Water Justice and Groundwater Subsidies in India: Equitable and Sustainable Access and Regulation

This book examines the impact of water-related subsidies on social and distributive equity and environmental sustainability in groundwater access and regulation in India.

This book argues that adopting a water justice framework is essential to ensure equitable and sustainable access to and regulation of groundwater by balancing anthropogenic and ecological water needs. The inherent inequity resulting from property rights-controlled groundwater access gets widened by the social, political, and economic factors determining the subsidy beneficiaries. Adopting a socio-legal approach, this book draws on two contrasting case studies in India: Kerala, a water-secure state, and Rajasthan, an arid state. Arguing for a shift to a new paradigm in water governance, it critically examines the feasibility of the public trust doctrine and rights of nature discourse to analyse the best suitable regulatory framework that can balance the human right to water and ecological sustainability in groundwater resources. It demonstrates the feasibility of adopting various environmental law principles that balance human rights to water and nature. It argues that the hitherto highlighted public trust doctrine cannot address these inequities due to its anthropogenic bias and property rights link. This book examines the applicability of the rights of nature discourse instead of these property rights-based regulations to incorporate and mainstream the concerns of aquifer protection in water governance.

This book shall be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of water law and policy, environmental law, water and social justice, development studies, and political ecology.

Gayathri D. Naik is an assistant professor at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She holds a PhD in Water Law and Policy from SOAS University of London, UK, on the prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship.