So in my last post (January 29) I closed at the midpoint of an excerpt from an interview I conducted in Maharashtra, which dealt with the dynamics of area water partnerships engaged in the IWRM model there. In this post I want to provide the remainder of that excerpt, because it offers a view both of the kinds of issues faced by organizations who are trying to conduct decentralized water management and of the ways in which existing decentralized water management efforts articulate and render their ongoing activities as instances of integrated water resources management. I’ll leave you on your own with deep analysis of the excerpt for now; things are about to get tight for us again because we are just about to leave for Mumbai and Thane for more fieldwork, where we’ll be covering the Everything About Water Technologies Expo and also to conduct more fieldwork with IWRM folks in upper Maharashtra. Promises to return to this interview in subsequent posts.
INFORMANT: ...Your question was, the people were doing all this anyway. So what’s the big deal about IRBM and IWRM? The big deal is that the governments, which were functioning sectorally, are now being forced to look at integration between sectors. I’m talking about stakeholders, which is what we talk about, they are talking about sectors. The irrigation department, the water supply department, the rural water supply and sanitation department, the flood control people, the drainage and sewerage people, the agriculture department, the forest department – name it! - all of these have to function in an integrated manner.
KV: They are forced by whom?
INFORMANT: By this concept. I mean, if the government of India starts now and says, fine now we will adopt the IWRM model, then they start saying, fine now, the ministries and these have to now come onto a platform and they have to resolve. Because they are not doing it. People were. That’s the difference. Civil society, villages, towns. They were already doing all of this. It was the government departments which were working in isolation and sectors. So now, with what’s come from – whatever - Stockholm, or Kyoto, or whatever, we’ve got to handle it. Because civil society people go all over the place. They will know every statement, document and code written anywhere in the country, and that’s why they say, fine, look guys, you went and have gone and signed whatever such and such declaration, so do it. Get your departments to function in an integrated fashion. Let the urban water management people talk to the downstream irrigators. Let the city commissioners talk to the upstream water users. And this didn’t happen in the past. Now it’s happening. And this is the advantage of getting these international conventions in place. So when it comes to the establishment, yes, it has made a difference. And we’ve been able to latch onto it. Saying, look, this is what we wanted you to do anyway. But now that you’ve taken on loans, you’ve taken on World Bank conditionality, you’ve signed all kinds of agreements all over the world, you now deliver.
>>>end excerpt
hej hej for now...
On Integrated Water Resources Management - western zone
During our time in Delhi we learned quite a lot about decentralized water management practices movements in the North. We intend to draw on these experiences as we move to Mumbai to cover and develop documentary material from the everything about water expo, which will show-case high-end water technologies being promoted in the Indian context. Ultimately, our effort at this dimension of the fieldwork is to characterize the formation of two different water management cultures in India and their associated socitechnical solutions to the water crisis. I will return to develop more on this characterization as we move forward.
Here I want to comment also on another aspect of the feidlwork we’ve done while in Delhi. We had a visit to the institute for human development, where we made contacts and had informative conversations with folks involved in supporting, proliferating and coordinating the transnational water policy formation “Integrated Water Resource Management” (IWRM) movement in India. The India Water Partnership is located here, which is a sub-organization of the Global Water Partnership, which promotes the adoption and adaptation of IWRM globally. According to a report contracted by the Global Water Partnership, as of 2006, there were 15 “Area Water Partnerships” (AWP) operating in India, with varying degrees of activeness. The AWP’s are constructions are steered by the Global Water Partnership (GWP) in its efforts to transfer/implement Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) practices in India. The GWP follows this organizational strategy in many other countries as well. The AWPs are organized around river basins and are a kind of fourth-tier organizational form, just ‘below’ the India Country Water Partnership, located in New Delhi, which is just ‘below’ the South Asia Regional Water Partnership, located in Bangalore. GWP uses this hierarchical organizational logic as a way of mapping or spatializing the layers of scale at which implementation of IWRM occurs. One of my objectives with respect to IWRM on this fieldtrip has been to get a sense of how IWRM-related activities are occurring in the areas. One of the interesting findings is that IWRM is not really a salient category to organizations like the Center for Science and Environment (CSE) and Fountain of Development Research and Action (FODRA) – even though both groups seem as far as substance is concerned to be engaged in fostering and enacting IWRM principles. It is also interesting that while Anil Agarwal had been a contributor to an important IWRM technical document published by the GWP (“TAC4”), IWRM as such had not continued to be a salient category in CSE’s practices. Another interesting finding is that according to an informant at the India Water Partnership, IWRM activities among the AWP’s are really just getting off the ground in 2007. This is a bit of a disjuncture from the 2006 report that was commissioned by the GWP, which had suggested that the area water partnerships were in some cases already very active.
