Checklists for Water Sector Reforms in India

Background

It has almost been two decade since structural adjustment and sector reform processes are being implemented in our country. Under these sectoral reforms, legal, institutional, financial and regulatory changes are also ongoing in the water sector. These reforms are being largely implemented under the influence of water sector loans provided by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The focus of such reforms is on financial sustainability and technocratic solutions to the existing problems in the water sector leaving out important issues like social obligations, resource conservation and environmental aspects. The idea is to increase profitability from the water sector operations be it from the drinking water or irrigation. It is also argued that to increase the profitability the state would have to move out of the roles and responsibilities of service delivery to the role of the facilitator. The role of the service deliverer is to be handled by the private operators who it is argued would be able to deliver better, efficient and competitive services. Moving towards this under these reforms, many states in India have now passed the Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) Act and have initiated the process to form Water Regulatory Authorities. The concept of full cost recovery is a major step towards moving in the direction of financial sustainability.

Need for A Checklist

Manthan has been studying and monitoring the water sector reforms that are on-going in various states in India since quite some time. We also maintain a database of status of water sector reforms in different states in India, available on our website www.manthan-india.org. The understanding of reforms though, as of now is still very basic and theoretical and to take this further and to evaluate process and progress of water sector reforms at the grass-roots, on the ground and on the people, a checklist of the issues has been drafted. The basic idea behind Water Sector Reforms: A Checklist (Part I) is to bring in experiences, evidence, information and data on the reforms processes from various parts of the country. Primarily, the checklist needs to be comprehensive to cover and include all the issues related to water sector reforms, however minute to build our understanding of the reforms processes as they stand today. In the current draft version of the checklist we have tried to include almost all the issues that we know off through our experience and it is quite possible that we might have missed quite a few here. The expectation from this checklist is that it will help us to learn from the many individuals/ groups working in different parts of the country about the ongoing reforms processes.

Generally it has been noticed that implementation of water sector reforms is moving at such a pace that it is difficult for the people to realise and understand the kind of reforms processes that have been initiated in their regions and which would have long-term impacts on various aspects related to a vital, natural and common resource like water.

The Checklist (Part I) is attached with this note for your valuable comments/ suggestions on the issues included, questions based on these issues, quality of the content, the issues that we might have missed out, the framing of the questions, any other information that we need to include in this, etc to make it simpler and more comprehensive. With this checklist, the effort is to pinpoint issues in simple form and to frame questions based on a Yes/No format to reach the larger communities.

Further Plan

We also believe that from this checklist (Part I) with the better understanding of the IFIs driven reforms processes, we would be able to take it further to the real issues that need to be addressed to overcome the problems in the water sector. It would be of immense significance to explore that besides understanding the current happenings in the water sector, what are the other significant issues that need attention but have been neglected or are not done in the entire process of so-called reforms? For example under current reforms in the water sector emphasis is given on full cost recovery but not on the real needs like service delivery, demand side management, resource conservation, improving access, equity, right to water, etc. The idea is to expand this checklist in the next part (Part II) to bring out the real reforms that are required in the water sector to improve access, availability and affordability of water for drinking and irrigation.

Please also provide your comments/ suggestions/ ideas regarding issues that should be included in the both Checklists (Part I) and (Part II) so that we can incorporate them in these checklists in future.

For the English and Hindi versions of the checklists please click on the following PDF icons....

Checklist Part I English

Checklist Part I Hindi