Groundwater Must Be The Focus Of India National Water Policy

India's Water Management Crisis

A piercingly clear essay by Himanshu Thakkar on why India must realign its water resources priorities from big dams and river linking projects to protecting, managing, and regulating ground water.

Just take a look at the numbers:

"Most of the water that India uses today comes from over 30 million wells and tubewells. Irrigation is India’s biggest user of water and over two thirds of irrigated area gets water from groundwater. 85% of rural domestic supply, over 55% of Urban and Industrial water supply comes from groundwater. The graph of % of water in each sub sector coming from groundwater has been going up for at least four decades. In fact, some estimates show that over 90% of additional water India used in last four decades have come from groundwater. It sounds like an immitigable blessing. That’s not how blessings work, unfortunately.

Central Ground Water Board’s data shows that in about 70% of areas, groundwater is depleting and at many places it has exhausted or is on verge of exhaustion. The quality is deteriorating. Warnings have been available for decades now, but the government has done little to address the emerging crisis.

In fact, India’s water resources establishment, lead by the Big dam ideologues at Central Water Commission have ensured that the government do not even acknowledge that groundwater is India’s water lifeline"....

Scary.

Some States have taken initiatives to manage ground water. Maharashtra recently passed the Maharashtra Ground Water Act which provides a framework for management and regulation of ground water. How much diligent enforcement of the rules actually takes place remains to be seen.

Additional Reading:

The Maharashtra Groundwater (Development and Management) Act 2009 - Shashank Deshpande, Deputy Director GSDA.

A Decade Of The Maharashtra Ground Water Legislation: Analysis Of The Implementation Process - Sanjiv Phansalkar and Vivek Kher.

India Shale Gas: Environmental Concerns

Shale gas is natural gas trapped in very fined grained sedimentary rocks like shales. These rocks are not very permeable. To release the gas trapped in the tiny pore spaces, the rock is fractured by injecting water, sand and various chemicals into it at very high pressure. Several million gallons of fresh water is needed for such ' fracking' activity at any one site. 

Shashikant Yadav, Gopal K Sarangi and M P Ram Mohan in an essay in the Economic and Political Weekly explain the environmental concerns that shale gas production poses in India.

Regarding the guidelines for environmental management released by the government -

Further, the guidelines mention that water management is one of the key concerns. They state that the major and prime difference being in the hydraulic fracturing technologies requiring a large volume of water; the activities are likely to deplete water sources and cause pollution due to the disposal of produced water. However, instead of dealing with the water-specific issues, the guidelines (apart from explaining existing provisions) stated that the generic environment clearance process adopted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) will suffice to ascertain water-related issues posed by fracking. But, MoEFCC has not laid down any specific guidelines, policies, or manuals differentiating between conventional and unconventional gases to grant environment clearance.  More recently, despite the gaps, on 1 August, 2018, the cabinet approved a policy allowing companies to exploit shale gas in contract areas that were primarily allocated to exploit conventional gas.

..and this in the context of the ambiguous legal framework surrounding groundwater -

Considering the limited water legislation in India, the implementation of fracking may result in geopolitical and legislative complexities. For instance, shale rocks are usually adjacent to rocks containing useable/drinking water known as “aquifers.” While implementing the hydraulic fracking, the shale fluid can easily penetrate to aquifers leading to groundwater contamination. This contamination may result in methane-poisoning of water used for drinking and irrigational purposes. To avoid such contamination, as per industry standards, a project proponent must maintain a distance of 600 metres between aquifers and fracture zones (Davies et al 2012).

The Indian water legal regime is far away to make such specific observations, as aquifers are not defined in any of the Indian environmental regulatory or legal regime leading to a free pass for unregulated mixing of shale fluid and aquifers. Moreover, the landless have no right to groundwater, and accordingly peasants and tribal communities who have no ownership rights over land have no right on groundwater. Also, a project proponent may easily exploit groundwater while implementing the hydraulic fracking process with none or limited accountability of their actions.  In such a situation, the intent of “Public Trust Doctrine” is defeated, and the precautionary principle will be non-implementable.

