Scope of Public-Private Partnership for Sustainable Development of Water Resource Projects in a Backward Region of India

India has had a long tradition of community participation in the water harvesting structures. In earlier period of our history, the erstwhile rulers, such as, emperors and kings used to promote partnership between state and the people. But with the advent of large irrigation systems, the community participation became weak and mostly defunct. Indeed during the British rule as well as in the post independence period in India, the state machinery, which is usually based on the nexus between bureaucrats, politicians and greedy contractors, did not encourage the people to participate in such endeavours. Profiteering and rent seeking behaviour gradually dominated the system of irrigation management and that led to perpetuation of the problem of poverty in India. The socio-economic as well as physical environment not only deteriorated due to expansion of large irrigation systems but the regional and group income inequalities became wide spread. Our empirical studies and studies of many researchers have proved that the banes of irrigation outweighed the gainful effects, which led to unsustainable growth in the rural areas. In view of the debilitating effects of large irrigation systems, and in view of the environmental awareness in the world in the 1970s, it was realised that irrigation management should be decentralized. Hence, greater focus was laid on small projects, where the state started backing the small and marginal farmers. But in actual practice, no formal partnership could emerge due to many structural bottlenecks and lack of a political will. At such a critical juncture, during the 6th and 7th plan period, the Government of India inducted the non government organizations to play the role of a ‘change agent'and sought assistance from international agencies. Moreover, the international policy framework of decentralisation and people's participation approach provided a new impetus to our government to focus on participatory approach, involving users, planners and policy-makers at all levels, and also envisaged a special role for women to protect and preserve the water resources. To add to it, the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), i.e., Earth Summit, at Rio de Janeiro not only adopted the principle of sustainable development as recommended by the Brutland Commission, but also came up with Agenda 21 to address different dimensions of human welfare and strongly associated development and environment. Indeed, chapter 18 of Agenda 21 is dedicated to water, and it calls for integration of sectoral water plans and programmes within the framework of national economic and social policy. In view of our participation and commitment at international forums, the government of India came up with a National Water Policy in 1987, which was subsequently revised in 2002. Under these new policy, the state is committed to encourage public–private partnership but the implementation of the policy is not very encouraging. In this paper we have proposed to investigate the scope of PPP in management of our irrigation projects with the help of two case studies from two backward regions of the country.