 Well, I'm Paul Webley, I'm the director of SIAS, and I'd like to welcome all of you in the audience tonight, particularly of those who've travelled a long way to be here, and I know that some people have travelled a very long way to be here, so people who've come here from Delhi, for example, and to Professor Philippe Collet's mother, who I know is here somewhere. So, welcome. I was told that you haven't actually seen your son lecture, so it should be a very interesting experience for you. We really appreciate you all taking the trouble to come here. It all adds to the occasion that is a SIAS inaugural. It's a ceremony, it's a reed to passage for the speaker, although I've been told that he was also not telling people that he'd been promoted to Professor, so maybe he needs a reed to passage to convince him that he is a professor now. It's a celebration, and it's an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole SIAS community. Now, to make sure it's an enjoyable event, can I ask you please to turn off your mobile phones? That's something I invariably get wrong myself, so let's just do that. My problem is not normally turning it off, it's remembering to turn it back on again afterwards. I'm always told that I should tell you where the fire exits are, and not very surprisingly, they're the exits that say fire exit. Now, I'm very pleased to welcome you to this particular inaugural lecture. It's the third inaugural of this academic session where you've got a long tradition at SIAS of serious expertise in water. To my shame, I know little of Philip Culley's work, so I'm really looking forward to hearing more about water law reforms in India and the opportunities and apprehensions these are engendering. Professor Culley will be introduced by Dr Usher Ramanathan. She's an internationally recognised expert on law and poverty. She studied law at Madras University, the University of Nagpur and Delhi University, and she's a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Development in Societies. She's also South Asia editor of the Law, Environment and Development Journal. She's co-edited two books with Philip Culley, and she's also written with him, so I can't think of anyone better suited to do the introduction. She's also flown in, especially from Delhi, to do this introduction, so thank you very much indeed. At the end of the vote of thanks will be given by Professor Andreas Pilopopoulis Mikolopoulis of the University of Westminster. Andreas read law in Thessaloniki, Greece, as well as many other European cities, as far as I can see, complete with his LMM at Kings and his PhD at Birkbeck. He's written widely in the areas of environmental law, human rights and postmodern jurisprudence. He's the co-director of the Westminster International Law and Theory Centre. I should tell you that just before the inaugural, he came in dressed completely differently and had to get changed, because he'd be doing some interesting event involving place and law that meant he had to dress comfortably. I suggest we all ask him about it in the reception afterwards. When we finish that, there will be a reception upstairs in the Brunai Gallery, sweet to which you're all invited. We're very grateful to Usher and Andrews for taking part in this event. To introduce Professor Kulloig, I'm now going to pass over to Usher. This is really a signal honour. It's great to have a friend who gives you an opportunity to say publicly what you think of him. Thank you, Philip. I know that reaching the position of Professor takes years of hard work, and I suspect he did that so that I would have this moment. I was just thinking what one can say to explain what Philip is, because I know that academically there will be lots of you who've watched him here who know what he is and what he does. His students will know how he teaches. His colleagues will know his collaborative abilities. But there are a number of things that he does when many of you are not watching, so I thought I'll tell you about some of those things. There are some things that we've... What is it that makes for a good researcher? Because as a teacher you watch him here, and I've watched him as a researcher quite closely, worked with him quite closely over the years. And there are some things that we had to start off with. We would say that there are two things that you require when you're in any kind of work of this kind. One is education, and the other is instinct. Sometimes you don't have the instinct and you've got to develop an instinct, and you might have to develop it through education, but education alone is never enough. We find that you always have to work yourself into an instinct before you can deliver anything worthwhile. With Philip, from the first time that I met him, which is many, many years ago, and I've grown old having known him, so I mean he hasn't grown old, I've grown old knowing him. All these years I found that both education and instinct have been there as much as was needed for every bit of work that was done, that he's done. The early years when we watched him at work, working in collaboration with a group that was working against the building of the Sardar Sir Over Dam, it was very interesting to watch how an academic could understand movement politics, work with them, and yet not compromise his academic quality, the quality of his work. It's retained its purity, and I must say that I particularly find it fascinating because I've never succeeded in doing it. Every time I begin it becomes a campaign, and Philip has never allowed his commitment to what he sees as right in the field to colour the way in which he does his academics. Actually, we've had a number of questions that have arisen from watching Philip and Philip's colleagues' work, and just to give an instance, we've had discussions on who is an academic. What does an academic do? Is an academic a mere spectator? Can an academic be an activist and still be a good academic? Is an academic a lender of words and voice? Is an academic a chronicler? Is an academic a biographer of experience? Is an academic a footnote? Can a person be an academic without a footnote? Is an academic someone who aspires to be many footnotes? I think what Philip has done through these years is a mix of many of these things without getting obsessed with the footnotes, but yet having many footnotes in the work that he does. It's been a learning process for many of us. I must also say that it's very difficult to be a multi-tasker when you're an academic. I don't know how you find it, but usually when you think you've got your thinking cap on, it's difficult to do practical things. With Philip it's never been a problem, and I think maybe the most scary thing for me to watch was to watch him write the book that he did on intellectual property. There was this window, and you could see the sunrise and the moon rise through that window. He sat at a table from where you could see the sun and the moon rise at different times of the day, of course. He would get up every once in a while to go into the kitchen to make the dessert for the evening. In between he finished a book. It's the first book on intellectual property that we had in Indian academia. It was accessible in terms of reading, readability, and it was written between desserts. That kind of tells you what Philip is. I must also let you into a little secret for those who don't know that he makes the best chocolate cake in the world. Apart from reading his books, if you want something more, you know where to go. It's not very easy to work in another country where you may get viewed as a foreigner very often. You keep going there, and the new people who meet you still think you're a foreigner. Philip speaks Hindi with ease, and he understands all the Hindi that there is to understand. I've watched him learning patience. He's not a very patient chap, but he's had to learn his patience. Every time somebody comes up to him and tries being kind to him because he's a foreigner who doesn't understand what's happening around him, and he could explain to them the politics of the place, I think India helped him learn patience through not knowing very often that he knew more about India than we thought he did. But what's been useful when I've watched him in India, what's been very useful is that this is one person who's been able to be multi-continental with remarkable ease and to carry the experiences across continents, both ways. Bringing it from Europe to Asia and then collaborating with