Open Access.

Grand Theft Geology- Report Indicts Reliance Of Pilfering Gas From ONGC Reservoir

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta explains in a detailed article the shenanigans and the disputes over the exploitation of natural gas in the Krishna Godavari basin.

The Krishna-Godavari basin offshore Bay of Bengal composed of Late Mesozoic to Cenozoic deltaic-marine sequences has rich natural gas reservoirs  . Reliance Industries as well as the public sector ONGC are exploring and producing natural gas from adjoining areas. Turns out that in one area the underlying reservoirs are continuous, and ONGC suspected a couple of years ago that Reliance Industries realizing this geological situation drilled wells very close to the common boundary of the blocks. As a result of producing these wells as much as 11 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas has flowed from the reservoir under ONGC controlled areas into Reliance control. Out of that, Reliance in an unauthorized manner, has sucked out 8.9 bcm of gas worth about Rs 11,000 crore  (~ $1.7 billion).

If fact, the large migration of gas from ONGC controlled reservoir into Reliance controlled reservoir means that it would no longer be economically viable for ONGC  to develop this particular field.

That is the finding of an independent consultant DeGolyer and MacNaughton (D&M) based out of Dallas, Texas, in the US, which was hired to submit a technical report on the ONGC claim which Reliance had disputed.

ONGC has also taken the Government of India to court, naming the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MoPNG) and the Directorate-General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) as respondents accusing these agencies of failing to be vigilant in taking precautionary measures.

ONGC claimed in its writ petition:

Pertinently, four wells have been drilled by Respondent No 3 (RIL) within distances ranging within 50 m (metres) to about 350 m from the blocks of (the) petitioner (ONGC) and wells have been so drilled and constructed that there is a pre-planned and calculated slant/angular incline towards the gas reserves of (the) petitioner with a clear idea to tap the same.

According to ONGC, its nomination block, Godavari PML (G4) and discovery block, KG-D5 under the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP)-1 are contiguous to the RIL-operated NELP-1 block KG-D6. The public sector undertaking (PSU) had said that it wanted a “truly independent” agency to examine its contention that the Mukesh Ambani-led RIL may have drawn natural gas worth up to Rs 30,000 crore from ONGC’s fields adjacent to the ones in the KG-D6 block where the contracting company controlled by RIL operates.

all this does not reflect well on a government eager to invite foreign investments and collaboration-

Sarma is correctly of the view that management and enforcement of contracts are crucial to good governance in any sector, including the oil and gas exploration industry where the natural resources extracted are not just high in value and also critical to the country’s energy security. A flawed and inadequate PSC between RIL and the MoPNG has been greatly responsible for many of the problems that have been encountered during the exploration and extraction of gas from the KG basin. In the case of alleged theft, the management committee, which included representatives of the ministry, apparently acquiesced in whatever RIL did, and the contractual provisions for joint-management of the gas fields and imposition of penalties were never invoked. This, Sarma points out, does not augur well for a country that is aggressive inviting foreign investments, including investments in the oil and gas industry.

It should also be noted that government-owned companies like ONGC are expected to function independently and safeguard the interests of the shareholders, which include the people of India. The two really “independent” former directors of ONGC persuaded the corporation to approach the Delhi High Court but the ministry under Moily tried to prevent this from happening—it is truly ironic that the government as the major shareholder of ONGC should actively work against its interests and try and cause harm to itself.

The entire article is worth reading.

.. and more on the troubled involvement of Reliance Industries with natural gas exploitation in the Krishna Godavari basin .

Low Emissions Due To Ecofriendly Lifestyles? India's Climate Roadmap

India has submitted its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is a sort of a road map the country will take with regards to future carbon emissions, mitigation and adaptation.

On page two I came across this gem:

Even now, when the per capita emissions of many developed countries vary between 7 to15 metric tonnes, the per capita emissions in India were only about 1.56 metric tonnes in 2010. This is because Indians believe in nature friendly lifestyle and practices rather than its exploitation.

