Water: The burning question

Every year, we celebrate a World Water Day with its worrisome forecasts that the world is running out of water and that the wars of the 20th century will be fought over water. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) devoted its entire Human Development Report of 2006 to the global water crisis. The UN claims that by 2025, 2.7 billion people will be confronted with severe water shortages. Media headlines scream that the looming water crisis is threatening a large part of the world's population. How did water become such a crisis issue? How far is this picture of gloom and doom realistic? Or are water scarcity and wars over water myths constructed and sustained by the global establishments holding power over decision-making? These are some of the questions that this issue of the journal will seek to answer.

There is no question that for many people, access to clean and safe water in sufficient quantities is the prime challenge of survival. Kofi Annan, when Secretary-General of the UN, spoke of the major effort required to bring clean drinking water and sanitation to the top of the development agenda for hundreds of millions of people.

There are many conversations going on about water but a notable reluctance is evident among actors to step across boundaries. Engineers, macro-economic analysts and politicians have not seriously engaged with the alternative visions that activists, social scientists and ordinary people in their daily lives have formed on water. We hope this journal issue will bring together the many different forms of knowledge on water in order to form a holistic understanding of this essential part of our lives, and make sense of the escalating conflicts between community-based practices and modernist and centralized modes of water governance. The journal begins with the crucial assumption that as part of the social and cultural landscape, water is both the producer and the product of human agency and culture.

Global questions and debates related to our water, ecology and the environment cannot be isolated from political questions related to the differential ownership and control over water. The many challenges related to water are associated with broader environmental concerns such as climate change, revealing a need to find appropriate strategies for the sustainable management of water (Hunt, 2004; Gleick, 2005; Alam and Murray, 2005). The environmental challenge that the world faces of meeting the growing needs of the rural and urban populations has water at the heart of it.

Like other elements of the environment, however, water is enmeshed with people and politics. For example water as a source of conflicts – within nations and regions within nations – explicitly reveals the close connections between hydrology and politics that gave rise to the now-overused term 'hydropolitics' (Avila, 2006). The control over water has been a symbol of social and political power everywhere in the world. Nations assert their ownership of water resources and build 'empires of water' that are inextricably linked with national identities and pride. Water in hydraulic societies has always been a symbol of power where the harnessing of rivers implied and involved the social and political domination of some people over others (Wittfogel, 1957). Even at the local level, village elites controlled and changed the physical flows of water through diversion structures or the positioning of sluices and heights of weirs (Mosse, 2003: 4).

The disputes over sharing the water of one river between two countries – as in the case of the Nile – or between two states of one nation – as in the case of Cauvery waters – are well known. What is less debated is why or through what process the water was turned into a commodity owned by the nation states in the first place, and how decisions over governing these waters were taken up by the more powerful elites rather than the riparian communities (Rouyer, 2001: 1–2). Bate (2006: 4–5) observed: 'After many years of development of large-scale water infrastructure, subsidized water use especially to agriculture, it is now being recognized that water has been almost universally badly managed and that alternatives previously frowned upon must be reassessed'. This does not mean that the waters in the rivers, lakes and elsewhere will remain 'pure' or be helped to revert back to its original unadulterated state. Environmentalists such as Clarke and King (2004) acknowledge that human development has a valid claim to hydroelectric power and water for irrigation, drinking and sanitation, but believe this can and should be done at the local level.

The large number of scholarly publications on water reflects the enormous amount of research currently underway. At the same time, many communities are taking up the responsibility of their own water management, practicing or revitalizing new modes of water governance and building alternative knowledges of water. The question arises for the journal issue: what new angle can we add on water? The answer is that we need to rethink water and water scarcity, and illuminate the alternative ways of managing this vital fluid that are possible, and that exist. This issue of Development aims to enrich the growing field of water–people relationships by focusing on how communities balance their water needs in ways that take into consideration both the environment and the people.

The value of water

Much of what we make of water belongs to the domain of human culture (Strang, 1997; de Villiers, 1999). The symbolism of water lies in peace, life and regeneration, its significance expressed in spiritual, religious or social rituals, imbuing it and its users with meaning and value: 'water is always a metaphor of social, economic and political relationships – a barometer of the extent to which identity, power and resources are shared' (Strang, 2004: 21).