Africa and doing it like it's the most natural thing to do. Like they say, sometimes the award does the person proud and sometimes the person does the award proud. I think so as can rest assured that he's done you proud by being Professor here. Just the last thing, that when Philip would come quite frequently to India to do his research between all the work that he was doing here and I think his mother got curious at one point about why he was going so frequently to India and she came there to find out. After spending two weeks, she went with him to many of the places that he took her to and then she came back and at the end of the two weeks she said, I came here to find out why my son is constantly coming here and I think I'm going back more confused. She's a country full of anarchy. The languages are odd, it's an odd place and then she paused for a moment and then she said, but I think I understand one reason why he comes here. It's because there are so many people who love him so much and I think that's true. He's about the best friend you can have and it's a friendship that is not only about the social hymn but he's able to share all that he learns and a lot of the learning that he does, it's a mix of the professional and the social and there's very little gap between the two. I'm impressed that Soas has the capacity to appreciate this merging of the person with the professional, with the political. I think that it really speaks very well for the institution and I'm glad that Philip is here where he can be appreciated for the kind of person that he is and the work that he does. Thank you. Thank you very much all of you for being here. Thank you to the people of the stage, all the people who are robed like me, okay, probably better robed than me, it seems. But before I forget, one person that also needs to be, Tank is Payal who is hiding somewhere behind here for organizing this event, for robing me as well, so that doesn't seem to, maybe it won't last the whole lecture. And as we were just discussing, I just discovered that I chose the right university for doing my PhD because I have a nicer robed than some of the other people on the stage. I didn't know that until today. Okay, beyond that, when I was asked to do this lecture, I was told I had to find something which was suitable for a mixed audience, for people working on water, people working on law, people who might not be working on anything at all related to what I do. Okay, I chose water for a variety of reasons, so I'll just start explaining that in two seconds. First of all, I hope that we can all relate to water because water is after all something that concerns us directly on a daily basis, even though I understand that the kind of concerns that we have here have nothing to do with the kind of concerns that I'm going to talk about in a little bit more detail in India. It's definitely not staying. Secondly, and while I know there are some people in the audience who are very much within that field, there has been a lot of work on water, including in India in various spheres, but it so happens that there has been very little work on water law. That's true at the international level. It's much more true in India because there has really been virtually no work happening for a long time. That's where I'll bring back Usha into the picture because I also need to say my two bits about Usha. The reason why Usha is here and the reason why it made a lot of sense for her to be here is not just because she's seen me growing up in a sense for many years academically and otherwise. It's also because she is one of the very few people in India who have actually engaged with water law for many years, and I know I need to qualify that immediately because she'll say she doesn't work on water law per se, which may be true on a daily basis. First of all, she's one of the few people who were working on water law many years ago. I won't say so that it doesn't sound like it's too many years ago. She's one of the very few people, if not the only person I have met over the past number of years that have now been working on water law in India who can engage not just with the law as it is on the books that probably many people can, but with the underlying concept and the broader framework within which water law falls. Despite not working on water law itself, she's definitely the one person I would have wanted to call from an academic perspective only if I had had to choose from that perspective. There's another reason why I chose to speak on water law, which is that since I started working on it about in 2004 and there again, Usha is directly related to this because one day we were both called, I think we got an email from a colleague with whom we had been working for a long time in the context of dams, again the same Narmada dams Usha talked about, and he came up and said there are all these things happening from a law perspective and we are not understanding what's happening. Can you help us? At that point, I think neither of us had any ideas that there was a whole churning of new water laws happening. It was in front of us, it was all official laws coming up, but absolutely nobody had taken notice either in terms of law, activists, research, whatever it may be, apart from people who were passing these laws, there was really no one understanding the broader dimensions behind what was happening. So since I started that work completely by chance in a sense, it has had a way of taking over my life, and I guess by now I think Usha keeps joking that I work water law and I dream water law at night. It's a good sign that I don't dream water law at night, but it's more or less reached that stage where because there are so few people working on water law, it seems that given the number of issues that are taking place, there is more and more demand for doing more work in that field. So that's kind of what's happened. That's one of the reasons why I guess I chose also to talk about this today. Now lastly before I move on, I just also wanted to make the connection with Usha in the sense that the kind of work I'm presenting to you is in a sense a reflection of my own understanding of what Usha is. The reason why that happened is for two reasons, one of them that wasn't mentioned earlier, but I just mentioned it to make the link. The reason why I first went to India, the first time I went to India is because I did a master here, and the only thing I heard about was India, so one fine day I decided to go to India, so that's how I first put my finger into the country. So it was really directly related to my experience at Usha, and it's also the same time I spent at Usha in the first place, which taught me that despite the fact that I had done a law degree in Switzerland, which really didn't look like there was any prospect for doing anything with law in the future, it's when I came here that I realized that there was indeed a lot I could do without necessarily having to go and look for another field to expand my horizons. So in effect, hopefully what I'm talking about tonight is really the reflection of the changes that we're brought about by my Soas experience as a student, though obviously I'm sure that's been changed a lot in the meantime. Okay, so water law, that's something which is an experience indirectly for all of us on a daily basis. It's first of all drinking water, that's obvious. In India it's a struggle for the overwhelming majority of the people on a daily basis, specifically for the overwhelming majority of women. But even for the small percentage of the population within urban areas that has access to piped water supply, water is still a concern, even though a more distant concern, because supply is not assured on a daily basis to the extent that one might want. So in a sense, water, in the sense of drinking water, is a concern, not in the same way that we understand here, so a much more direct concern. It's also a concern when moving to a broader scale in terms of environmental issues, because environmental pollution that has impacts on water ecosystems is increasingly becoming an issue that affects people in their daily lives, maybe first of all farmers, but a much broader range of people as well. Finally, that links up all the way to the international level, and that's probably true for many countries around the world, but it's specifically true in India, where the international dimension of water sharing, whether with Pakistan or with Bangladesh, or whether in both very