With this apparent discrepancy in mind, we decided to make our way to other areas in India and to focus on some area water partnerships in other regions. Moving to this lower level of abstraction, we learned some interesting lessons which give more meaning to two things we learned earlier: first, that the India AWP’s both were and were not getting off the ground by 2006 at the time of the GWP report; second, that active groups like FODRA who appeared to be practicing IWRM did not hold IWRM as a salient category.
The lesson we learned came about during an interview with a man whom we had been told had been very active in promoting IWRM activities in India, and who was head of an organization which had been described as one of the primary stakeholders in one of the area water partnerships in the west. Here is an excerpt from that transcript:
Begin transcript excerpt….
KV: That’s been going on quite a while now.
INFORMANT: Oh yes, it’s twelve years now.
KV: And just in terms of IWRM movement, I’m just curious...
INFORMANT: How does it fit there?
KV: Yes.
INFORMANT: So on the one hand we had this elaborate, complex, comprehensive program for doing everything that needed to be done. At another level, a group of organizations converted themselves into a council, it’s now known as the council for equitable water rights. It’s for Maharashtra and it’s for the country. These are representatives of seven of the important civil society organizations working in water, who come together, and their heads have formed this council. This council interacts with the district authorities, with the state authorities, and with the government of India, the Central water commission, ministry of water resources, World Bank, International Hydrology Association – I mean, name it. So, and you’d started off by saying well, we’d been working on the western India or Western Zone Water Partnership. So how does that figure? Where does it come in? Well, Western Zone Water Partnership, India Water Partnership are, are just a rues. Frankly, this is what we are doing, and we need a name, an umbrella for it. So we say, okay, everybody knows and talks about it as Western Zone Partnership. Fine, we’ll establish that. What do you want? Do you want a partnership? There it is. You want a network? Fine, we’ll have a network. So we have the fortune of being able to do things flexibly. And if we want. So, we are influencing the state water policy. We are influencing the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulation Authority. So with that we do the kind of things which American NGOs do. Which is lobbying, advocacy, preparing notes, writing emails to everybody, getting funds, blowing whistles, going to the press. All that we do. But that’s a different scale. It’s a different function that we need to perform. So all civil society organizations have to do multiple functions. Multi-level functions. Our true constituencies are the people. To be able to do that, if we need to interact with the state government, we will. If we need to interact and get a project or research grant from the GSDA – the ground water survey and research organization - we’ll do that. If we need to influence the national water policy or state water policy, we’ll have conferences and get funds from wherever we can, organize workshops, put out press notes, so that people know and talk about it. If we want to make things more transparent, we’ll work that. Now, everything I’ve described so far requires negotiating skills. So when the council for equitable water rights – we were 8 members, 9 members, now maybe 20 members, we started with seven, and for the highest scale of, not replication, but up-scaling, of the village watershed development model or growth option, we’ve reached 32000 hectares, 50 villages, which is a fairly large scale, which is equivalent to, say, two large dams. So now we are talking about an alternative to the large dam model, in terms of an up-scaled, small-scale model. This requires negotiation. So we go to the Krishna valley development authority and say, look guys, with all your dams you are able to reach about 16%, 18% of the people. What’s going to happen to the rest? Oh, okay, yeah, we’ll deal with that. What’s going to happen with the upstream and downstream population? Oh, okay, fine. And it just goes on and on. So, for us, Integrated Water Basin Management means doing all of this. It doesn’t mean setting up an authority in the middle of 20 million hectares of land which drains off so many billion cubic meters of water from the Ganga and having a central authority which can rattle off figures and tell you well, we are the, whatever, Ganga Authority. Because what does the Ganga authority do? It doesn’t discuss anything with the people. It doesn’t distribute water. It doesn’t allocate. So the principle functions of a river basin organization, which are equitable apportionment of water, it doesn’t do. And if it doesn’t do that, then what’s the great fun of having an IRB, an IRBO, IRBM or IWRM? It’s meaningless. All of that has to be translated into these little actions which together form the river basin.
