Framing a Drinking Water Supply Services Act for India, with Particular Reference to Rajasthan

Tables

Table 1.1: Water Resource Summary for Rajasthan

Table 2.1: Description of River Basins in Rajasthan

Table 2.2: Number of Different Types of Water Supply Schemes in Rural Rajasthan

Table 2.3: Main Sources of Drinking Water (of Individual Households)

Table 2.4: Norms on Per Capita Water Supply per Day as per PHED, Rajasthan

Table 2.5: General Quality Criteria (Primary Parameters) for Raw Water for Organized Community Water Supplies (Surface and Ground Water)

Table 2.6: Water Quality Requirements for Drinking Purposes under IS0 10500:1991

Table 2.7: Factors of General Relevance Influencing Selection of Community Water Supply Technology

Table 3.1: Water Supply Legislations in Indian States

Table 3.2: Some Water Supply Legislations from around the World

Preface

Water is a unique substance. It is one of the few materials on Earth that exists naturally as a solid, liquid or gas. Life on Earth cannot exist without water. As a global phenomenon, the quality of water available in natural freshwater ecosystems – in rivers, phreatic aquifers and lakes – is deteriorating as a result of human activities, land use practices and economic development. Land use practices, such as the removal of forest cover, intensive cultivation of crops, livestock farming and aquaculture, affect the quality of water in our streams, lakes, groundwater and ultimately the marine environment.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), water is ‘the stuff of life and a basic human right’ (UNDP, 2006). Thus, water is an essential element for life on Earth – including human life – and as a result, it is a core concern in law. From a legal perspective, the UNDP rightly emphasizes the importance of the human rights dimension of water. Yet, in practice, water law has to address the economic and environmental dimensions as well as the human rights dimension. In particular, historically, one of the central concerns of water law has been the development of principles concerning access to and control over water.

While water that is directly consumed, that is, the drinking water, is essential for the survival of human beings, it is also required for farming (growing crops, livestock rearing and fisheries), which produces food for human consumption, and manufacturing.

Despite the central role that water plays in sustaining lives and economies, the development of a formal water law has been relatively slow and often patchy. At the domestic level, colonial legislation first focused on the regulation of water for economic reasons, for instance, through the development of legislation concerning irrigation and navigation. Over the past few decades, increasing pollution of freshwater bodies, decreasing per capita water availability (resulting from increasing population) and excessive diversion of water for competitive uses have led to the development of water quality regulations and norms on environmental flows in rivers. All the water policies, from the first one in 1987 to the most recent in 2012, have prioritized drinking water in water allocation decisions.

In a civilized world, the ‘right to a dignified life’ cannot be guaranteed merely through the provision of an adequate volume of water to meet the physiological needs of the people. The ‘right to live’ should imply the right to food, water and a decent environment. Water is the key to achieving all these goals. The civil, political, social and cultural rights of people enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and under the Constitution of India cannot be exercised without these basic human rights.

When water resources are scarce, their allocation and distribution need to be carefully regulated, given the growing competition between different water-use sectors. Framing a law on drinking water provisioning, though requiring small quantities of high-quality water, is therefore not an easy task under such circumstances.

Historically, irrigation laws constitute the most developed part of water law in India, though statutory water law also includes a number of pre- and post-independence enactments in various areas such as embankments, drinking water supply, irrigation and drainage, floods, water conservation, river water pollution, rehabilitation of evacuees and displaced persons, fisheries and ferries.

In India, the laws governing the use of water include international treaties and federal and state legislations. They also include a number of less formal arrangements, including water and water-related policies as well as customary rules and practices, which were weakened by formal central and state laws.

The drinking water laws of the Indian states largely deal with areas such as regulation of water supply by the agency, water charges, permit/license systems and strategy for water supply. The laws focus more on offences by the subscribers and are silent on the inefficiency in service delivery and the root causes. No Indian state has a comprehensive drinking water act that deals with the myriad of questions starting from the criteria for selection of water supply technologies to deciding on the service levels (quantity and quality of water, duration, etc.) to releasing the water connections to a new customer to charging for water to payment of penalties for non-compliance to disposal and treatment of wastewater to water supply surveillance.

This book, for the first time in the history of academic work on water laws in India, presents a draft act on drinking water services that comprehensively deals with the complex challenges of drinking water provisioning in a difficult landscape. It is done for one of the acutely water-scarce states of India, that is, Rajasthan, where water supply challenges are big and growing. Besides presenting the detailed act chapterwise with its seventy articles, it goes into the nuances of framing the act, starting from building the rationale for the specific provisions included. The book also presents a comprehensive review of various drinking water acts and other water legislations in India, and drinking water legislations in selected developed countries, viz., the United States, England and Wales, Japan, Canada, Malaysia, the EU, South Africa and two developing countries (Ghana and Bahamas), to evaluate and compare their unique features. The book also attempts to shed some light on the reasons for the failure or ineffectiveness of most water-related acts in India.

I sincerely hope the drinking water sector specialists, government policymakers in the water supply and sanitation sector and water law professionals in India and other developing countries will find the book useful for evaluating existing drinking water legislations and framing new ones.