Understanding water institutions and their impact on the performance of the water sector in India

Abstract

The water crisis in India is no more restricted to a few states or areas. It has started affecting all forms of life, industry, and livelihood, and therefore it emerges as one of the biggest challenges. The water crisis is a direct outcome of the governance and analysis of water institutions, playing a central role in understanding the state of water governance. This study aims to understand the water institutions and their ultimate impact on various aspects of water sector performance in India. A survey was administered to collect information on the perception of water experts on the role and importance of various institutional aspects including water law, policy, and administration in improving water sector performance in India. Factor analysis and multiple linear regression methods were used to find the significant factors of water institutions and their effect on the different aspects of water sector performance in India. The analysis shows that the most important factors for improving the water sector performance are (a) legal accountability provisions, (b) water transfer policies, and (c) use of science and technology application along with reliable data. The level of importance of these significant institutional variables also varies within various performance aspects.

Challenges to Water Resource Management—Role of Economic and Modeling Approaches

“…Recent years have brought a significant increase in publications that focus on environmental valuation [151]. Some argue that this is the result of global change, affecting vulnerable water resources, but also increasing their a ributes that can benefit different segments of society.…”

Impact of institutional overlapping on water governance of Himalayan City, Nainital, India

“…In India, there are many water institutions involved in managing the three institutional components i.e., water law, policy, and administration (Chopra & Ramchandran, 2021), but recognizing the complexity of Nainital's water governance and for a meaningful focused evaluation, only concerned institutions were selected for the study.…”

Governing Water Resource Allocation: Water User Association Characteristics and the Role of the State

“…Principle 2: congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money. The advantages and shortcomings of self-governed systems have led to increasing the attention towards hybrid systems, where formal institutions (the state) interact with local communities enhancing collective action and promoting self-governance [13,16,[34][35][36][37][38].…”

“…The success of self-governed communities and collective action can be measured in the sustainability and productivity of the common resources, conflict-free communities, lack of freeriding, participation, and the existence of accountability to their own crafted rules [30,33,37]; in the literature, this has been tied to the presence or absence of DPs [30,32,49]. However, DPs cannot be seen in isolation.…”