Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 106

Parameters of Successful Wastewater Reuse in Urban India
of groundwater. Generally, regulatory
power resides with these ministries and
departments: the CGWA, the Ministry
of Environment, Forests and Climate
Change, the CPCB, the state Pollution
Control Boards, the High Courts and
Supreme Court, and now the NGT.
Regulation occurs as a series of actions
that impose rules, limits, and punishments
on individuals, companies,
and government offices. Citizens can
also lead these efforts or contest them
through petitions and participation in
the NGT. However, it is important to
understand where real regulatory power
or pressure resides and this depends
upon the state or region of the country.
In the northern Indian states of
Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar
Pradesh, and Bihar, the CGWA and the
NGT rather than the MoEFCC, or the
PCBs in the sanitation field exert more
power. In Tamil Nadu and Karnataka,
the State Pollution Control Boards exert
more influence. 14 Across India, the
policy shells of Namami Gange and
Swachha Bharat help to set criteria or
benchmarks for projects and provide
the vision and mission for sanitation
but play no role in regulation. 15 The
Namami Ganga and Swachha Bharat
programs also provide leadership in
terms of policy vision and rhetoric.
In terms of infrastructure, the Smart
Cities program is providing a set of
criteria for urban improvement which
includes physical infrastructure and
social infrastructure. On the physical
infrastructure side, the government
is promoting smart grid, smart roads,
parking, solar power, water ATMs, and
STPs (Bahinipati 2017).
A short history of groundwater
regulations helps to explain how
it emerged in importance as a driver
for water recycling. In 2013, the NGT
began a series of debates on groundwater
usage and contamination in the
context of petitions filed by citizens on
water and sewage problems. In eight
different cases, the NGT ruled that industries
or other large quantity users
must curb their use of groundwater
(Charts 1–3). They ordered that large
quantity groundwater users must obtain
an NOC, or no objection permit,
from the CGWA. 16 In addition, households
were forbidden from using bore
well water for gardening and horticulture,
but this rule has been hard to
enforce and monitor. Over time, new
permits have become harder to procure.
In the new draft guidelines of the
Groundwater Bill in Parliament, this
renewal period varies: for individuals,
it is set at every five years, for industries,
at every three years, and for
real estate projects, at every two years.
The draft guidelines also take out the
need to recharge groundwater. 17 The
bill advocates strengthening the regulatory
powers of gram sabhas, panchayats,
and municipal bodies related
to groundwater. However, some argue
these new guidelines are “trying to
make a system wherein state or district
level authorities will be giving NOCs
but whether those authorities have capacity
to give NOCs after understanding
the implications is the question”
(Sandrp 2017). It is within this context
of regulating groundwater extraction
that a stronger direction to use recycled
wastewater has emerged.
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