The landscapes of water were jointly written by people with nature over millennia. Civilizations were defined and nourished by the mighty rivers, in the deltas and the plains they created. Human societies had found ways to adapt to the hydrological regimes and processes – the variabilities, scarcities and excesses that occur over space and between seasons.¹ Societies also evolved complex institutional systems of water management that looked after the common property resource regimes, some of which are still in operation (Singh, 2006). In Bengal for example, an independent department with separate budget, the pulbandi daftar (public works department also known as pushtabandi), was set up by the Mughal provincial government to supervise embankments, roads, bridges and river dredging (Kamal, 2006: 197). In drier parts of the world, people made the best use of available water for domestic use and for irrigation in economical systems of water management through channels usually constructed and maintained by the farmers collectively under a cooperative system. The tank system in South India and Sri Lanka for example served for hundreds of years as effective insurance against droughts, providing irrigation water and flood protection.

The domination of waters and rivers to benefit the more powerful has been represented as 'one of the clearest illustrations of the link between the control of nature and the control of people' (McCully, 1998), and has characterized water resource development planning in more densely populated countries such as India (Singh, 1997; D'Souza, 2003).

The symbolism of water has traditionally been not as wealth but as a spiritual purifier, a cleanser, the flowing waters of rivers best expressing this absorption and removal of filth.² The water in rivers is also imagined to be a powerful and independent agent, with an inherent fierceness and brutality and destructive power, but can also be benevolent, forgiving and giving. The symbolic sacredness of water is transferred onto the places onto which it flows or rests as in a water-hole (kunda), creating holy places (tirthas) (Kumar, 1983: 14). Ill-defined ownership and user rights, coupled with ever-increasing demands, have obliterated any symbolic value of water, turned it into a commodity and put the institutions that developed around the structures of water management at threat. Not only have traditional water use systems been disrupted and polluted by the introduction of modern techniques, but rapid increases in water use in the last four or five decades in agriculture, industry and the domestic sector, especially in the ever-growing urban centres, are threatening to bring in an unforeseen water shortage.

Many of these 'water problems' are actually manufactured by focusing on continually increasing the additional supply of water as against exploring solutions that have the potential of increasing the efficiency, equity and sustainability of water use. The crisis has also been produced by the neglect of alternative options of managing water. It is precisely this approach to the value of water that has led to great tensions between the nations and communities.

People and the state seeing a finite resource

The ownership of water is the core challenge of water management posed at different scales: between the state and communities in general, between the Central government and respective states or provinces and between local and state governments. A related question is how water is perceived or 'seen' at different scales. I will give an example from the official document of the National Water Policy of India (2002), which proclaims: 'Water is a scarce national resource to be planned, developed, conserved and managed as such, and on an integrated and environmentally sound basis, keeping in view the socio-economic aspects and needs of the states'. This proclamation clearly gives the perspective that water is not a 'common property' or a tradeable good, but is a national 'asset' – meant for the greater common good – to be controlled and managed by central bodies. At the same time, more and more rivers in India have been turned into carriers of waste, their flows drastically reduced destroying riverine ecologies and the livelihoods of communities dependent on the flows of water. This deterioration in river ecologies and morphologies has created yet another 'tragedy of commons', examples of which abound not only in India but throughout the world.

Discussion of the water resources of any country conventionally begins with either a description of the size of population compared with the availability of amounts of land and water, or a description of population distribution and rainfall/water availability figures, or an inventory of available water resources (Swain, 1998a, 1998b).³ Such apprehensions found eloquent expression in the proceedings of the World Water Conferences. This sense of a looming crisis of water brings forth an urgency of dealing with it head on.

A 'problem' is envisioned in this imagining of an ecology, an idealized water terrain in which the norm is for the water to be just right, whenever and wherever it is demanded, and its excesses and deficits are seen as aberrations. The problem is that of scarcity, interpreted as being not enough in aggregate terms or in per capita terms.⁴ This view has now been reinforced by the perception that the growth of population, pace of urbanization and economic development will accentuate the pressure of increasing demand on a finite resource, and that the answer lies in large supply-side projects and long-distance water transfers.

Many of these doomsday water predictions have been questioned by water experts themselves. For example, Vaidyanathan (2001: 1) notes: 'the scarcity of water is a fuzzy concept; that its nature and extent differ greatly between countries and regions; that there is considerable, though variable, scope for augmentation, conservation and better management; and that we need to focus on policies, including especially institutional changes, needed to exploit these potentials'.