different contexts, is an issue which matters at the policy-making level, which turns into legal conflict once in a while. So it's from the very local to the national level, water is an issue that makes up that part of the fabric of policy-making at all levels. Now, what I want to focus on for tonight to simplify or to narrow down the scope is specifically on drinking water, because that's the easiest entry point, and to link that with groundwater as well. So I'll just start with a couple of minutes of context just so that I'm sure we're all on the same level in terms of the issues I want to bring up later on. Access to drinking water specifically in rural areas, in principle, official figures tell us that everyone has access to water, but even governmental figures recognise that more or less 70% get access to sufficient clean water, and so both have to be taken together. Just as a matter of record, sufficient water, as of now in terms of policy norms, is 40 litres per capita. Now, what are the reasons for insufficient access for the 30% that are recognised as having not sufficient access to water yet? One may be absence of infrastructure, and again in principle that only very few people today who do not have access to any hand pumps or any other source of water in the vicinity of the place where they live. A much more serious concern in terms of the numbers that are affected are falling water tables, which means that they may be a hand pump, but the water table may have fallen, which means that the hand pump has dried up, so that's typically a case where it would look like people have access, but in practice there is no water. There are issues of restrictions, both in terms of social norms and economic factors, so economic factors are to simplify simply the cost. Social norms in India that would be specifically caste issues, and while we would hope that caste-related discriminations, inequalities in access to water are going away or have been going away for the past several decades, there's just a case that I can't resist mentioning just to show that it's really a present concern. Just a few weeks ago, and that's something I read in the paper, so I don't know more about the case, a young man from the state of Haryana had his hand cut off for having drunk water from the water pot of someone from a higher caste, so it's not a theoretical concern, it's still a very practical concern, this issue of the social dimension of access to water. Finally, the problem which is one of the most significant in terms of the number of people that get affected on an increasing basis, and it's the declining quality of water. You may have access to water, but it may not be deemed clean according to the standards in place. The other factors I want to mention at the outset is that there are issues of lack of access that are caused by insufficient availability of water, but particularly in terms of drinking water, there is no question of an actual physical scarcity of water. Drinking water only takes between five and ten figures, one sees usually a 7% of overall water consumption, so the issue is really not in terms of not having enough water to provide everyone the 40 or 70 litre per capita per day, but it's more all the other issues among which I've highlighted a few just here. In terms of groundwater, what needs to be mentioned is that it's become the major source of drinking water for everyone, it's about 80% of the population that now provides itself through groundwater drinking water, some things that's dramatically changed over the past few decades. Similarly for other users of water, groundwater is becoming an increasing source of water, and that's the case for instance for bottling plants, and bottling plants are one of the issues that I want to get back to in a minute. Now, there are a multiplicity of conflicts related to drinking water linked directly or indirectly to the rules in place. One of them is the problem linked to the fact that it is landowners that have control over groundwater, which means that access to the wells, hand pumps or whatever that may be, situated on private land are regulated or mediated by the landowners, which again will be an issue, not necessarily directly in legal terms, but in the case of caste equations for instance. A second, maybe less visible conflict is the question of disconnections. Disconnections can happen in cities when the utility disconnects someone's water supply because they haven't paid their bills. That's very straightforward in the sense that the utility does it directly. In rural areas we get the same phenomenon, but in an indirect way, which is that for people who get waters through bore wells for instance, in case they do not manage to pay the electricity bill or for any other reason, electricity gets disconnected, then access to water gets disconnected automatically. But the link is not made for instance between the lack of access to electricity and the realization of the human right to water. Now these conflicts are conflicts which are largely invisible at the policy making level because largely they affect mostly the poor, they affect individuals, they do not affect people in large number at the same time. So these are the conflicts in effect that are the most interesting, that are the ones I want to bring out to you because they are the ones that do not get discussed either academically or in policy terms. Now there are obviously also lots of visible conflicts, much more visible conflicts concerning drinking water and just two examples of that I'll take in terms of large scale conflicts. One is the case of the state of Delhi, it's a city state which has an increasing, ever increasing burgeoning population and the state needs to find water to provide drinking water to its population. Since it's a city state, it doesn't have access to drinking water, to water beyond what falls under its territory. Hence it is in a permanent state of negotiation and conflict with neighboring states in terms of accessing sufficient water to provide the drinking water. The second case is a case going back to the Narmada dams that have already been mentioned, specifically in the case of the Sardar Sarwar Dam in the state of Gujarat which happens to be a multi and inter-state project. The rationale for the dam has been evolving over time. At this point, one of the main justification for the dam is the provision of drinking water to hundreds of villages in the drier part of the state of Gujarat. What's interesting here is that all the conflicts related to the dam and there have been many over many years from displacement related issues, probably three to four hundred thousand people displaced by the dam to all the environmental impacts. All of that in a sense comes into the issue of drinking water because the main rationale in a sense or the best rationale that has been found by the government at this point is the provision of drinking water. So we can make the link very directly with these formal very visible conflicts as well. So these ones have been acknowledged, these ones have been debated in the media, in academic literature and so on which is why for today I'm focusing more on the less visible conflict. The rest of the time I want to keep you here tonight I'll try to focus on two different examples to try and bring it to a more specific level. One, the first one I want to take is drinking water supply in rural areas which will help me illustrating the kind of policy changes that have taken place over the past two decades. And again that's an example of invisible conflicts in the sense that the conflicts that arise at the local level in terms of access to water to a specific well for instance are not things which are actually discussed specifically either at the state or national level from a policy or law perspective. The second case is an example of a more visible conflict which is industrial use of groundwater specifically in the case of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in the state of Kerala. This conflict has been mediated by various organs of the state. There's been a movement against the bottling plant because they have also been interventioned by the courts, by the state government and that kind of conflict shows us the potential of, helps us to understand the kind of links that exist between industrial use of groundwater, drinking water, environmental aspects, agricultural aspects and as well in the specific case I want to mention health related concerns. So in