KV: But one thing I hear you saying or suggesting is...Is it fair to say that these activities were going on even before.
INFORMANT: Of course they were. Absolutely.
KV: So in a sense you were already doing this work.
INFORMANT: Absolutely.
KV: So then the Stockholm people import this policy language.
INFORMANT: Yes, absolutely. Then we just latch on to the terminology, and maybe the government of Maharashtra wants to take a tranche of whatever billion US dollars, and if they say well you have to have a participatory irrigation management act in place, they will have it in place. If they say you need to have MWIRA authority, they will have an authority. That authority may do damn all in terms of doing all this, because if you have three people in a state as large as Maharashtra, with five major river basins, and three people running the MWIRA authority, which is the apex body for running the river basins, and then you have the Krishna valley authority, and the Godavari valley authority. And what are these authorities doing? They are doing the old conventional stuff – building dams and canals. They are not doing all these other things: motivating people, interacting, allocating, negotiating, advocating. None of this tuff. They’re not used to it. So. Your question was, the people were doing all this anyway. So what’s the big deal about IRBM and IWRM? The big deal is that the governments, which were functioning sectorally, are now being forced to look at integration between sectors. I’m talking about stakeholders, which is what we talk about, they are talking about sectors. The irrigation department, the water supply department, the rural water supply and sanitation department, the flood control people, the drainage and sewerage people, the agriculture department, the forest department – name it! - all of these have to function in an integrated manner.
KV: They are forced by whom?
REMAINDER OF THIS EXCERPT TO APPEAR IN NEXT BLOG ENTRY
Hej hej...
Decentralized water management is not equivalent to private sector service provision
hi folks, a bit more today on the meaning of the categories 'centralized' and 'decentralized':
One of the lessons I have learned in fieldwork so far: the terminological distinction between centralized and decentralized practices, while crucial, also obscures a lower level distinction that has significant bearing on how we understand the emerging practices and conflicts in the Indian context. The distinction between centralized and decentralized management practices is often invoked in discussions of shifts away from government (centralized management forms) to governance (decentralized management forms). But the problem with this way of talking about the world, is that privatization (whether of water resources or of water services) tends to be considered ‘decentralized’ – simply because of the distinction between public sector provision (associated with centralized management) and private sector provision. And yet one of the lessons that we are learning is that much of the move to private sector service provision piggybacks on and reproduces the centralized management systems that have been put into place through public service provision (and central government control). Private service providers continue to reproduce the very model of water management (the dependence on very large infrastructures and substance conveyance) that public sector government opted for in the past. The same systems are maintained, but the contract is simply handed over to private service providers. So when folks refer to ‘decentralized’ water management practices, they have something very different in mind than simply non-public sector (or private sector) provision. They have in mind very different paradigms of what provision itself consists of and how it is to be carried out. And what becomes very interesting in this terminological context, is that both ‘centralized’ and ‘decentralized’ water management practices have a space for either/both public sector or non-public sector service provision. For example, one could have decentralized management paradigms being supported through public sector or private sector support; or one could have centralized services being supported through public sector or private sector support. And, in effect, the different management paradigms (‘centralized’ infrastructures – conveyance, ‘flush and forget’ – and ‘decentralized management paradigms’ - treat the resource at the source) make spaces for different types of technologies, and thus support different technology markets.
In previous posts I have alluded to the notion that centralized management systems entail provision limits which have fairly severe consequences. Such consequences can be divided roughly along two lines.
First, informants have made the argument that centralized waste water treatment systems fail to do the work they need to do even with respect to the populations that they reach. The illustrative case along these lines was the
The primary culprit here is system capacity, which the technocrats who support the centralized paradigm believe can be overcome through technological innovation.
