with the Urban Water Sector and what do I mean by that I think Dr.Judith Reevs had given the framework in which economics and social scientists look at this issue, that what kind of impact does urban water in terms of its requirement and in terms of its pollution at such work impose on other sectors. That is the focus and not I am not going to talk about urban water management per say and lots of things are going on rain water harvesting is one of them and lots of things on pricing and tariffs and urban water sectors reforms involving the private sector and all that. I am not going to discuss on all those things. I am going to look at the urban water sector in conjunction with other sector which use water. |
| So I have my presentation is basically formulated like this I want to talk about little bit of urbanisation process in India recently where we are now and governing in urban water requirements and I am going to mention here that when we talk about the urban water requirements here we normally talk about area, which in domestic and industrial use. What we don't talk about is the virtual water because in order for the urban residents to survive they have to get food from rural areas and the water is encomposed in the food, in the fibre, in many other things so when we often talk about the urban requirements are very convieniently leave out all the water that is involved in sustaining urban living. So really the urban water requirement is much more than the direct use, so there are lot of indirect water requirement. |
| Options to meet urban water requirements and those are the water quantity issues and then a couple of water quality issues. One is the pollution that the urban sector imposes on other sectors and this is becoming a very serious issue. In certain parts of the country, especially from industrial use and to some extent from the domestic sector also. Imposing on other sectors. But literally on agriculture and rural water supply and so far. I will also briefly want to mention the pollution which agriculture causes and which affects urban water supply. This is an issue come to the fore recently particulary raised by the Centre for Science and Environment about the high level of pesticides in our bottled drinks and etc. and lots of hue and cry and various committees have met and recently we had a committee meeting in Chennai on the Standards for soft drinks and so forth. But the basic question is are we managing the use of agro-chemicals in a sustainable way? And are we realsing that by using those chemicals we are damaging our water supplies, both rural water supply and urban water supply. Unfortunately much of the rhetoric has been about our soft drinks and everything else in that we have not been able to pay much attention. What is happeining on the effect of the agricultural sector? On other uses including the urban sector. |
| Bascially I conclude by saying that we have to close the water cycle by looking at the sectors not in isolation but in relationship with each other. Jus a few indicators that some of them had been mentioned before that the Indian Urban Popultion now is about 290 millions which makes about 28% of the population, Our total population is a little over one billion. |
| As an earlier speaker has said, that the urban population may increase to 500 million by the middle part of the century. Our annual rate of growth of the urban population is around 2.7 % that it has come down. So there is a decelerating trend, it saw the interesting that we were urbanising much more rapidly in earlier decades but for various reasons including the facts that our national growth has been declined particularly in states like TN. Our annual growth rate of the urban population has come down to 2.7% from around 3.8% earlier. We have more than 5000 cities and towns in the country. We have 35 cities with more than one million and a couple of cities with population (Mumbai and Kolkatta) more than 10 million and we have Class I cities which are those more than 100 thousand population that are some 423e. So the task of providing the urban water supply for the urban population is as you can imagine from the substaintial point of view, drinking water, but also for industrial and institutional use. And the kind of difficult in that we are already facing and it was mentioned by Dr.Shakthivadivelu we are also fast reaching a water stress situation in the country and in the state of TN we are already in water stress, we are much lower than 1000 cubic meter per capita of a year which was cut off for water stress. I think in TN we are 740 cubic meters per capita, so we are already in that situation. |
| Now to provide water for the urban area is like, what shall I say very large task, what shall I say very large task. So our standards as according to the public health, people that in towns piped water supply should proide 70 litres per capita. Those with pipe water supply and so it should provide 135 to 150 litres per capita in metro cities and public I suppose to have 40 litres per capita. So we have to take arithmetic mean if we take 100 litres per capita and multiply by the urban population of 300 million people. You can imagine the water requirements and the load for meeting the needs of the urban population. |
| So what are the options that we have to meet the urban water requirement. One is we can look way for new sources, which is the traditional way that engineers and planners did for a long time. We may have to end off as Dr.Shakthivedivelu said that reallocate water from agriculture when we have closed basins as in case in many parts of the country, there is no new water available, we have to take away from agriculture and provide to urban purposes. The third method is to start at the bottom, in actually to manage urban demand by a variety of ways. |
| But I would like to concentrate on some issues here which relate not to urban water management sake but to look at what some of the strategies might impact on other sectors. For example, if you are going for inter basin transfer of water, then you may have to take away from water from agriculture or from some other basin, rain water harvesting which Mrs.Gariyali has pointed out is important for Chennai. But I would also point out some troublesome issue that recently that occurred that will all the rains that we are receiving, our water supply reservoirs are not filling up at rates that they are used to fill up. The Public Works Department (PWD) in very much concerned about this. We are not very sure because of too much ground water extraction so that is being done. Or is their problem too much of rain water catchment of our reservoir, because rain water harvesting is a very good idea in city. But if you have rainwater harvesting in catchment areas, automatically, obviously if you hold water in catchments are that is going to diminish the supply to reservoirs. This is what the Prof. from IIT has suggested might be a problem. This is what something more of which research has to be done and we were worried that our water supply reservoirs which Gariyali Madam showed in the map are not filling up as per earlier even the quantum of the rainfall we received is much lower that they have reached is much lower than the historical period. So this is a worrying situation. So I would disagree a little bit with what Dr.Shakthivadivelu said that if we go to the lowest possible lowest levels of watershed and micro-watershed and do a lot of water management at that level. It is quite possible