What a load of bollocks!

Anyone familiar with the reality of life in India will recognize this as a specious attempt to explain away the low per capita emissions.

Emissions in India are low not because of nature friendly lifestyles but because of deep poverty. Hundreds of millions of people don't have access to enough energy... and the energy they are forced to exploit like burning cow dung, charcoal, wood and rubbish to sustain themselves is deeply injurious to their health.

On the other end of the spectrum, emissions from the increasingly affluent classes living mostly in cities are beginning to catch up with the developed world.

Nagraj Adve and Ashish Kothari critique the road map. It is not "nature friendly".

Groundwater Policy: Quis Custodiet Ipos Custodes

Who regulates the regulators?

In the context of groundwater policy, who will keep an independent check on government data collection methods and analysis which informs groundwater policy decisions.

It would be nice if government scientist themselves keep refining their methods, but equally needed are independent researchers from Universities and research institutions. Rahul Gokhale and Milind Sohoni of IIT Bombay analyze Maharashtra statewide groundwater data collected over the past few decades by the government Groundwater Surveys and Development Agency. The Agency in October of each year puts out a report on the groundwater outlook for the upcoming dry season (until June of the following year). This report relies on measured groundwater levels from ~ 5000 wells and the State rainfall data. However, there is substantial variation in groundwater levels throughout the dry season and between years in most wells.  By subjecting this data to statistical analysis and modelling study Gokhale and Sohoni conclude that aggregate rainfall data is a poor predictor of groundwater levels and that unmeasured factors like extraction patterns and land use influence groundwater availability. They point a way toward refining groundwater assessment methodology by incorporating local socio-economic and groundwater use data.

Now, on the face of it the finding seems somewhat banal, that groundwater levels and availability is controlled not just by rainfall patterns but other anthropogenic factors as well. However, it is important that someone dives into large government data sets and teases out these quantitative relationships between various interacting parameters. And it is good to see an Indian government agency share data willingly.

Abstract:

This paper looks at the crucial issue of dry-season groundwater-availability in the state of Maharashtra, India. We look at the two key hydro-climatological measurements which are used to implement groundwater policy in the state, viz., water levels in 5000+ observation wells across the state and aggregate rainfall data. We see that there is substantial variation in groundwater levels within and across the years in most wells. We argue that for a large number of these observation well locations, aggregate rainfall data is inadequate to model or to predict groundwater levels. For this, we use a novel random rainfall coefficient model for the purpose of modelling the effect of rainfall in a composite setting where extraction and changing land-use data is unknown. The observed high variance of this coefficient points to significant variations in groundwater levels, which may only be explained by unmeasured anthropogenic factors. Next, we see that the uncertainty in actual groundwater levels along with scarcity are two distinct features of groundwater availability and will elicit different behaviours from the typical user. Finally, we recommend that quantitative groundwater assessment protocols of the state should move to incorporating data from which extraction and land-use may be modelled. We believe this is one of the first studies where large spatio-temporal scale data gathered by state agencies have been analysed for scientific adequacy.

and a relevant finding and recommendation:

It is necessary to recognize that scarcity and uncertainty are mutually distinct features of a groundwater regime. For example, if groundwater was scarce but certain, the groundwater-user may make  a different set of socio-economic decisions as compared to when it were both scarce and uncertain. In the first case, it incentivizes efficient use of groundwater, while in the second case, it may well lead to competitive extraction and a race to the bottom, worsening the scarcity. Indeed, the spatial coincidence of large σα with σρ seems to suggest this. This leads us to the following policy recommendations: (i) recognition of scarcity and uncertainty as separate attributes of groundwater-availability and developing indices to measure uncertainty, (ii) further work into the incorporation of socioeconomic data along with hydrogeologic and climatic data for building groundwater assessment tools. Perhaps, one relevant avenue for this is the periodic water balance computation carried out by GSDA for each watershed, every 3–5 years (see GEC’97 1997). This incorporates considerable data on extraction, irrigation, surface water bodies, and estimates of other stocks and flows. A refinement of this water balance exercise may yield better inputs for the yearly outlook for the dry season.
 

