Presentation short abstract

India's groundwater crisis stems from the institutional separation of surface-groundwater governance and agricultural sector capture. Post-independence policies incentivised extraction before establishing regulation, creating lock-ins that resist reform despite integrated management proposals.

Presentation long abstract

India's groundwater crisis illustrates how the institutional separation of surface and groundwater governance reinforces power relations that enable systematic overexploitation. This paper employs a policy process sequencing framework to trace how post-independence agricultural policies created a fragmented institutional structure that separated surface water (managed by irrigation departments) from groundwater (privatised through land ownership), enabling the politically powerful agricultural sector to capture groundwater governance.

The temporal analysis reveals that agricultural modernization policies (1947-1970s) incentivized intensive groundwater extraction through subsidized electricity, credit for tubewells, and guaranteed prices for water-intensive crops, establishing what became the entrenched water-energy-food nexus. Critically, these incentives preceded any regulatory framework by decades. This sequencing created economic, institutional, and political lock-ins that consistently defeated subsequent regulation attempts (1970-present). The colonial-era fragmentation separating surface and groundwater bureaucracies persisted despite repeated calls for integrated management, as departmental interests and agricultural political power blocked restructuring.

The case demonstrates how the separation of surface and groundwater is not merely technical but serves specific political-economic interests. Growth-oriented, food security policies framed groundwater as an agricultural input rather than a common pool resource requiring collective management. Engineer-dominated water bureaucracies maintained this separation, marginalizing alternative knowledge systems and community-based governance.

Understanding groundwater overexploitation requires examining how the agricultural sector's dominance, manifested through the temporal sequencing of policies and the persistence of fragmented institutions, shapes what counts as legitimate water knowledge and who holds power over water governance. Challenging surface-groundwater separation necessitates confronting these accumulated historical dependencies, not just proposing integrated frameworks that ignore existing power structures.