Water management

Projections of water demand and supply based on various scenarios provide a backdrop for examining the relevance of alternative interventions to achieve sustainable use of India's water resources. Policy interventions in the water sector need to address the conservation and better use of water by correcting instruments that have resulted in inefficient use of water and pollution of water bodies. Adoption of such interventions must involve a wider dialogue within civil society and a study of the knowledge available from around the world.

Despite the government's repeated assertions in recent years on the need for a decentralised, people-oriented and demand driven water management, these have not been converted into implementable solutions. While policy initiatives exist with regard to water user associations, watershed associations, and legal strategies are a much-needed prerequisite in order to evolve statisfactory working relationships between local bodies institutions and networks of formal and informal village groups engaged in water management.

Water supplied free to urban centres imposes costs on the upland watershed. The paper analyses the conflicts and costs of such provision of external ecosystem services in a case in Yunnan, China. It argues that in order to internalise the external costs of such water supply, there should be a locally embedded system of forest management. It further argues that pricing of these external ecosystem products, like water, is needed to enable local communities to balance the benefits from their sale against costs and other benefits.