W ATER R EFORMS IN I NDIA : D EVOLUTION AND L IBERALIZATION

Constitutionally, water provision in India is primarily the responsibility of State governments, though the Central government has increasingly been setting major policy, determining approaches and providing substantial funds for infrastructure development since 1985. After 1992, responsibility was however, transferred to the newly strengthened local governments, and subsequently, also to community and user groups through a Sector Reform Program, piloted in 1999 and in 2002 extended as the ‘Swajaldhara’ program to all States158. These two reform initiatives both reflect the communitarian discourses on local governance, but as clearly, the former is cast in a progressive-communitarian mould and the latter in distinctly neoliberal structures.

Elected local governments were statutorily mandated and given the ‘right to life’159 for the first time in India, by the Constitution 73rd and 74th Amendment Acts (CAAs). Emerging as much from a national history of ideas and efforts to develop local self-

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GoI 1999, 2003; see also Krishnan 2003.

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As expressed by Mr. Sivaramakrishnan, ex-Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development, GOI, in personal communication. This means they are legally safeguarded against arbitrary dismissal, dissolution or supercession by state governments, who hold powers to legislate on local governance.

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governance and decentralize development initiatives as from the international discourses around decentralization, three-tier, elected local governments were

instituted compulsorily in rural and urban areas, across all States and Union Territories (UTs) after 1992. In this legislation, both Panchayats (rural locals governments) and municipal governments were mandated ‘to function as units of self-government’ and to be endowed with powers, responsibilities and resources for ‘the preparation of plans for economic development and social justice’ and ‘the implementation of schemes that may be entrusted to them’ by superior levels of government (GoI, 1992). In addition, the Nagarpalika Act also mandated the constitution of a District Planning Committee (DPC) in every district160 of the country, to ‘consolidate the plans prepared by the Panchayats and the Municipalities in the district and to prepare a draft development plan for the district as a whole’ (GoI 1992). In a provision that soon brought more than a million women into local governments, one-third of the electoral constituencies at all levels were statutorily earmarked for women.

While these provisions of the Central Acts apply uniformly throughout the country, and provide a skeletal uniformity, various details of the structure and procedures were left to the discretion of the State legislatures, to be specified in their respective

Conforming Acts. This has not only resulted in significant variations in the local government structure and functioning across States, but also in the nature and extent of their authority, responsibilities and resources (see Mathew 2000, Pal 2004, Mishra 2008). Water provision was one of the responsibilities devolved to local governments in most States, though resources and most notably, technical personnel were not always transferred.

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Districts are sub-state administrative units, which in turn are further subdivided into smaller revenue jurisdictions variously called talukas, mandals or tehsils in different parts of the country. Development ‘blocks’ were constituted in the sixties and seventies under the community development program (CDP), including one or more talukas, for implementation of development projects and programs.

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Beginning in 1991, a spate of neoliberal economic reforms including both liberalization and privatization were also implemented in many sectors of the economy.161 Dovetailing with these were subsequent administrative reforms of government departments and the revision of development programs along more business-like principles. The communitarian strand of the liberalization initiatives were directed to increasing the involvement of citizens in local governance, in very ‘neoliberal communitarian’ approaches. For example, in the Forest Department’s program for Joint Forest Management (JFM), forest-dependant village communities have been allowed to manage demarcated forest areas through JFM Committees, and a similar approach has been taken in the participatory Watershed Management program of the Ministry of Rural Development. Various kinds of user committees have also been formed, for example in education, health and irrigation. The application of these reforms and the specific organizational arrangements at the local level, again, varies regionally across States and sometimes, districts. These reforms for citizen

involvement, typically include a quota for women in the beneficiary or user groups that are constituted, usually one-third of membership, emulating the provisions in local governments. The pilot Sector Reform Program (SRP) initiated by the Department of Drinking Water Supply (DDWS), of the Central Government’s Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) is one of such reforms, initially introduced in selected districts but in 2002 extended to all as Swajaldhara (SP).

The progressive and neoliberal characteristics of the two reforms respectively are

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Tariff rates were cut, and legislation and policy was put in place to enable private firms to compete with formerly protected government monopolies in, among others, power, air transport,

telecommunications, public services provision, banking, media and infrastructure construction and management. Public sector organizations have been restructured or divested to the private sector (Bhattacharya 1999; Bhagwati 1994). Again, while most of these reforms apply to the whole country, in many sectors, States have been free to implement the reforms in different forms and timelines, resulting in different degrees and kinds of restructuring in the local arrangements for provision and distribution of services.

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distinctly evident. Though both neoliberal and progressive discourses intersect in the domestic articulations on devolution to local governments, what distinguishes it as a progressive-communitarian type of reform is the provision for direct-democratic functioning at the town, village or habitation level. The assembly of all voters in the jurisdiction was constituted as a decision-making assembly (Gram Sabha) by the CAAs, with the elected local government serving as the executive body.162 The neoliberal underpinnings of the partnership approaches to citizen participation (through user committees and the like) adopted in Central and State departmental reform, are clearly evident in the stated objectives of the SRP as also in the institutional design that is mandated. (GoI 1999, 2002)

With governance reforms of these two types, and the variation in institutional arrangements across States (sometimes even districts) structures for ‘multi-channel government’ emerged at the local level, with competing institutional structures coexisting uneasily. (Manor 1999, World Bank 2000, UNDP 2000). The concurrent operation of reforms premised on different discursive formations has sharply surfaced contradictory and competing processes in local governance (Roychoudhury 2002; Patnaik 2001; Bhattacharya 1999). Conflicts have emerged between the legitimacy, functions and domains of local government and the varied types of organizations that have been constituted at the local level, and also between processes of democratic, locally determined development and expert-centered top-down approaches (Manor 2001). This impacts both effectiveness of and participation in the reformed

governance structures, for not only are resources and expertise fragmented and selectively channeled, it sets up variations in the kind of spaces and channels for

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This is the vision read in the Constitutional provisions, though the allowances made for States to develop locally suitable arrangements to actualize such functioning enabled substantial variations between the vision and the reality. (Misra and Mishra 2000, 2001)

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citizen involvement across locations. The latter is further confounded by the variations in locally institutionalized customs and practices which intersect with uniformly overlaid formal institutional arrangements to modulate the involvement of different groups, and these are particularly relevant in shaping the public participation of women and dalits (Buch 2000a, b).