Context

The sharp turns away from democracy seen recently in the country must jolt citizens into stopping the descent.

Equality in democracy

• The central edifice of a democracy, or what makes it a revolutionary idea, is equality, or that it accords an equal status to all its people.
• The promise of the far-sighted Indian Constitution was of equal rights to all.
• If any benefit was accorded to smaller groups, religious or linguistic minorities or Dalits, it was in order to achieve substantive equality.

Faith as a differentiator

• The basis of citizenship under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019, allowing for non-Muslims from three countries to fast-track their citizenship, was the most serious push to introduce religion into citizenship.
• Impact on marital choice: In terms of marital choices, laws in the country in States where the national ruling party holds sway have drawn harsh attention on inter-faith couples.
• The Gujarat law criminalising inter-faith marriages has been called out by the Gujarat High Court.
• But the ordinance introduced in Uttar Pradesh (Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020) is now a law.
• Food has been criminalised: Stringent laws on cattle end up penalising those who have a certain diet, namely beef. The mood in the country created and abetted by people close to the powers that be, has led to lynchings.
• State governments and the Union government have mostly ignored the Supreme Court’s directions in 2018 to set up fast track courts, advice to take steps to stop hate messages on social media, or compensation to victims, or bringing in an anti-mob lynching law.
• Circumscribe where on can reside: The Gujarat Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Property and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from Premises in Disturbed Areas Act, popularly known as the Disturbed Areas Act, circumscribes where one can reside.
• The act was brought in an atmosphere where there was communal rioting and forced displacement, to ostensibly protect communities from distress sales, the twist accorded to it over the years firmly makes the forced separation of communities. evident.

Hostile environment

• Scholars like Thomas Blom Hansen and Paul Brass have unhesitatingly pointed to the role of violence that has historically been acceptable in Indian society and politics.
• Scholars like Christophe Jaffrelot have pointed out that there will not be a seamless transition to an “ethnic democracy”.
• The Indian nation is one formed on the promise of shared and participatory kinship, which recognised Indian nationalism as being distinct from the faith you practised at home.
• Prioritising any one identity will have disastrous consequences and history provides enough evidence of this.

Conclusion

The mobs read together with actions of the Union government and that of State governments mark a sharp turn away from the democracy India claims it is. That must jolt us into recognising the distance we have already travelled down the wrong path. That may be the first step to try to wrest the descent into the darkness of an apartheid state.

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Context

Over a period of one year, the committee set up to draft the new National Water Policy (NWP) received 124 submissions by state and central governments, academics and practitioners. The NWP is based on the striking consensus that emerged through these wide-ranging deliberations.

Major suggestion in NWP

Demand-side: Diversification of public procurement operations

• Irrigation consumes 80-90 per cent of India’s water, most of which is used by rice, wheat and sugarcane.
• Thus, crop diversification is the single most important step in resolving India’s water crisis.
• The policy suggests diversifying public procurement operations to include nutri-cereals, pulses and oilseeds.
• This would incentivise farmers to diversify their cropping patterns, resulting in huge savings of water.

2) Reduce-Recycle-Reuse

• Reduce-Recycle-Reuse has been proposed as the basic mantra of integrated urban water supply and wastewater management, with treatment of sewage and eco-restoration of urban river stretches, as far as possible through decentralised wastewater management.
• All non-potable use, such as flushing, fire protection, vehicle washing must mandatorily shift to treated wastewater.

3) Supply-side measure: Using technology to utilised stored water in dams

• Within supply-side options, the NWP points to trillions of litres stored in big dams, which are still not reaching farmers.
• NWP suggests how the irrigated areas could be greatly expanded at very low cost by deploying pressurised closed conveyance pipelines, combined with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and pressurised micro-irrigation.

4) Supply of water through “nature-based solutions”

• The NWP places major emphasis on supply of water through “nature-based solutions” such as the rejuvenation of catchment areas, to be incentivised through compensation for ecosystem services.
• Specially curated “blue-green infrastructure” such as rain gardens and bio-swales, restored rivers with wet meadows, wetlands constructed for bio-remediation, urban parks, permeable pavements, green roofs etc are proposed for urban areas.

5) Sustainable and equitable management of groundwater

• Information on aquifer boundaries, water storage capacities and flows provided in a user-friendly manner to stakeholders, designated as custodians of their aquifers, would enable them to develop protocols for effective management of groundwater.

6) Rights of Rivers

• The NWP accords river protection and revitalisation prior and primary importance.
• Steps to restore river flows include: Re-vegetation of catchments, regulation of groundwater extraction, river-bed pumping and mining of sand and boulders.
• The NWP outlines a process to draft a Rights of Rivers Act, including their right to flow, to meander and to meet the sea.

7) Emphasis on water quality

• The new NWP considers water quality as the most serious un-addressed issue in India today.
• It proposes that every water ministry, at the Centre and states, include a water quality department.
• The policy advocates adoption of state-of-the-art, low-cost, low-energy, eco-sensitive technologies for sewage treatment.
• Widespread use of reverse osmosis has led to huge water wastage and adverse impact on water quality.
• The policy wants RO units to be discouraged if the total dissolved solids count in water is less than 500mg/L.
• It suggests a task force on emerging water contaminants to better understand and tackle the threats they are likely to pose.

8) Reforming governance of water

• The policy makes radical suggestions for reforming governance of water, which suffers from three kinds issues: That between irrigation and drinking water, surface and groundwater, as also water and wastewater.
• Government departments, working in silos, have generally dealt with just one side of these binaries.
• Dealing with drinking water and irrigation in silos has meant that aquifers providing assured sources of drinking water dry up because the same aquifers are used for irrigation, which consumes much more water.
• And when water and wastewater are separated in planning, the result is a fall in water quality.

9) Creation of National Water Commission

• The NWP also suggests the creation of a unified multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder National Water Commission (NWC), which would become an exemplar for states to follow.
• Governments should build enduring partnerships with primary stakeholders of water, who must become an integral part of the NWC and its counterparts in the states.

Conclusion

The new National Water Policy calls for multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to water management.

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