Download paper here.

Rigged: The Slow Decline Of India's National Oil Company

This article came out last year but I came across it today via twitter. In Caravan magazine Krishn Kaushik  writes about India's flagship oil  company the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited and its failure over the years to live up to its mission of finding and producing fuel for the country.

This failure has many causes as Kaushik explores- institutional inertia is one important one, government interference in company functioning is another. But there are also a host of private interests trying to exploit the company's wealth. Reliance comes under particular criticism for its alleged manipulation of the bidding process.

Here is one example:

Things only got better for Reliance with the introduction of the New Exploration Licensing Policy. The former ONGC director told me that during his tenure under the NELP regime, both the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons and the petroleum ministry—then headed by VK Sibal and the Congressman Murli Deora, respectively—made at least three unconventional decisions that disadvantaged ONGC and awarded contracts to Mukesh Ambani.

Bids for oil and gas blocks are given points according to various criteria, he explained. One of these is meterage, the depth of the wells a company offers to drill. In principle, the deeper the better—but every hydrocarbon field has a natural “basement,” based on its geological ability to retain hydrocarbon fuels, beyond which it doesn’t make sense to go. In the Cambay Basin, the director said, “everybody knows that the depth cannot be more than 3,500 metres.” But Reliance “bid 5,000 metres stroke basement”—whichever came first. “They got marks for 5,000, whereas ONGC couldn’t write more than 3,500 because we knew we would hit the basement below that.”

There are also points for how much territory a contractor will explore with three-dimensional seismic surveys. In another NELP round, Reliance offered to survey more than the total area of the block on offer, the director claimed. “So they got marks on that.”

There are also allegations that Reliance is  sucking out natural gas from adjacent blocks under ONGC control in the Krishna Godavari offshore basin. ONGC has taken the government to court over this! .. and the list goes on..

Between all these shenanigans is a bizarre episode of how Russian geologists helped discover Mumbai High,  India's biggest off shore oil field-

Discussing its aleatory nature, Sunjoy Joshi, the director of the Observer Research Foundation, a Reliance-funded think tank, told me a story he heard from Subir Raha, a former chairman and managing director of ONGC. “I don’t know if there is any record of this story,” Joshi said, before relating how Raha, who died in 2010, used to say that the Russians had been engaged to do the surveys far out to sea, “where geologists thought there was better possibility of finding oil and gas. But they had to justify coming to the shore more and more often, to screw all the girls in Kamathipura,” Mumbai’s oldest and largest red-light district. Moving their operations closer to land, they eventually found India’s most prolific oil field to date. “The discovery of Mumbai High,” Joshi continued, chuckling, “owes a lot to those poor women.”

Its a long read but well worth it.

Summary Of India Draft National Water Policy

How India manages its water resources is an issue of paramount importance. S. Ramesh at InfoChange.org gives an excellent summary of the National Water Policy and its merits and demerits.

The draft National Water Policy has gone into two revisions, first in May 2012 and then again in July, after being tabled in January when protests were made about the policy treating water as an economic good, and favouring privatisation. Still, the soul of the draft remains intact except for a few points.

There is every likelihood that water will become a highly rationed commodity in the future. We will have to pay for any excess water we use after our basic domestic, sanitation and agriculture requirements have been met. This makes a national-level legal framework to control water use and prevent inter-state, intra-state and regional water conflicts absolutely imperative.

Statistics on India's water availability are summed up in one paragraph and a table gives projected increase in water demand for various sectors. One quirky detail... Inland navigation which has no demand in 1988 shoots up to 15 bcm (billion cubic meters) in 2050! Is that due to the building of large canals to transfer water from one river basin to another? (I haven't read the report by the National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development  Plan 1999 from which this data was taken). Inter basin transfer of water or river linking as it is also known is often being presented as one solution for supplying southern Indian water "deficit" basins with "excess" water from mostly northern Himalayan rivers, although there are more local versions of the plan too. The problem off course is to get states to agree that they have excess water to part with, along with a host of other issues involving resettlement of displaced people and energy and ecological costs.