a sense that brings in a much broader set of issues. The first example that I'm taking is, refers to the now 15 year long policy changes that have been taking place for drinking water in rural areas. The title of this slide is called Swajaldhara with a dash in between. The reason for that is because there was first a pilot project of the World Bank in the late 1990s which was called the Swajaldh project and that was then turned into national policy from 2002-2008 in the form of something called the Swajaldhara guidelines. But the policy principles underlying both are more or less the same to discuss them in one go. In a sense it's that helps us explain a whole decade of changes. So what is it that the Swajaldhara schemes, the project implemented looked like? Now it's something we've moved beyond that at this point but it explains where we are today. First of all the proposal was that it is the users themselves that should determine what kind of drinking water schemes they wanted to implement for their own use. So it's not for their village because it wasn't for the whole village, it was for themselves. That was done in the name of increasing the participation of users to the drinking water schemes again on the assumption that drinking water is something that concerns everyone very directly. Now the first problem to highlight is that the user group was in principle to be chosen by the village assemblies that means a meeting of the whole village. In practice at least in all the visits I've been able to do it was always self-selection a group of people coming together and realizing that there was something to do that there was a new project opportunity to be implemented. In other words there was hardly ever any women to start with on the committees because it was usually the more powerful men of the village that were coming together to decide on the scheme, just one element of the problem. The choices by the users means that there was no allocation by the state so in a sense there was no planning of the schemes in terms of deciding which villages were the neediest villages at that point or which were the people within one village that were most in need of getting access to new water infrastructures in case for instance there could have been hand pumps in certain parts of the village but not others that could have been planned but the whole idea of these schemes was to let users themselves demand in policy terms what they wanted. The broader underlying proposal behind this was that the government should limit itself to the formulation of policy aims and then restrict itself to monitoring and evaluating. Not here, no enforcement of any policy proposals enforcement was left to be at the local level so in other words it's a government withdrawal from some of the function it had been performing. Now the user group choice of schemes was not in a vacuum the government is still there to provide the policy framework that again immediately reminds us that the government withdrawing is not withdrawing entirely but is withdrawing in part so that was linked to certain norms the first one of them and one of the most significant was the willingness to pay off users which means that users could decide on whatever scheme they wanted but they had to pay 10% of the capital costs at the outset before the implementation of the project and they were meant to pay full costs of the operation the maintenance and anything related to the replacement let's say if the engine failed replacement costs would need to be borne by the villagers. Now what has that meant in practice? In practice that has meant that water under the schemes is only provided to people who pay the 10% contribution capital cost in the first place so everyone else is by definition excluded that's how the scheme works the problem is that in practice that means that the poor are excluded and in parts of the country where villages are made of different hamlets then the hamlets that contain mostly a poor population which will happen in many cases to be also down in the caste equations for instance Dalit hamlets will largely be excluded from the scheme at the outset so it's not a question of the scheme not being unequal or equal it's just funded on principles which dismiss certain people at the outset second thing is that the choice of scheme was free completely free in principle but in practice there has been a strong emphasis on individual piped connections instead of the usual hand pumps that have been put in most villages for many years by now by the government so in a sense what this does is that this increases the cost of building the scheme that increases the 10% contribution that people have to give that's one thing but if you take that decision at the outset it's fine but mostly it increases dramatically the cost of running the scheme afterwards the difference between running a scheme on electricity with an engine and so on and a hand pump are very significant third point is that there was a distrust of community taps but in the context of piped water supply which is the equivalent in the sense of a hand pump and a distrust of sharing of water among water users now in practice what this meant is that at least in the context of the Swagall project the early pilot project for which we have a longer time period to see what has happened on the ground community taps were always installed in the first place people were told that there was a need to provide both for individual connections and to the rest of the village in practice after a couple of years all the community taps were exposed the reason given by the committee overseeing the project to those users was always the same which was that the villages the other villages, the community had not paid whatever they were supposed to pay hence eventually they had cut off the supply and it makes sense from an economic perspective because it was otherwise those users that had to bear the cost of providing water to the whole village but the underlying point here is that these are users it's a user committee it's not the punch-at the local elected village assembly which under the constitution in principle has control over drinking water at the local level so that's where the problem arises in the sense that there's been a displacement from the elected representatives to those so-called user committees which in effect not able even if they wanted to they are not able to take over the functions of the punch-at the second point here was in terms of sharing of water I found very significant especially because we encountered that in Rajasthan, a very dry state where there has been a lot of solidarity at the local level more than in areas that suffer less from water scarcity and in certain villages not in all villages it has to be said but in certain villages the schemes were implemented in such a way that people were specifically told that they were not allowed to share the water they were getting from the scheme with their neighbours whether they were family, just neighbours they were not allowed to share for fear, for penalty so in a sense it's instead of promoting better access throughout the village what happens is that it is the people who are the users of the scheme that get better access so it's good for a limited number of people but that doesn't provide a broader policy answer to the need for better access to drinking water in villages now just to give an illustration of what the schemes have been in practice so that was just to give an idea of a tank and the infrastructure that's built for those projects that's not what I want to focus on that's a typical case so it's obviously much more expensive than a hand pump but the second slide is to indicate that there is also scope for whatever success stories within a scheme that doesn't seem to have much potential in equity terms in terms of the realisation of the human rights for everyone within a given village and the reason why there was scope in practice for some success stories is because the scheme was implemented not just through these user committees I mentioned but with the support I shouldn't use that word of so-called support organisations or in other words NGOs coming to help the villagers so it so happens at least to one organisation I know there may be other success stories but this is one I know an organisation called Vanagna working with Dalit women for Dalit women's rights who happens to find itself as one of these support organisations they decided to take that