The response from the state in the face of a growing scarcity has most often been to turn towards technology that may provide clues to designing means to ameliorate this scarcity, or to plan to equitably distribute the surplus of one region into another deficit region. Instead of devising means to reduce consumption, the construction of civil engineering structures has been paramount in the measures that we have so far adopted to deal with the perceived 'vagaries' of water. The responses have also been ad hoc; such as the drilling of an increasing number of wells to extract the fossil water from hard-rock aquifers. The technological fixes should have made us less dependent on water, but that has not happened. It is not that the governments are not aware of this fact; Raju et al. (2004: 284) noted that the stress has been greater on the 'hardware' – the physical control structures of water – rather than the 'software' – the rules and procedures that govern the operation of water systems.

Mehta (2003) has critiqued this mainstream view by pointing out that the access to and control over water is usually linked to prevailing social and power relations, and thus scarcity can be constructed differently by different political and social actors. The scarcity can indeed be 'real' – falling groundwater table or increased salinity indeed gives evidence of the physical lowering in water availability. However, the scarcity can also be 'constructed', especially by statist discourses that portray the lack of water as natural rather than human-induced, and chronic rather than cyclical.⁵ Indeed, if densely populated parts of the world are now facing the threats of growing water scarcity, it is due to increasing complications over its ownership, poor management and depleting quality (Mehta, 2003).

Genuine efforts have yet to be made in changing the patterns of demand – primarily of water-intensive farming practices and concentrated water markets in urban centres of various sizes – in this crisis scenario. The water that is required for the well-being of populations is only a minute fraction of the total water demand. This demand of course is not only dependent on numbers, but is a function of standards of living of the populations. It is also a function of social inequity in the sharing of benefits from natural resources. Often the international agencies tend to interpret the lack of access to good-quality water (and sanitation) as symptomatic of poverty, that the poor often pay more for water and that economic development will solve the problem of scarcity. The lack of access is also seen as a distributional failure, linked to poor governance by states. This approach, that the supply of water has become a limiting factor in economic growth, is exemplified in the recent World Bank publication (Briscoe, 2006).

Questioning the scarcity myth

Scarcity is associated with concepts of 'security', a much-used term in global policy circles that not only means the provision of adequate water to households but, in water resource development and planning discussions, paints the picture of a bleak future that conveys a sense of urgency to deal with the 'problem'.⁶ Globally, 'water security' is represented as a simplistic linkage between increasing populations, increased environmental scarcity, decreased economic activity/migration and weakening of states resulting in conflicts and violence.⁷ Turbulent images of water scarcity involve dreary scenarios of crumbling water infrastructures, depleting groundwater, climate change worsening the shortages – all eventually leading to growing conflicts: between individuals, groups, states and nations.⁸ These images emanate from the 18th-century hypothesis of Malthus that fixed resources are under pressure from a growing population. Security of water supply is indeed a major challenge and is an integral part of human development; security from both excessive amounts of water such as those during floods is as imperative as the lack of water such as those in droughts. However, like any other Malthusian concept, water security needs to be placed in the context of actual water resource governance. Not only so, many of the claims fail the test of careful analysis and interpretation of the quantitative data. Rogers (2006: 8–12) has scrutinized and proved their absolutist claims as hollow a range of other concepts floating around water scarcity such as water stress, water vulnerability and water shortage. According to him, many of these terms do not distinguish between security concerns due to the actions of humankind or of nature. For example, he cites the many impacts of Climate Change, including those on water resources and the global hydrological cycle.⁹ Appearing as purely natural events unfolding on a geological time frame, many of these are essentially due to human action.

In 2003, the International Year of Freshwater, the UN/WWP concluded that we are facing a water crisis, and that signs suggest that this crisis is getting worse. It observed: 'Of all the social and natural crises we humans face, the water crisis is the one that lies at the heart of our survival and that of planet Earth... No region will be spared from the impact of this crisis which touches every facet of life, from the health of children to the ability of nations to secure food for their citizens... . Water supplies are failing while the demand is dramatically growing at an unsustainable rate. Over the next twenty years the average supply of water worldwide per person is expected to drop by one third'. However, the report did not purely put the blame in typical Malthusian way squarely on population explosion in the Third World, but recognized that 'the crisis is one of governance, essentially caused by the ways we mismanage water' (p. 4). It is clear that in an unequal world where the per capita use of litres of bottled water in 2003 was 91.8 in North America, 72.1 in Europe, but only 4.2 in Africa, West Asia and Oceania, 9.7 in Asia and 31.2 in South America, the crisis and scarcity of water needs to be placed in the context of governance (http://www.worldwater.org/data20062007/Table12.pdf). Clearly, what we are facing is a governance crisis, not a resource crisis.