Second, informants have made the argument that centralized waste water treatment systems fail to reach many populations – either because of they are geographically too far away for the central system to meet and/or because the population is so poor that its needs are not taken seriously. The illustrative case we got to understand along these lines was
The edge of the field rests at the bottom of the slope of the village, and rests within 300 meters of a train track. Law stipulates that no structures can be built within 300 meters of the train track. Governments of
In a previous post I gave closer details about some of the emerging technologies for decentralized waste water treatment practices. One of those was Ecosanitation. A group of people we have come to know in this fieldtrip are associated with FODRA – fountain of development research and action – who have taken up use and proliferation of ecosan techniques. The pictures of ecosan that I give elsewhere in the hydrousmantle blog (and at some point at hydrousmantle.org) were taken in a farming community in Uttar Pradesh, where ecosan is being piloted by FODRA. FODRA are now planning to integrate them in
Fountain of Development Research and Action (FODRA) is an independent non-governmental organisation committed to promoting and undertaking actions for sustainable development among people living in poverty. It believes in methods of micro planning to ensure participatory development and action oriented learning, enhancing the potentials of the underprivileged. FODRA also gives top priority in promoting women as planner and decision maker to ensure gender equality both in its own programme management structure and in programme targeting. As on today, FODRA has been in a position to claim the project is totally community managed with representation of two-third of staff are either from target community or nearby clusters who understand the nitty-gritty of local issues and situation.
In our visits with Saboli village where FODRA is currently working, we noticed an extremely integrated community development approach which entailed not only an appreciation of the water management needs of the community, but also significant efforts at health service provision and education and craftwork education. Look out for future developments on FODRA and its activities.
Until next time,
hej hej...
Last time I got into some of the features of ‘decentralized’ water and sanitation practices that are being promoted by folks at the
There’s an extremely interesting relationship between the centralized systems in existence now and the traffic situation that I referred to in a previous post. When I arrived here I was blown away by the way autos move around and in relation to one another. While it seems that there are ‘lanes’ drawn on the streets, the cars themselves are literally bumping up against one another trying to squeeze in a little bit ahead of the one next to them. It’s a lot like being in a mosh pit where you’re trying to get as close to the stage as possible. And the method they’ve devised to prevent crashes is the horn. Back bumpers say “please use horn” – and people use them. There are so many high pitched ‘honks’ going off at once it becomes unclear (at least to me) to whom the honk is speaking. Unless it is very early in the morning, you’re basically in a bumper to bumper traffic jam. Luckily, people drive really slowly (even in the rare moments that they find an open road), and serious collisions seem rare. Of course I raised the topic of traffic with some informants, and what they suggested is that the traffic works like this largely because of overcrowding on the roads and no enforcement of traffic laws. One of our new friends suggested that cows are the only law enforcers. These factors are exacerbated, again, by very bad planning. When we asked what they meant by bad planning, informants said that just 25 years ago (20-25 is a salient historical reference that informants regularly make on a host of topics),
So there’s a common theme characterizing traffic and water/sanitation practices: very large infrastructures planted above and below ground, connecting people, transporting objects, considered ‘centralized’. Just about everyone we’ve met here so far finds it problematic, and at least with respect to water and sanitation management practices, many whom we’ve met believe that the key is to return not only to traditional technologies, but also to traditional forms of coordination and control. What traditional means in the waste water context is, for example, harvesting, treating, and reusing waste closer to the source of its generation. Rather than send waste traveling away to be treated (‘flush and forget’) one wants to localize the waste processing and transforming it into productive resource that can be used also locally. I want to bring your attention to a few of the technologies we’ve been introduced to. (we have gathered some fairly detailed data on these for the video documentary, so expect more detail in future posts; and we will inquire in future posts the ways in which these technologies differ from those being showcased, for example, at the high-end “everything about water expo”, which some of our informants suggest will be completely different technologies because they are meant for centralized management systems and therefore support/constitute very different water technology markets – Meredith and I go to this expo next week).
A reedbed drain treatment system is being developed by Indian Institute of Technology.
In this system, plants are used to cleanse waste water which flows in the areas between the brick structures. At one end of the brick structure is a large bucket which holds the waste and allows it to drip into the soil areas between the brick structures. The brick structures you see in the photo above were built to separate different forms of waste, but other materials could be used. The useful part of this approach is that it uses plants for cleansing and filtration. One of its limitations is its large space requirement.
