Book review: Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia, by Tushaar Shah (RFF Press, 2008)

Abstract

Tushaar Shah—a development economist and senior fellow at the International Water Management Institute, IWMI—has written an excellent and timely book (Shah 2008). In stylish and well-argued prose, he deconstructs the dominant view of irrigation and groundwater management through a close examination of their status and recent history in South Asia, and in particular in his native India. (IWMI staff continue to develop the line of research: e.g. Mukherji et al. (2009) appear to have taken some of these ideas forward for the Indo-Gangetic and the Yellow River basins.) From the hydrogeologist’s viewpoint “Taming the Anarchy” is interesting especially because Shah draws on and integrates ideas from different disciplines, but particularly the socio-economic sphere, to enlighten the debate. He proposes that the orthodox technocratic view must be leavened with an understanding of the welfare outcomes produced by groundwater irrigation and the threats to those outcomes that would be produced if the resource were to fail. He further postulates that water-sector professionals and political leaders must re-cast their view of what is feasible in managing that resource, by taking a wider view of the socio-economic factors that currently stymie most efforts to improve it. A telling example that he provides is the cooption of political leaders in hard-rock areas of India by the strong “vote bank” of the smallholder farming community, so that even where cheap electricity for pumping is fuelling the race to the bottom of these lowyielding aquifers (a race that is everywhere recognised as unsustainable), elected leaders continue to provide and to promise subsidised electricity rates for irrigation. In Shah’s view, South Asian irrigation is peculiar in that the groundwater pumping boom is driven not so much by lack of water as by lack of farmland. The increasing rural population densities push farmers to intensify production and produce high value crops, and this requires water. The advent of modern pumps and the consequent explosion in the number of small groundwater abstractions are direct results. Shah characterises the informal and uncontrolled nature of the modern irrigation economies of South Asia by the phrase “atomistic individualism”. This is contrasted with the orthodox view of national and international agencies, which assume that groundwater abstractions can be controlled by a centralised authority that formally manages water distribution rather in the way that the large-scale surface-irrigation projects of the colonial era were conceived. For Shah, “taming the anarchy” in the manner that might be envisaged by a hydrogeologist will only be possible over several decades. In the interim, he proposes that South Asia must chart an innovative course that recognises the variability in the irrigation economies that have developed in response to different hydrological settings. This is the only way to provide a framework for the exploitation of the region’s aquifers that will at least avoid the worst environmental excesses and at the same time prevent a collapse of the hundreds of millions of dependent farming livelihoods. Shah notes that “Governing an informal economy is a contradiction in terms” (p. 203), and that there is no possibility that the “atomistic” nature of South Asian irrigation will be formalised soon. He contends correctly that there is little connection between the reality of local water economies and reforms to policy and regulation borne out of the international discourse on integrated water-resources management (see, for example, the Global Water Partnership website – GWP 2008). Given the huge numbers of abstractors involved, there is no realistic way for centralised controls to be implemented and policed. Indirect management strategies must therefore be used, which impact the “environment of conduct” (e.g. electricity prices) rather than the conduct itself (water pumping). (In a recent paper on effective and accountable public authority in poor countries, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS 2010) similarly concludes that “instead of viewing informal arrangements as a major part of the governance problem, they could also be part of the solution”.) Received: 20 September 2010 /Accepted: 16 November 2010 Published online: 4 January 2011