Thankfully, these images of doom and gloom have been challenged by water experts. Mehta begins her book by noting that 'this naturalization of scarcity... largely benefits powerful actors ... water crisis must also be seen as the crisis of skewed access to and control over a finite resource' (2005: ix). The myth of scarcity then leads to the argument that 'deliverance from the injustice of water scarcity can only take place by receiving water from distant 'water wonders', such as the river Indus or the river Narmada' (Mehta, 2005: 57–58).

Conclusion

Is water the last frontier of conflict and separation, the greatest 'commons', or is it an openly accessible resource for the more powerful to draw upon ceaselessly to meet their own interests? Is it a resource for 'nation-building' in which central bodies own and take the responsibility of procuring and supplying water, often at a price, or is it a resource that can empower communities and around which ordinary citizens can strengthen their bonds with nature and enhance their commitments to others? The time has come for us to look closely at some widely circulated myths or, at least misconceptions, about water resources. These myths are often centred upon the view of the absolute and physical amount of water that is available for the growing populations, and based on economic premises heralded by international funding agencies. They fail to illuminate important aspects of water such as the history of water management and planning in the region that over the years has tightened the ownership and control over waters by the states in a top-down manner.

Notes

¹ They continue doing so, as Ahmed (1999) has shown us with many examples.

² Eck (1987: 110) noted: 'The running water of rivers is often used ritually for purification ... Bathing in the Ganges is said to purify not only the sins of this birth but also those of many previous births'. Feldhaus (1995: 5) showed that this purifying power of the rivers emanates from the fertilizing properties of water that are more important than the cleansing properties. The agricultural communities dependent on rivers attributed feminine qualities to them in rural areas of South Asia. The worship of waters as feminine is a South Asian tradition (Tambs-Lyche, 1999); the goddess of nature is represented as the womb that is revealed in rivers. In western cultures, not water bodies but lands 'appear as the womb of life, fertile, productive' (Giblett, 1996: 85), but against this notion, Baartmaans (2000: 4) note, 'Waters envelop both creation (sŗsti), maintenance and support (sthiti) as well as decay and destruction (pralaya), only to give rise to new creation'.

³ Rao's (1979) early authoritative book, India's Water Wealth, exemplifies this approach.

⁴ For example, according to the UNDP report published in 2001, 14 percent of the population in India does not have access to improved water sources and 67 percent are without access to adequate sanitation facilities. As the population surpasses the 124 billion mark in 2015, almost half of it will be in urban areas of various sizes, making sanitation and water access one of crucial need.

⁵ The 'manufacture' of scarcity at the discursive level obscures several important aspects of 'real' scarcity. One, inequalities often shape access to and control over water. Two, water scarcity is not natural, but instead largely due to anthropogenic interventions, resulting from bad water management and land use practices. The naturalization of scarcity at the discursive level does not help mitigate the symptoms and causes of 'real' scarcity. In some cases, 'real' scarcity might be exacerbated due to the popular narratives (e.g., water tables might continue to decline if the decrease in groundwater resources is attributed to climate change rather than to uncontrolled extraction). Furthermore, the 'manufacture' of scarcity might not result in the creation of solutions appropriate to local needs and conditions.

⁶ Gleick notes (200: 39) about these projections: 'But what will future water demands be? How can they be predicted, given all the uncertainties involved in looking into the future? At the global level, various projections and estimates of future freshwater demands have been made over the past half century, some extending out as much as 60 or 70 years. These projections have invariably turned out to be wrong'.

⁷ For example, see UN World Water Development Report, Water for People, Water for Life published in 2003, on the eve of the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto in Japan.

⁸ Gujja et al. (2006: 572) note that 'water conflicts are symptoms of larger issues in water resources management. ...implicit in these 'million revolts' is a demand for change; first in the ways we think about water and second in the ways we manage it'.

⁹ 'Climate change will lead to an intensification of the global hydrological cycle and can have major impacts on regional water resources, affecting both ground and surface water supply for domestic and industrial uses, irrigation, hydropower generation, navigation, in-stream ecosystems and water based recreation. ....The impacts of climate change will depend on the baseline condition of the water supply system and the ability of water resource managers to respond not only to climate change but also to population growth and changes in demands, technology, and economic, social and legislative conditions' (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report 2001). The more recent Stern report, The Economics of Climate Change published in 2007, predicts a 20–30 percent decrease in water availability in some 'vulnerable regions' such as Southern Africa and Mediterranean with a 2C temperature rise.

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