Another emerging waste water treatment technology is Effective Microorganisms - naturally occurring, nonpathogenic, and mostly food-grade microorganisms. They are comprised mainly of lactic acid bacteria, yeast and phototrophic bacteria, including aerobic and anaerobic microorganisms. Maple Orgtech Limited, located in Kolkata,
Another emerging technology that we were told is all the vogue iin decentralized resource management communities right now is Ecosan. Ecological sanitation is touted as a way to move from linear solutions of waste disposal towards systems based on a circular flow of nutrients. It addresses the recognition that human excreta is a resource and not a waste to be disposed of at a distance.
A group of very dedicated people who are working with ecosanitation technologies in and around
There are two basic techniques in ecological sanitation. One is urine-diversion, in which urine and faeces are kept separate.
In the second technique urine and faeces are combined and transformed into humus through a composting process. In each type of ecological sanitation it is possible to manage the system with little or no water, and it is also possible to keep the end products out of ground and surface waters. The toilet you see above was being used by a farming community in Uttar Pradesh. The toilet was really clean and didn’t smell at all dirty. When I looked into the pee section, the bowl around the hole was dry. I thought for a moment that this must mean that the people were not really using the ecosan. I asked about this and it was explained to me that immediately after use, the pisser reaches into a a small sized canister just outside the door. In the canister is wood burnt ash, a small amount of which is taken up by a handy straw broom and then brushed around the inside of the bowl. This dries everything and also gets rid of the smell.
The picture above shows the back side of the toilet. Sitaram, a member of FODRA, is picking up the fertilizer that has been made over the course of thirty days. It used to be feces that was dumped into the ecosan toilet above. The open doorway from which he pulls the fertilizer was easily removed, as it previously had been held closed by a dry clay. Once the fertilizer is removed, the door is resealed so that another 30 cycle of fertilization can begin. Inside this particular ecosan toilet building there are two adjacent toilets that are alternately used – one 30 days on, the other the next 30 days on, and so forth.
Meredith and I also learned how to build a “decentralized wastewater treatment system” (DEWATS), which is promoted in
Today – January 26 - is Independence Day in
Until next time,
Agarwal Green Center takes on Centralized Management
In my last post I mentioned that we’ve been hanging out with some of the folks at the Center for Science and Environment in
Meredith and I went on a rather disgusting site visit to the
Until next time,
India Fieldwork
Hi folks. Apologies for delay between last post and this. we have been doing feildwork from early morning til late night and internet access has been unstable. It's been nearly a week since I've had the chance. I finaly caught a plane from new york to mumbai - arrived mumbai around midnight the 12th. coming into the airport there was amazing - tons of people standing waiting for their loved ones and beyond that traffic. T R A F F I C. Traffic has been one of the most salient differences to which i've grown a bit more accustomed over the week. It really demands a different body to make your way through it. I caught a small cab to my hotel in mumbai; met up with meredith and had 3 hours sleep before catching our nexct plane to delhi. We got to delhi by monday morning and went directly to meet up with some of the people at the center for science and environment. i wil be posting more about the center in subsequent posts, as we've spent a lot of time with and learned a lot from various people associated with it over the last week. one of the reasons we got hooked up with the center is that they are doing a lot of work on what they call do it yourself, decentralized water and sanitation practices. the center was put into motion by anil agarwal some decades past. anil died a few years ago but the cetner continues to do amazing work. they have a major focus on social justice and developing sustainable practices for the poor. because of this orientation, they have spent a lot of time understanding both the governance and technological dimensions that go with making it possible for people to survive in the absence of government support and in the absence of financial resources. much more to come on the history and activities of this group and the many lessons we have learned from them. this week we've met a lot of people who are doing participatory water governance work in small communities in and around delhi. some extremely intersting work is being done by these groups - interesting, heartbreaking, and also hopeful. the reason this work must be done is that the rapid industrialization and development that took place over the past 20 years in delhi has resulted in unplanned growth and some problematic gaps and contradictions in infrastructures. traffic is one example, but it has seeemed to me that it also acts asa kind of metaphor for the water and sanitation infrastructure development over the same historical time (i'll return to this theme in subsequent posts). the infrastructure