It’s a sleeper crisis that doesn’t often make the headlines but India needs to start addressing water, food, and land together to secure lives and livelihoods. It’s a nexus that is now getting international attention as well.
As the buzz around COP28 intensifies, the international summit plans to ‘drive water up the climate agenda’ and has a dedicated day for food, land and water. Being the largest user of freshwater globally, most of it for agriculture, and having the largest population in the world to feed, India offers the biggest laboratory to analyse water-land-food inter-dependencies.
The 2023 assessment of Sustainable Development Goals highlights that more than 800 million people in the world live in areas with high to critical levels of water stress and about an equal number are facing chronic hunger, a state of long-term undernourishment. There is also a third layer — land, whose proper management is needed to ensure optimal water use and sustainable food production. So, it is of utmost importance to analyse synergies in India’s water-land-food policies to reduce negative trade-offs and ensure they mutually support each other.
The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) did an initial assessment of seven national policies across water, land, and food sectors in India. These policies have had a combined average annual expenditure of ₹39,550 crore during the last three years. Based on it, we developed a blueprint for undertaking policy coherence analysis at a more granular level (state or district). Three considerations for future work in the area emerge.
First, different governmental ministries implementing water, food and land policies need to develop common indicators to measure impact. Different departments often operate within their given mandate with little felt need for having common impact indicators. For instance, water use efficiency improvement, which is important to reduce water loss and achieve higher economic returns per unit of water, might sound like a domain of one sectoral policy.
But if the aim is to optimise water and energy use in irrigation without impacting food production, then other policy instruments and actors need to be engaged for integrated action and developing common indicators. These include ministries or departments dealing with water resources, the power sector, rural development, food supplies, and farmers’ welfare, among others.
Some policies are beginning to think in this direction. It is worth highlighting the strategic components of the ‘Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana’, which include an accelerated irrigation benefit programme, ‘Har khet ko paani’ (water for every farm), per drop more crop scheme, and integrated watershed management that aims to synergise action across the three sectors.
Second, for impact assessment, focus on outcome-based indicators leading to larger societal and environmental benefits in addition to the output-based sectoral targets. The functionality assessment of the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM), undertaken by a third party engaged by the Ministry of Jal Shakti (MoJS), focuses on such outcome indicators that include benefits to family income and improvement in social status in addition to the number of households provided with water taps within the premises, which is an output indicator.
We also identified outcome indicators for specific schemes such as influence on local labour markets and improvement in groundwater recharge to map the impact of MGNREGA works across water, land and agriculture sectors. A similar approach needs to be introduced for other policies that presently focus only on output-based indicators or targets.
Third, and most importantly, set up a mechanism for building partnerships, forming collaborations, and ensuring coordination among and within different ministries and departments dealing with water, land, and food sectors. This is critical at all levels—national, regionals, state, district, block, and village— and is a prerequisite for actioning a joint policy.
Recent collaborative work undertaken by IWMI and CEEW’s assessment of community-based participatory groundwater management implementation in Rajasthan highlights the potential benefits of such convergence for the judicious use of energy and groundwater for irrigation. One important aspect here is to encourage the engagement between formal government institutions and community-based institutions such as village water and sanitation committees, and water users’ associations. This can lead to effective analysis of gaps in achieving the policy outcomes as such institutions are often repositories of local knowledge that can provide important feedback.
Policy coherence in the Indian context is still an emerging theme. It should be mainstreamed in each phase of the policy cycle. Land, water and energy cannot be decided on in silos – it’s time for policy overhauls to ensure long-term security.
—The authors, Nitin Bassi, is a Senior Programme Lead at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), and Garima Taneja, is a Research Officer at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). The views expressed are their personal.
(Edited by : C H Unnikrishnan)
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