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Governance in Motion: Towards Socially and Environmentally Sustainable Water Laws

The book focuses on the work undertaken by IELRC on water law reforms in India. It seeks to provide a sweeping overview of the issues arising in respect to changing policy context for water use and aims to provide a broader understanding of the conceptual framework informing existing water law and ongoing reforms. It assembles in one volume the contributions made by a broad range of scholars working on some of the most important law and policy issues arising in the context of water sector reforms in India . The contributions have been specifically selected in order to address the broad range of issues that must be examined when one considers the legal regime for the allocation of water, which covers a number of areas including water distribution to households, irrigation, industrial use and wastewater treatment. These questions are dealt with from a range of perspectives including human rights, environment, agriculture, development and trade, and it thus becomes imperative to encompass all these perspectives in the analysis. The book is divided into two parts. The first part critically analyses the international law context for water reforms and the second part provides the national level focus, with the selected contributions describing in detail the multifaceted aspects of water sector reforms in India.

Author: P. Cullet,
A. Gowlland-Gualtieri,
R. Madhav & U. Ramanathan eds
Publication Date: 2010
Binding: hardback
ISBN: 9788175966345

Table of Contents

Introduction, Philippe Cullet

Part 1: Water Law, Policy and Institutional Reforms in India

1. Water and Questions of Law: An overview, Ramaswamy R. Iyer

2. Water Law - Evolving Regulatory Framework, Philippe Cullet

3. Discourses in Water and Water Reform in Western India, Priya Sangameswaran

4. The Slow Road to the Private - A Case Study of Neo-Liberal Water Reforms in Chennai, Karen Coelho

Part 2: Ongoing irrigation and groundwater reforms in India

5. Canal Irrigation, Water User Associations and Law in India - Emerging Trends in Rights based Perspective, Videh Upadhyay

6. Customary Rights And Their Relevance In Modern Tank Management: Select Cases In Tamil Nadu, A. Gurunathan and C.R. Shanmugham

7. Groundwater - Legal Aspects of the Plachimada Dispute, Sujith Koonan

Part 3: Perspectives on privatisation

8. Tirupur Water Supply and Sanitation Project - A Revolution in Water Resource Management?, Roopa Madhav

9. The World Bank's Influence on Water Privatisation in Argentina : The Experience of the City of Buenos Aires, Andrés Olleta

10. Linkages between Access to Water and Water Scarcity with International Investment Law and the WTO Regime, Francesco Costamagna and Francesco Sindico

11. More Drops for Hyderabad City , Less Crops For Farmers: Water Institutions and Reallocation in Andhra Pradesh, Mattia Celio

Part 4: Environment and Human Rights

12. Balancing Development And Environmental Conservation And Protection of the Water Resource Base - The 'Greening' of Water Laws, Stefano Burchi

13. The Right to Water as a Human Right or a Bird's Right - Does Co-operative Governance Offer a Way Out of a Conflict of Interests and Legal Complexity?, Jonathan Verschuuren

14. South Africa's Water Law and Policy Framework: Implications for the Right to Water, Alix Gowlland-gualtieri

15. Respect, Protect, Fulfil: The Implementation of the Human Right to Water in South Africa, Inga T. Winkler

Part 5: Comparative Perspectives on Reforms

16. Learning from Water Law Reform in Australia, Poh-Ling Tan

17. Law and 'development' discourses about water: Understanding agency in regime changes, Radha D'souza

18. Marginal Remarks Concerning Water Policy Regimes; Governance, Rights, Justice, and Development - An Epilogue, Upendra Baxi