Viswanathan, Swaran

Sustainable groundwater management is an important and challenging issue. It is challenging since groundwater continues to be treated as private property regardless of its Common Pool Resource (CPR) nature. Establishing the collective property rights for groundwater is one way of managing this precious resource. Proposals for groundwater governance have taken many approaches, including market-based (Nsoh 2022), government regulation, privatisation, self-governance (Cosens 2018) and polycentric (Ostrom 1990).

The current study is based on the Groundwater Collectivisation agreements conceptualised by the Hyderabad (India) based non-profit Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN) and operationalised since 2007 through its partner NGOs across the rainfed regions of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India. The collective facilitates the sharing of groundwater for critical irrigation in the hitherto unirrigated patches of land of borewell-owning and rainfed farmers via a piped network. The water-sharing mechanism is enforced via a formal agreement between the parties signed before the land revenue officer. From polycentric, the sharing arrangement is expected to shift to self-governed following the cessation of the agreement period of 10 years. What drives these potential shifts and sustaining collective sharing has been the core of Elinor Ostrom’s works on commons and the central question posed in this study.

Through farmer surveys, group discussions, interviews and mapping of change in cultivation/cropping patterns,, this study locates the following outcomes from the sampled collectivisation locations across Andhra Pradesh: 1) Establishment of new norms and governance structures related to groundwater management, 2) Dynamics of the decision-making processes, and 3) Impact on groundwater level, cropping pattern, income and livelihood.