Groundwater Allocation Between Dyeing Units, Farmers and Fluoride-Affected Villages
You chair a district-level committee in a semi-arid block of Gujarat where the Central Ground Water Board records an aquifer decline of 2.4 m a year over five years; 38 per cent of wells now go dry in summer. Twenty-seven textile dyeing and processing units draw 9.6 million litres a day from borewells under no-objection certificates issued in 2014, all of which expire in three months. The units employ 11,000 workers, 70 per cent local, and pay about 340 crore rupees in annual GST. The canal that serves 6,200 farmers carries only 41 per cent of its design discharge. A High Court order directs the state to regulate groundwater extraction but leaves the mechanism to the executive. Six villages record fluoride at 2.1 mg/L against a permissible 1.5 mg/L, and their piped supply scheme is 60 per cent complete. The unit association offers to fund a recharge project if the renewals are granted without new conditions.
1. On what principle will you allocate water among drinking, agriculture and industry? Justify the principle against the competing claims.
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Allocation should be lexicographic rather than proportional: drinking water first, then livestock and ecological flows, then agriculture, then industry - with an efficiency condition attached to every single user.
The reasoning is that the same kilolitre has very different marginal value and very different substitutability. Drinking water has no substitute; fluoride at 2.1 mg/L is a health failure, not an economic trade-off. Industry can substitute through treated-effluent reuse and process change far more cheaply than a farmer can. But a blanket closure is also wrong: 11,000 jobs and 340 crore rupees of GST are real, and much of the water is embedded in export-earning product. The operating principle is therefore a declining cap with a price, not a ban.
Groundwater is a public trust resource and the High Court has already held that the state must regulate; the only remaining choice is the instrument. The order must state expressly that agriculture is not exempt - the 6,200 farmers also need metering and a crop-shift incentive, or the reform will be read as one rule for industry and another for farmers, and will lose public legitimacy.
2. Draft the conditions you would attach to renewal of the 27 certificates, and decide how to treat the association's offer.
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Conditions, each written and enforceable:
- Electromagnetic flow meters on every borewell with telemetry to the collector's dashboard, and monthly public disclosure of withdrawal.
- A five-year extraction cap, reduced by 5 per cent each year, referenced to the block's CGWB categorisation.
- Compulsory reuse of at least 40 per cent of treated effluent within 18 months, verified by a third-party auditor.
- A recharge obligation of at least 1.5 times extraction within the same watershed, funded through an escrow account operated by the committee.
- A forfeitable bank guarantee with a graded penalty schedule.
- No renewal for a unit without a functioning effluent treatment plant or with a pending prosecution.
On the association's offer: accept the recharge money only as an unconditional deposit, and refuse to link it to renewal. A quid pro quo converts a statutory condition into a contract, is vulnerable to challenge, and creates a precedent that the next unit will bargain with. Publish the conditions and the reasons for them, and apply them identically to all 27 units - discrimination between similarly placed units is where such orders usually collapse.
3. How will you sequence action over the next quarter, and where will resistance come from?
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First quarter: drinking water is the first claim. Six villages at 2.1 mg/L need immediate tanker supply plus either defluoridation units or an interim RO plant; complete the 60 per cent piped scheme with a dated milestone and a completion certificate on the collector's dashboard. Resistance will be lowest here and credibility highest, which is precisely why it must be visible first.
Second: industry. Issue the renewal order with conditions before the old certificates lapse, because a gap creates unregulated extraction and litigation on both sides. Uncertainty will come from the association, which will ask for a transition year; grant a defined transition with milestones, not an open exemption.
Third: agriculture. Freeze new borewell permits in the over-exploited block, push micro-irrigation and a shift from water-intensive crops with a per-hectare payment for water saved, and route monitoring through the farmers' cooperative rather than the district office.
The real resistance will come from farmers who see themselves as the original users being asked to change while industry was allowed to draw for a decade. That objection is fair, and the answer is a published extraction register for every category, including agriculture.