problems that have come about with rapid industrialization of the villages in and around delhi has been compounded by what many have described as a painful neglect on the part of government here. people maintain that india has a very strong supreme court, but other than that citizens are virtually left to their own devices to create the condicitons for their survival. such a situation seems generalized with repsect to the lower middle and lower class people, and it seems punctuated with respect to settlements that have arisen in the areas outside delhi proper, whihc are described as no-man's lands to whom no governments accept accountability. so for many people there are lots of problems and not a lot of resoures to solve them. one of the challenges in working through this theoretically is to disentangle the fact that 'decentralized' is used to describe both the lack of government action/accountability and the do it yourself practices, and at the same time 'centralization' is described as one of the culprits of the mess as such. on this more posts to come. we've been on several few site visits this week - trips to a no-man';s land at the border between delhi and the state of 'uppi' have given me an appreciation for the severity of these crises as well as the strategies that communities are coming up with to deal with their water management challenges. on these i will post more detailed commentary soon. (all these future posts will be titled with reference to their more specific names, with a keyterm 'delhi' in the title also.) we stay in delhi til wednesday, as we have several more meetings monday and tuesday - some of which are focused specifically on the integrated water resource management as a formal/institutionalized water management paradigm. from there we will go to pune and then to villages in raigad for more fieldwork before heading back to mumbai to look at issues around the markets for water technologies.
love to friends and family. more soon.
hej hej.
love to friends and family. more soon.
hej hej.
India fieldwork
Hi folks. This is the first day I begin to share material in the Hydrous Mantle blog. I decided to create a blog in association with hydrousmantle.org, which is the website space in which I organize and publish some of my current research activities. The Hydrous Mantle blog supports that website by sharing ongoing activities and research content that mutates more frequently. As I become invovled with many collaborative projects simultaneously, my hope is that this space will help me to keep others aware of various recent details of interest.
What's up at the moment is the fieldwork trip to India. During this trip my objectives are to learn more about how Integrated Water Resources management is manifesting 'on the ground' in a few 'local' areas in the country. In particular, I will be focusing on some of the activities of the IWRM "Area Water Partnerships" that are sponsored and coordinated by the Global Water Partnership. I also have the wish to learn more about how different actors in India orient to the water resource challenges, and to document in video format some of the experiences we have throughout the fieldwork. My hope is to develop a cinematic artifact from which others might learn. As part of the documentary project, I am collaborating with Meredith Anderson - a sociologist who uses video as a research tool. Meredith and I met in Tunisia a few years ago and we have stayed in touch through various science studies events. I just heard from Meredith, who just arrived in Mumbai on the plane we were both supposed to take. My flight connection from San Francisco was disturbed by weather, so I depart JFK tonight and will meet with her tomorrow. From Mumbai we fly out early morning monday to Delhi, where we will join up with folks at the Center for Science and Environment for our first stop on the planned fieldwork schedule. I will check in to Hydrous Mantle again by Monday to share more details of the trip.
hej hej..
What's up at the moment is the fieldwork trip to India. During this trip my objectives are to learn more about how Integrated Water Resources management is manifesting 'on the ground' in a few 'local' areas in the country. In particular, I will be focusing on some of the activities of the IWRM "Area Water Partnerships" that are sponsored and coordinated by the Global Water Partnership. I also have the wish to learn more about how different actors in India orient to the water resource challenges, and to document in video format some of the experiences we have throughout the fieldwork. My hope is to develop a cinematic artifact from which others might learn. As part of the documentary project, I am collaborating with Meredith Anderson - a sociologist who uses video as a research tool. Meredith and I met in Tunisia a few years ago and we have stayed in touch through various science studies events. I just heard from Meredith, who just arrived in Mumbai on the plane we were both supposed to take. My flight connection from San Francisco was disturbed by weather, so I depart JFK tonight and will meet with her tomorrow. From Mumbai we fly out early morning monday to Delhi, where we will join up with folks at the Center for Science and Environment for our first stop on the planned fieldwork schedule. I will check in to Hydrous Mantle again by Monday to share more details of the trip.
hej hej..
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