up as a way to finance their own work on women's rights and they realised that there was potential to do something with this and the picture of this closed well in a village in Chitrakoot district in the southern part of Uttar Pradesh is the result of an organisation taking up some mandates of the projects deciding which scheme to put forward which scheme to implement implementing the cheapest possible option for the whole community in a Dalit hamlet of the village where the rest of the village had done their own pipe scheme for themselves so that kind of gives the contrast of the different things that can be done depending on who is involved so that also brings another point which is the problem with drawing of the state depending on the kind of advice people get at the local level they may not be all experts in terms of what kind of solution they need if support organisation keep telling them that go for piped connections because you get better water access it makes sense that most people will go for that there is potential for something else as well as illustrated in this case the broader connection that this brings in terms of the evolution of the policy framework the emphasis on individual connection has the impact obviously on the importance of hand pumps in the first place this doesn't do anything to anyone because for the people who do not benefit from the new schemes they still have access to the existing infrastructure through which they have been accessing water the understanding being that everyone has access to some water if they are alive so in the first place there is no issue per se but the problem comes with the withdrawal of the state from operation and maintenance costs which means that the hand pumps that have been a bit a staggered implementation but in principle it has been implemented for the past few years from now on the government is not supposed to chip in for the maintenance of existing infrastructure so once a hand pumps fails that means the villagers have to pay for its repair so that's the first level of the first policy issues that arises now we have moved in a sense many steps forward with a strategic plan for 2011 2022 which proposes a virtual phase out of hand pumps by saying that we should move from 90% reliance on hand pumps today to 10% by 2022 and that will be made up through increased reliance on the individual connections so that whatever I was explaining in terms of the specific project at the local level and the kind of pilot project there has in fact feeds in into a much broader policy framework but there is obviously no I shouldn't say obviously but there is no discussion of what kind of policy framework is implemented at the local level and the way in which the government thinks about moving forward in the long run now a more another concern which goes back to the local level is the issue of replacement cost now the problem that I've been able to identify in all the villages I've visited is that while people are usually willing and are able to pay the monthly charge that represents the cost of pumping the water and maybe the minor repairs or paying the person who will go switch on and switch off the pump in not a single village one sword about invested into a fund that would be able to pay for a major repair and so what happens when there is a major repair and it is always that the scheme ends up being disused so these schemes where the replacement costs are to be born by the users in practice do not work because the money is not there at the local level and there is no planning in terms of policy planning at the local level to make sure that these are sustainable scheme in terms of the long term I've already mentioned that the user committees are not directly we're not directly part of the punch what I want to emphasize is that this was something which was really obvious in terms of being not particularly within the legal framework so in the meantime that means over the past decade the user committees have increasingly been brought back within the punch system but what's interesting is that we now have at least in certain states a scheme whereby the punch so again the elected village body has a water committee and to that you append a certain numbers of so-called users who are individuals who have usually been part of these paying schemes who get appended to the existing democratically elected committee as additional members so in a sense it's a kind of a dilution of the governance framework that exists that's been implemented over time last point in terms of the practical implications of the kind of policies that are being implemented is that when the government withdraws it not only withdraws from provision of services but it also withdraws from adjudicating any disputes that may arise as a result of the new scheme so in a sense however bad accountability was earlier and there were obviously huge problems with accountability through the public sector now the problems that we are facing is that that layer of accountability has simply been withdrawn and people are left to fath for themselves at the local level so in a sense what we get here as kind of the legal and policy frameworks which people can feel at the local level if they so want, if they so manage but the state itself decide not to get involved anymore at any level now just briefly to put that into the broader picture I won't go into the detail of these various policy documents I've put here on the slide there has been over the past 15 years a stream of policy reforms that have been proposed in the form of policy documents administrative directions or pilot project as the first it started with a pilot project what is important to note here is the fact that it's been a mix of national and international agencies working together in a sense on a similar set of principles which is not what we would expect because we are always told that water is a local issue and we expect local concern hence the principles for any reforms that would be implemented should be alongside along the lines of some things that is very much driven by local concerns and so that's one of the issues and the second issue is the fact that the pace of the reform the pace of change has increased dramatically and that's borne out by the documents there are more documents than this because we once have highlighted here while the changes started slowly in the state, 1990s and early parts of the last decades in just the past four years we've had two major new policy frameworks being thrown at the country as in all the states in a sense which which still built on the same principles that were introduced in the 1990s but takes them in a sense it's fast forwarding the implementation throughout the country the issue here is that these reforms have been entirely driven by the executive and there has been absolutely no input from either the legislative assemblies at the state level or parliament at the national level that is in a sense the biggest problem that needs to be highlighted from this slide because water being recognised as a fundamental right to human rights one would expect that one of the first task of legislative assemblies of the legislature in general would be to address issues related to drinking water interestingly there has been a lot of water law reform in the country in India over the past 10, 15 years none of them have directly addressed drinking water at least none in the sense of the nitty gritty that I've tried to highlight here the only things that we have is all these policy documents largely at the national level and these documents have neither been discussed or debated in the legislature nor been widely debated either at the state or national level so in a sense these are really things coming out of the executive at a rapid pace without a process of policy change being discussed and debated at any particular level as far as the local level is concerned it's very clear that people are not part of the discussions concerning policy changes they understand policy changes when they reach them in the form of these specific projects that come with a given set of principles at that point they can react and relate to the policy changes but there is nothing beyond the actual implementation of the policy now let me turn to the second example which is coca cola bottling plants in Plachimada which is now a case which has been discussed widely throughout India and internationally it's one of many bottling plants for soft drinks then bottled