Spruce up water mgmt: WB to India

The World Bank today said India would have neither the cash to maintain and build new infrastructure nor the water required for the economy and for people, unless dramatic changes were made in the way government managed water.

In the report titled "India's Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future", the Bank said India should take up only those water projects which had high economic and social returns, and were carried out with high technical and implementation standards.

It added that affected people should be made the first beneficiaries of such projects.

Saying that the Bank will invest $900 million annually till 2008 in India's water sector, John Briscoe, the Bank's senior water advisor and newly-appointed country director for Brazil, said the government needed to modernise water entitlements rules, set abstraction limits from groundwater districts and de-monopolise public irrigation departments and water supply utilities.

He said the lack of clarity in water allocation rights led to "little civil wars" between states and different users in a basin, between communities and states, between farmers and environment, among farmers within command areas and between farmers and cities.

This was particularly problematic since 90 per cent of India's land was drained by inter-state rivers. He, however, was not in favour of water being moved from the state list and made a central subject. "It will be a wrong way to go about it," he said.

The report said for the foreseeable future there was a need for budget-support through taxpayers' money for irrigation "but it is also obvious that user charges simply must be increased".

It said bringing tariffs into balance with costs must be the third leg of a triangle, with the first two legs being improving services first and providing them in an efficient and accountable manner. "The disconnnect between prices and costs induces very large overall economic costs," said the report.

The report particularly rang alarm bells on ground-water management and called for a legal framework which constrained rights of people to pump as much water as they wished from their land, by separating land rights from water entitlements.