Book review: Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia, by Tushaar Shah (RFF Press, 2008)

摘要

Tushaar Shah—a development economist and senior fellow at the International Water Management Institute, IWMI—has written an excellent and timely book (Shah 2008). In stylish and well-argued prose, he deconstructs the dominant view of irrigation and groundwater management through a close examination of their status and recent history in South Asia, and in particular in his native India. (IWMI staff continue to develop the line of research: e.g. Mukherji et al. (2009) appear to have taken some of these ideas forward for the Indo-Gangetic and the Yellow River basins.) From the hydrogeologist’s viewpoint “Taming the Anarchy” is interesting especially because Shah draws on and integrates ideas from different disciplines, but particularly the socio-economic sphere, to enlighten the debate. He proposes that the orthodox technocratic view must be leavened with an understanding of the welfare outcomes produced by groundwater irrigation and the threats to those outcomes that would be produced if the resource were to fail. He further postulates that water-sector professionals and political leaders must re-cast their view of what is feasible in managing that resource, by taking a wider view of the socio-economic factors that currently stymie most efforts to improve it. A telling example that he provides is the cooption of political leaders in hard-rock areas of India by the strong “vote bank” of the smallholder farming community, so that even where cheap electricity for pumping is fuelling the race to the bottom of these lowyielding aquifers (a race that is everywhere recognised as unsustainable), elected leaders continue to provide and to promise subsidised electricity rates for irrigation.