water what's interesting is that we are talking bottled water hence we are also talking drinking water at some level it's a plant which started production in 2000 having received all the necessary clearances but maybe the reason why it's more interesting for our purposes than other similar bottling plants in India or maybe elsewhere in the world is because in Kerala the framework for decentralization has been relatively better implemented at least up to a certain extent and the punch-at in that case was a village assembly had the rights at that point to issue the license and decide on the renewal or non-renewal of the license for the bottling plant which is not something that can be set for the whole country so in a sense it's a very positive development where a local village assembly can decide on what should happen in terms of industrial development not just in terms of actual drinking water supply to people now what happened in from 2000 to 2003 was a big number of controversies villagers starting being happy especially the farmers the neighbouring farmers run the bottling plant and eventually the punch-at decided not to renew the license what this has led to over the past decades, nine, ten years is a strong campaign that has been maintained by people of the area but ok the campaign that would be is that there are campaigns let's say various other bottling plants for the kind of problems that I'm going to highlight so that's not the specificity the specificity is that this has also been litigated in first the High Court twice in the High Court and now it's pending in the Supreme Court and the state government that is the government of Kerala has also been very active in trying to find solution to this conflict at its own level and I'll get back to that in a second the problems that I highlighted here is that the different organs of the state at their own different levels have all tried to pitch in and address different aspects of the dispute now first of all what are the issues arising in the context of this bottling plant first there is an issue of access to drinking water linked also to health concerning the diminishing water quality in the area and the falling water table which has affected access to drinking water for people living nearby secondly there are environmental issues and that's another reason why this case is particularly significant which we may not find everywhere else because for some reasons which are not completely clear yet the owners of the plant decided that the sludge the waste created by the process of making the soft drinks was something which they could give to farmers under the guise of manure it's not clear whether that was done deliberately or not but in any case that manure for fields ended up being full of cadmium and other heavy metals which means that they have been significant negative environmental impacts not from the plant itself but in a sense from the distribution of the sludge in the neighboring fields gives a broader dimension to the conflict there have been also issues of access to irrigation water that makes sense if the water table has fallen but the point here is that Palachad district which is a district within which this plant is located is the so-called rice ball of Kerala so in a sense agriculture is the main issue in terms of for most people within the region and indeed the next issue which arises is one related to agriculture again which is that they have been diminishing employment opportunities in the area because of falling water table which means less fewer crops hence all the landless manual workers, farm workers have been finding it more difficult to find employment there so in a sense what's interesting is that it's not just about the plant being there closing, not closing the people employed there are issues related to water directly to the environment and also livelihood issues which go beyond the impact of having the plant or not having the plant in the punchet now what are the lessons from the case which is still very much an ongoing case first of all in legal terms there is a basic problem in the sense that the existing rules that give landowners complete control of groundwater are not suited to resolve the kind of conflicts that can arise when a given landowner decides to in effect over extract groundwater the neighbouring farmers whether it's an industrial concern or another use of groundwater the neighbours never have a say in a sense in the amount of water that can be extracted that comes down to rules which were laid down in the 19th century so in a sense the rules we have in this country which work fine for the kind of climate we have in this country but which have really never worked for the kind of hydrological conditions in India but these are the rules which are still in place and these are the rules which in a sense give rise to the kind of conflicts that are visible in the context of the plachimala dispute now what's interesting is that there has been a search at various levels for finding new solutions to the dispute that's the reason first of all the first judge that looked at the issue in the high court decided that the actual extraction of groundwater was illegal that was going a bit too far probably so the next sex of judges that looked at it decided that the first judge had got it wrong but what's significant is that the first judge tried to find a new rationale for doing something about a problem which is an actual problem that had to be addressed and he also tried to think in terms of giving groundwater a new legal status which would remove it from the direct control of landowners so again that's been dismissed by the high court for the timing it's sitting in the supreme court so there is no resolution to that part of the dispute in terms of what the government of Kerala has done that's also been extremely instructive in a sense they started by setting up a so-called high power committee to look into the aspect of compensation so there was an understanding that there was a need that there were damages that needed to be compensated so that the Coca-Cola company has been very unhappy that the fact that the government took a stand in the first place that's something which will have repercussion for a long time I guess and after that committee gave its report finding all sort of problems among the ones some of the ones I've highlighted here the government decided to introduce a bill to set up a separate tribunal for the compensation of damages arising in the Plachymar Dacu so what we see here is that it's a state government that feels the need to do a special effort that's in terms of introducing a new legislation to adjudicate a single conflict which at the end of the day is not a major conflict in the sense of being large scale but it's a major conflict in social and political terms and for the timings there is no implementation of the bill in fact it's not even become law because they have been dispute in terms of the power of the state government to come up with this kind of separate tribunals for compensation so it may well be that nothing will happen in practice but the fact is that the state government itself has tried to do whatever it thought it could do whatever it saw in its power to do to come to a different kind of solution to the problem the third point in terms of lessons from this case is that there is a problem in terms of planning of industrial use of groundwater or property of water generally but specifically of groundwater and which would at least in a sense at least one thing would at least hope for is that no industrial use of groundwater would be implemented in areas that are relatively dry where groundwater is becoming scarce interestingly while Palachad district is a rice bowl of Kerala the specific area of the district where the bottling plant of Plachimada is located is the driest area of the district so it's very interesting to see how that kind of issue arises which could have been avoided in terms with a broader plan being put in place now to put two examples together briefly what are the lessons we learn from these cases that is in a sense first of all the courts have been telling us for the past two decades on an increasingly frequent basis on the fundamental right to water in India so even though it's not in the constitution now it's well established that there is a human right to water in practice the actual practice of the government either in terms of policy documents in terms of what's