Water rights in a decentralized space

Development professionals have for long emphasized the importance of participation in realizing the benefits of development. Over the last two decades, this realization has become visible in India's irrigation sector, where the absence of involvement of users has been identified as the reason for the problems facing the irrigation sector. These problems include a widening gap between irrigation potential created and utilized, inequity between head and tail reaches of irrigation commands, water logging and salinity problems, and poor financial recoveries.

This has led to an emphasis on farmer participation in irrigation management through the formation of user groups called WUAs (water users' associations). However, despite about two decades of experimentation on this front, there has been an emerging disenchantment. Though there have been some successes, they have remained very localized, resting on the strength of local leadership or NGO organizational capacity. Efforts at WUA formation have often been carried out under donor-funded programmes for irrigation rehabilitation and modernization, with little clarity or commitment among state governments on what the actual objectives of participation are. Where these efforts have led to the creation of mutual accountability relationships between the state and the users, they have, for the same reason, been resisted by those who benefit from the status quo. Irrigation departments have focused on forming WUAs at the farmer level, without making improvements in main system management.

In order to usher in a new phase of irrigation reforms, state governments will need greater clarity on what they wish to accomplish through WUA establishment. Efforts at forming WUAs will have to be managed and supported by more effective management of the main system.

An area where a major impact will have to be made is in terms of the redefinition of rights and entitlements: why should farmers come together to form WUAs if they do not perceive a change in the manner in which rights and entitlements are defined? At the same time, present efforts at establishing WUAs have focused mainly on consolidating the rights of those in irrigation commands. This is the fall-out of an institutional context in which rights in water are tied to rights in land. We need to break away from this institutional setting, and use decentralization as an opportunity to extend water rights to those outside irrigation commands, by separating rights in water from rights in land. This calls for strong local-level action backed by political will.

Editorial