Thursday 8 January 2015

Comments on the Draft Inter-State River Basin Management Bill, 2012

People and environments are missing

The seven principles that are supposed to govern the bill (a) Participation; b) co-operation; c) equitable and sustainable utilization of water; d) conjunctive management of water; e) integrated management; f) water is a common pool state owned resource to ensure food security, support livelihoods, sustainable and equitable use; g) demand management by efficient use of water to avoid wastage) as stated in the proposed bill would have been laudable and deserving of appreciation; however none of them speak about the people in the concerned river basin and do not take explicit account of environmental needs and this fact vitiates their meaning and renders them inoperative and unacceptable. For example participation is in the context of basin states to develop, manage and regulate interstate waters; or co-operation is referred to in the context of national interest and for mutual benefits to the states or conjunctive use or integrated management or other principles, but nowhere do the needs and requirements of fulfilling the needs of the people and the flora fauna of the concerned river basins acquire central place. In fact, underlying the draft is an old-school governance attitude that does not sit well with the modern multi-stakeholder bottoms up approach that is essential for good governance. 

No norms for water sharing and distribution, within as well as across states
Similarly, the bill does not tackle the most contentious issue of how to share the waters between and within states. The river basin master plan could have become a powerful tool to lay out norms and criteria for sharing of inter-state waters, and specifying participative and bottom up processes of governance to develop, implement and monitor that plan. By not doing this the bill reduces the master plan to an ineffective wish list. Moreover, it completely ignores the various  basin level institutions that the individual states have already put up and the existing arrangements. It could be well argued that the companion water sharing policy note would supplement the bill, but that policy itself needs to be grounded within this bill by providing it with the necessary norms and institutional structures.
An associated weakness is that it does not even lay out any criteria for equitable sharing of water and  participative and bottom up processes of governance to develop, implement and monitor such sharing arrangements within the basin either. Because the principles and criteria for water priorities and allocations of different users are clearly laid out, all the verbal commitments to equity, sustainability, ensuring food security elsewhere in the bill are rendered ineffective and become lipservice. 

Mishandles centre-state balances and inter-state matters
The bill vests the power of demarcating and establishing a River basin authority with the Central government and it can do this with a unilateral central notification. This sweeping provision eliminates the role of the states in what is otherwise a state subject.
Moreover, as pointed out earlier, the Bill does not say anything on how or whether existing river basin corporations already formed within different states for inter-state rivers would be integrated within the proposed legal framework. At present there are several tribunals and awards on different interstate rivers but the proposed bill does not take any cognizance of these existing water sharing arrangements. Would the proposed RBAs could be preparing River basin plans ab novo or on the basis of the current, often non sustainable and inequitable, water allocations? None of this is clear. By allowing for participation of states in the Governing Council and the executive board, the bill sanguinely hopes for consensus  on a single river basin master plan that will also be implemented. It is unlikely that co-basin states would be able to evolve a consensus on a river basin master plan in this manner. 

Weak in its commitment to principles
At the root of this is a basic flaw that runs through the bill. While it is liberal in enunciating, using and referring to laudable principles, there it very little commitment to making them work and providing them with legal backing so that they would have the necessary teeth. It does not create any legal bindings through its use of these principles. For example equity and sustainability are mentioned as principles, but there is no attempt to provide a legal definition of what they mean within the act, nor are there any specific criteria laid out for their assessment. On top of this is the timidity to switch to recommendatory phrases instead of legal bindings. For example, conjunctive management of surface and ground water is a stated principle, but it is only recommendatory in nature and so is integrated management, and in both cases the states are to “make their best efforts“  to do so. This is bad law as well as bad policy.
It is sad to see such an important bill so badly drafted. As such the present draft is entirely unacceptable to us and will need to be suitably redrafted in its entirety by bringing the people who occupy them and the ecosystems that comprise them as central to the objectives as well as the means of achieving those objectives, taking note of the ground situation in respect of inter-state matters, and with a firm commitment to create legal binding to the principles that it enunciates and recommends. We demand that the draft be thrown out in its entirety and an alternative draft prepared allowing wider consultation allowing sufficient time to evolve consensus and ensure commitment to core principles in terms of legal bindings. We would emphasise that a bad draft that hurriedly tries to address the legal gap the bill tries to fill is worse than letting the gap lie as it is.


Lokabhimukh Pani Dhoran Sangharsha Manch
 





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