implemented at the local level so in specific villages is that water is seen as a basic need and that really is a difference between the human rights and the basic needs to be emphasised here the basic needs rather than the social rights so there is even one policy document which specifically admonishes the people of India for having misunderstood water as being a social right rather than an economic and basic need so that we have it in written form second point is that all these drinking water reforms as I mentioned have been without any legislative input the problem is that that means that in terms of the regulation of drinking water there is no legislation that allocates rights and obligations of the water utilities of providers of water at any level on a broad scale similarly there is no legislation that specifically sets down any quality for drinking water there are standards that exist but they are not referred to in any legislative framework now the problem is the following in a sense that as long as the government was providing water for everyone and implementing everything it was understood for instance that quality standards that had been put out in the public domain though not binding would be the standards that the government would implement and at worst they could be held accountable for not meeting those standards even not in a code of law at least in policy and political terms now when we are moving towards provision of water through other actors whether private sector or just individual contractors there is an absolute need to have some standard in place because otherwise there is a complete vacuum which cannot be remedied by people in terms of their own access to water now one just mentioned it but I haven't really mentioned it until now one of the issues that arise was the underlying issues of all these reforms is whether we are moving towards privatisation of water services that's indeed one of the biggest debate in terms of water but interestingly not in terms of water law so the first thing to mention here is that the laws in place in India neither prohibits nor contributes to the privatisation of water services in a sense they are completely neutral they were all worded in such a way that you could do whatever you want so it's not that law itself pushes or pulls in one specific direction however what we see through the policy documents again it's not the law but then it's a policy that drives the changes is that there is indeed a push which is increasingly visible even though privatisation is not being pushed as an option per se it's not anymore privatisation per se is good but it's more privatisation through different means or in piecemeal fashion in rural areas the strategic plan that I already mentioned specifically calls for private sector actors to be involved in rural water supplies that's something completely new so that's something which again one would hope to be seen discussed in the legislature at whichever level that is rather than just introduced in policy documents in urban areas what we see now is that as opposed to the proposals for so-called big bank privatisation of water services as was implemented firstly or mostly in Latin America in the 1990s we now have task specific privatisation implemented that for instance in the case in Delhi where metering, billing very specific task within the water utility have been privatised and we also see privatisation on a geographical basis in a sense of pilot project in certain specific areas of a city possibly as a prelude to broader privatisation but possibly also as in terms of simply area specific privatisation now all this talk of either privatisation or decentralisation or participation by users gives a sense that the state is withdrawing from provision and really limiting itself to a distant regulatory role again without getting involved in accountability enforcement at the local level and so on that withdrawal is in fact not a reality so there is another side to the law and policy debate and it's one that really needs to be put parallel because it influences probably just as much if not more what's actually happening and will happen in practice so in a sense the state still very much maintains its presence but it's in different forms it's starting to take a different shape and form and one of the one easy case to refer to is that so called proposal for interlinking of rivers it's a mammoth ID it's a mammoth project that would build hundreds of major canals and dams to link the different river basins within the country now interestingly the reason why I'm bringing it here today is because the supreme court that project was mooted quite a long time ago it was given a kick by the supreme court in 2002 in the meantime given lots of opposition the state had started to be less prominent in terms of pushing it forward just a couple of weeks ago the supreme court has come back and admonished the state as in the government for not having done enough and told the government that it was time to implement this project on war footing now the issue that also highlight something very interesting is that policymaking happens within the executive legislative developments do not happen in a sense for instance with drinking water where parliament is just not involved the courts also get involved in something that between policymaking and lawmaking as in the case of immense ideas like that which definitely cannot be regulated through a court but which in fact happen to be given pushers at various points now overall what it is that we get with the reforms that we've seen for the past 20 years in fact what we really see is that there are different pools in different directions and the real problem is that there is no attempt has been been or maybe no attempt can be made yet to put it all to bring it all under one direction so we see the case law pulling in one direction now I'm not taking the case law concerning friends and that interleaking is the first but the more I would say progressive case law the one through which the courts have recognised the fundamental right to water the one where they have said that water is a public trust in other words a common resource rather than something that can be privately owned all of that the court has been doing consistently in a sense over the past couple of decades secondly we have that whole stream of new laws that have been adopted and progressively implemented these laws concern for instance user participation so that reflects what I was talking about but user participation specifically in the management of canal and having nothing to do with drinking waters in a sense there are very specific interventions that do not take a broader perspective of what needs to be done and the other laws for instance propose the setting up of new institutions in the water sector these new institutions being meant to take over part of the functions of the state but these new laws do not tell us what the state is supposed to do they only set up the new institution and give those new institutions a mandate so in a sense they don't resolve the problem of the fact that the state machinery is still very much there and is not going to disappear overnight whether that's the intent or not the problem is that we don't get the sense of what's supposed to happen at the end of the day one of the things that's also visible with these reforms is the diminishing role of the legislature even though lots of new water laws have been adopted so in a sense that the laws in sectors which may or may not be the most important but definitely the one that's the most important acknowledge universally that is drinking water that one has been left completely untouched I can go to my last slide where are these leaders for the future? I guess the importance of water in social, political, policy terms is such that water will remain an issue of considerable importance and there will be attempts to make sure that the current reforms are worked on further down the line so in terms of providing some of the positives that are rising at this point the planning commission is for instance in the midst of an exercise of trying to define a new water strategy for the country trying to pull some of these different bits and pieces together the planning commission can't do the job by itself but it is one new initiative in terms of bringing things together in terms of that privatisation issue which I mentioned again which is one of the key issues in terms of what's debated