that water may not reach to other places where water has to be reached in the past. So it some game. So some people definitely benefit some people definitely lose. So the question is equity, so if we say the people and will benefit from watershed management and rainwater harvesting then fine. But that might very well be at the expense of other people who use to receive that water. I think this is something on which one should not be dogmatic. I think we should really study the question carefully. Are we managing again a IWRM question if you are looking at it over much larger geographical area, are we cutting of supplies to some places and increasing supplies to other places. This is the thing which we need to worry about. But my issue, which is to focus o the quantity side, is what about reallocating water from agriculture? Now this can be done administratively from government of TN can say, OK we will take away water from this command area or this river basin and provide it for Chennai, Coimbatore or whatever. This can be done administratively, if it is closed basin as Dr.Shakthivadivel said are we being fair and what about riparian rights from whom the water is being taken away. Should there be systems of compensation and for example how should we ensure for taking away water from farmers is necessarily compensatinf is that a good idea? But what has happened defacto is that the farmers themselves have started selling water, because they realise the urban water price is very much higher and especillay in areas in Chennai or Coimbatore and around the citites, the farmers find far more profitable to sell water to urban purposes rather than to raise a crop and all the risks entailed with that. |
| So water markets have developed in many parts of our state, as well as in other states in Gujarat and many other states. So selling of water as become possible particularly in the case of groundwater, as you many of you know that we have a peculiar situation here that you cannot sell surface water but ground water, if it happens to be yours. If it belongs to your land according to the Indian Law, but I don't know if this is according to the Groundwater Act, whether you could still do it, at least. All these years people were simply extracting water and selling it and all the water tankers you see around either private or metro water are extracting water and selling it for a price. So water has already become an economic good. We need not preach about it. It has a price and that price in public is very higher than what the agencies charge. So we in Chennai one doesn't have to convince anybody on the need to price water and economic good. Should we think about tradable property rights. Now in the case of surface water, especially water given to the farmers, if they do not want to raise a crop, do they have the right to sell that water? Of Dr.Palanisamy would have been there, he would have talked about an idea which he has been propagating for a long time. But strictly speaking according to our system of law in India, we cannot sell surface water if you live in a command area, and you are not going to raise a crop that water cannot be sold to somebody else. But the question which many people raise now may be he could prefer not to raise a crop and he may want to sell it to higher prices but should he be allowed to do that, which is basically assigning a property rights to the farmer. Now these are the kinds of questions which now emerging as I said. Informal Water Markets are developing and question is whether we want to legalise some of these process whether for example if we take away water from Veeranam or whatever, are we impinging on the property rights of farmers in that area. These are the issues that are becoming really burning issues and I think if we do not think about some institutional mechanism, we may end up in a situation where we may have a lot of quarrels and fights going on between the rural sector and the urban sector and some of it is already happening. I am not talking about hypothetical case, we are having people going to court, we are having people blocking water tankers and all sorts of things. So we really have to give some serious thought about how to deal with these intersectoral issues between the agricultural sector and the urban sector. So on the water quantity side we have the issues of connected allocation and reallocation, we have issues connected with pricing and evaluation. How do we price water in various sectors? Of course, it is well known that are present tariff system and irrigation and pricing is absurdaly low in all sectors in agriculture, urban etc., and really we have to give some serious thought about we are going to price water in the future and how all that everybody knows when they are selling water in fact it is very funny situation where individuals in Chennai city are willing to pay a huge price for water, when they will not pay a higher tariff which is a fraction of what they would pay to a private vendor. So this is some psychology of people which somethings says public agencies has to provide at low cost of living, I don't mind paying ten times that amount if I am buying it from a private seller. So this irriationality somehow we have to get over and convince people of water is that valuable to you why cant' you pay a higher tariff to a public agency? |
| Anyway Coordinatio of public agency already Dr.Shakthivadivelu had already taled about to you I don't want to talk about that. |
| Water quality, pollution of waterways is becoming a serious problem because of the sewage generated from the cities. Ground water quality is really getting affected. So really we have to worry about the cost of treatment and the cost to clean up. In some case place where particularly ground water is affected. We have to worry about the replacement cost because if that source of ground water is earlier used as a drinking water source then to provide an alternative source of water is going to cost money. |
| To conclude, I would basically say, the urban sector has to look at the water issues ina holistic way and in an integrated way, one is the question of sourcing, we have to have proper allocation principle, water rights should be formulated better and wether trading should be allowed and you should have negotiated settlement with different acts which we have to worry about. Pollution, imposing the urban sector, imposing cost on other uses, industrial affluence imposing cost on agriculture, cost used in the urban sector, particularly cost imposed on agriculture in terms of agrochemicals use, the question of environmental flows whether or not we should maintain environmental flows in rivers especially in peninsular's rivers. This is a big topic in all over the world. But unfortunately in ephemeral rivers like we have in south India, is the concept of environmental flow at all was meaningful and something we have to worry about the cost of clean up and treatment has to be looked at. And in case particularly of agriculture causing pollution, we have to think about volunteering complaints about the farmers to restrict the amount of pesticides and fertilizers that we use. I think regulatory systems are not going to work that well. As I already mentioned we really have to think about institutional mechanisms. I think that Dr.Shakthivadivelu has described it in detail and I need not repeat it again. I think even in the Urban Case the urban area has to look at itself not in isolation but as a part of the larger system. |