Presentation done by Leela Fernandes, Scholar on "Governing Water in India" at #TheIndiaDialog on February 23 at Stanford University. The #TheIndiaDialog was organised by Institute for Competitiveness and US Asia Technology Management Center at Stanford University.

1. Governing Water in India:
Inequality Reform and the State

2. Challenges to Water Governance
- Multiple demands on water – drinking
water, agriculture, industry, expanding urban
needs
- Climate Change and Cycles of Floods and
Drought

3. Reforms and Governance
•both the problems of and solutions for
effective water governance require a
deeper understanding of the mechanics of
state bureaucracies – particularly of water
bureaucracies within state governments.
•how institutional reforms are being
implemented –principles of decentralization

4. The significance of local institutions
1.How authority is recentralized within States in India ; move away
from spatial understanding of decentralization
2.How institutions produce inequality in this process of
recentralization: how institutions work and their impact on inequality

5. Water Reforms in India: Tamil Nadu
Has been one of the Indian states that has been at the forefront of the implementation of global
and national reforms centered on the principles of decentralization and privatization
- In line with the global norms associated with such funding, the state of Tamil Nadu has engaged
in significant institutional restructuring of the water bureaucracy (since 1995):
One of first 3 states to implement World Bank (WB) Water Resources Consolidation
Projects
One of 6 states for WB water restructuring projects
- The state has also developed a model of drawing in finance capital for infrastructure
development that has been held up as a national and global model (the Tamil Nadu Urban
Infrastructure Financial Services)

6. Water Reforms and State Centralization
1. Redistributes institutional authority between different wings of the
bureaucracies (water bureaucracy treated as a ‘closed system’)
2. Produces and reproduces inequality including between metropolitan cities and
smaller towns and peri-urban areas; allows for an extractive state that transfers
water resources based on socio-economic inequalities and urban/rural inequalities
3. Decentralization shaped by institutional and financial weakness of small towns
and rural areas
- Most ULBs too financially weak to qualify for private finances – dependent on state governments
- Public/Private financing further weakens rural water bureaucracy as they lose revenue from the well off
ULBs
- Institutions such as Water User Associations have tended to become enmeshed in top-down state
bureaucracy

7. Example: Regulatory Reform and
Groundwater Extraction in Chennai

8. Institutions and inequality
• Processes of recentralization become intertwined with various
socioeconomic inequalities such as
- Rural-urban divides
- Inequalities within rural areas (who benefits from groundwater
markets)
- Power dynamics within WUAs – gender dynamics

9. Conclusion