in the public domain what's clear is that water cannot drop out of the policymaker's attention because it is too significant for people on a daily basis and what we're already seeing is that in urban areas if not in rural areas where more work needs to be done there is much more awareness there is much more contestation also of policy proposals by the government and that at least generates a level of debate even though that may not reach all the way to the higher legislatures of parliament and I couldn't resist finishing with a quote that I found a couple of weeks ago from the president I can't remember if he's president or chairman of Nestlé Peter Brabec who when interviewed about how Nestlé is doing in terms of its bottle water business he said there is nothing to worry about because in any case it's only 0.0, 0.0, 0.0 0.9% of water that's actually bottled water that may be true he didn't say what is the world consumption he understood there but the point I want to make is that picture from the Platyma, the bottling plant while that may be true in the future it's clear that it won't be enough for Nestlé or maybe Coca-Cola whichever just happened to find this quote to just assert that the fact of getting into the business of bottled drinking water has no impact on the water sector in fact it has, the people of Platyma in a sense have shown that there are ways in which the kind of conflict that arise can be mediated that doesn't mean that bottled water would not be set up but they should be set up under conditions which work both in terms of the water sector in general and the social and livelihood opportunities after that thank you very much Philippe, esteemed colleagues friends this is the vote of thanks now I have to be honest with you I had to google what a vote of thanks was and I got all sorts of ideas about what a vote of thanks is I decided to ignore every single one of them I really take this as an opportunity and indeed a privilege to thank Philippe for this, I can't describe it how wonderfully solid despite the fact that we kept on talking about liquids here such a solid delivery such a wonderful arsenal of knowledge that we just witnessed here so I just take this I think it's an enviable position to actually say that the vote of thanks is essentially a voice that represents all this the body of people here that you cannot speak because Philippe was talking ex-cathedra which means we shall take no questions is the privilege of the inaugural lecture and I think we should respect this but it's me my responsibility and my privilege indeed to voice and I'm pretty sure that it's one of the few times where I actually think that I can safely speak for a large number of people that we have to express our deepest thanks to Philippe and if I may say Philippe's you see how Philippe was and how is and how he behaves everything about Philippe is is modesty is humblness and I cannot tell you how this combination of incredible humble self-effacing that goes on with Philippe contrasts with the CV he sent me my printer ran out of paper small font too an extraordinary thing and for this reason it was it's all the more humbling I think for us to be here what I saw that Philippe was doing was this except for the obvious inter-disciplinarity of the projects it's something he started with the concept of water as conflict and we can all sympathise with that this is what is happening this is what is going to happen we know that the world is going to be divided it's not over religion it's not over politics it's actually over water it's an extraordinary thing how water seems to be the one thing that bridges the personal that is the corporeal our own bodies with the global I mean the other thing is air of course but it's harder to stop us from breathing whereas it's quite easy to give us poison water and what Philippe has managed to do I think during this lecture is bring this conflict and especially the invisibility of the conflict because that is exactly what Philippe was getting at he didn't talk and very specifically you said Philippe that you're not going to talk about the visible conflicts but you're going to look into the invisibility of the conflict and what I was reading throughout his marvellous talk is precisely this conflict between on one hand what we call law in the sense of policy in the sense of regulation and on the other hand what might one dare to call justice so the use of law that Philippe was presenting to us is a law that talks about community that talks about personal choice and the choices of the local communities and how they have the freedom to choose in theory it talks about a law that talks about future plans the 2020s it talks about a law at the same time though that discourages sharing and it talks about a law that excludes women it talks about a law that excludes the Hamlets so when the law talks about right Philippe talks about village water pumps and he talks about the poor in India in the uttermost invisibility so what I felt that Philippe was doing throughout this lecture is bringing up this much needed horizon of what we can call justice the understanding of justice for the marginal for the excluded for the women not the urban population that gets on to station in the heated debate and if I may say this is an extraordinary thing because Philippe is a Swiss man he's a white Swiss man who lives in London and Delhi he speaks English with an Indian rhythm which we all find I'm sure fascinating but somehow he is the western observer yet he manages to do that with such an extraordinary modesty and conviction and efficiency I mean you could see that there was nothing romanticised about his understanding of India there was nothing idealising he didn't even mention the word justice I'm the one who keeps on idealising here he stuck to law but it's this struggle of avoiding to be idealistic or avoiding to romanticise that I think Philippe has totally won because you know you saw how for example he was he didn't say that decentralisation localisation is a good thing we need the law to come back and give us strength to work through all these things so I'm full of awe in a sense because Philippe manages to straddle this incredibly vertiginously fragile path between continents shall I say between disciplines, between law and justice between offending people who think what do you know about how we live and yet doing it in this I think such a convincing and unassuming way and I think Philippe to a great extent performs exactly what he what he researches and this is a rare moment of academic honesty in a way he is what he does he is what he writes about and he is the moment I can perfectly see Philippe writing in front of his window and taking all this all this in and I think at the same time Philippe to me represents sewers I've always been coming when I was doing my PhD at Birkbeck which is a bit of a bizarre place it's kind of a hotbed of postmodern snobbism and it's well you know I fitted pretty well in there but true but then you know you come to sewers ah I breathe it's fine it's nice it's you know the cafe where you just sit around you don't care you know people take off their shoes great I hope they still do that and this understanding of the sewers is precisely this constant bridge between all these things and I think Philippe on so many levels he's exactly this bridge and may I say Usher was talking about his chocolate cake I will talk about his creme brule and he's dull I mean it's incredible he's Indian cooking and his you know high Swiss bakery and it's he is that he is all that and I think that it's again I find this really really rather humbling and please forgive my idiotic metaphor but if I can say that his lecture was a bit like clear water you know the kind of Evian water on this side perhaps it was so clear it was you know you have to agree with me that you didn't need to look at these things they were so the delivery was so incredibly clear the viscosity of the water was full of these minerals of wisdom and full of you know this kind of you know liquid footnotes everywhere because he talks in a really solid position so if I can take the perhaps the I don't know perhaps the presumption that I can talk on behalf of you and thank Philipp on behalf of all of us for this wonderful lecture and also for I presume making us distinctly thirsty and I'm informed that there is a reception where not just water is going to be served on the first floor in the Brunai gallery so Philippe thank you so much