Quite a useful overview. And there are more interesting articles on India's water resources and the debates over privatization of water on the InfoChangeIndia website.

Chinatown And Water Law On Generation Anthropocene

No.. no.. Jack Nicholson didn't show up on Gen. Anthropocene to revisit his great role in the movie Chinatown. In that movie, detective J.J.Gittes played by Nicholson uncovers a shady plan set in the early 1900's  to monopolize the water resources of Owen's Valley and to divert that water to the growing city of Los Angeles.

Buzz Thompson who is an expert in environmental and natural resources law and policy has a personal connection with California's dodgy water history as he recounts how his grandfather's farm was bought over by the city of Los Angeles in the early 1920's using a local farmer as a front and then letting the farm lay fallow as it diverted water for urban use. 

He also gives a tutorial on the different water use doctrines prevalent in the U.S as he explains the differences between the riparian water use doctrine of the eastern part of the U.S. versus the prior appropriation water use doctrine common in the west and also talks about how enforcement of water law has generally failed in the U.S. Another important topic covered is the economics of water use especially in the context of water recycling.

 Excellent conversation from Gen Anthropocene.

Borlaug Award For Study Of Groundwater Use In West Bengal

It's good to see the vital role groundwater plays in Indian agriculture gain recognition. Aditi Mukherji with the International Water Management Institute has been awarded the Norman Borlaug award given by the World Food Prize Foundation for her work on access and usage of groundwater in agriculture in West Bengal.

From the Times of India interview with Aditi Mukherji:

West Bengal has one of the best agricultural electricity governance regimes in India. The majority of electricity pumps are metered and farmers pay high electricity bills, which in my opinion is a good thing. It sends the right price signal.

The real constraint was getting an electricity connection. We suggested removal of permits system in all blocks where the groundwater situation is safe. We also suggested rationalization of capital costs of initial electrification, but also recommended that metered tariffs must continue. The government has accepted most of these suggestions. In addition, it is deploying NREGA funds for excavation of ponds. That will help in groundwater recharge.

The prerequisite for a successful policy change in terms of immediate benefit to farmers as well as judicious use of groundwater was already in place in West Bengal. By prerequisite I mean good electricity governance. In the interview Ms. Mukherji mentions that Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have 80% of pumps electrified, a high percentage achieved due to past populist policies of handing out free electricity to farmers. The consequence has been rampant over exploitation of groundwater (largely by richer farmers). To avoid over extraction of groundwater,  West Bengal had set up a blanket restrictive permit policy even for areas within the state that had abundant groundwater. This perversely affected poor and marginal farmers in West Bengal who would have benefited from access to groundwater.

She suggests her recommendations could also be extended to the eastern states of Assam and Bihar. Geological conditions there are right for making such a policy work in favor of small farmers. Aquifers are alluvial over large parts. Groundwater is easier to find and is available at shallow depths.

Indian Natural Gas: Policy And Governance Issue

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago on the geological context of Indian shale gas potential. Indian sedimentary basins have considerable potential in both conventional natural gas as well as shale gas. These resources are being hailed as critical to India's future energy needs.

But geological presence has to be translated into effective use of this resource and how the produced natural gas is to be most efficiently allocated to various sectors is a question that has not been satisfactorily fleshed out at the policy level. The big users of natural gas are 1) Feed stock for fertilizer 2) Power generation 3) Transportation.

Here is an example of the kind of thinking and debate going on within policy and energy expert community regarding best utilization of the gas resources keeping in mind India's food security, need to reduce oil imports, and achieving a cleaner emissions profile. These have been written by energy experts of Prayas Energy Group based in Pune.

Towards a rational, objective natural gas utilization policy, Ashok Shreenivas and Girish Sant, June 2009

Shortcomings in governance of natural gas sector, Ashok Sreenivas, Girish Sant, July 2009

Worth a read to get a flavor of the debates concerning policy and governance issues regarding these resources.