underground system was assumed to be ‘owned’ by the landowner. This implies that groundwater is mostly controlled by individuals that own the land. Land owners were not restricted in the amount of water they can take out.
Why is the above understanding flawed? Underground water does not human land ownership boundaries that are made on the surface. Water is a flowing resource and what is extracted from an individual tube well or well depends on the underground rock formation, the recharge from rainfall or surface water. All these factors are happening over a large area. Hence, the actions of others in the region will affect this particular well. For example, over-extraction from one tube well often dries up other tube wells around. Each one competes to go deeper than their neighbour and soon all the tube wells up to a certain depth dry up, since these wells are interconnected by the underground structures in the. It is therefore inappropriate to think of ‘ownership’ of a flowing resource such as water. Compare this to the air over the plot of land - it is always flowing and there is no way one can create boundaries. Similarly, there are no boundaries in the flowing water underground.
Today, this is the major source of water for people. When there is much extraction, it affects others in connected areas. It affects the stock of water that would be available for future generations. Therefore, one can’t allow individual landowners to extract as much water as they wish from their land. There should be some restrictions. These restrictions will be acceptable if we first delink the connection between ownership of land and water drawn from the underground system through tube wells on the land.
Where control over groundwater is linked to land rights, there are pressures on individual landowners to use water in a fair manner. Nor is there any way to implement policies that take into account the welfare of a broader community and the environment. For instance, in an unregulated system, there is no authority that can determine how many wells, handpumps and other tubewells can be sunk in a given area. Some form of regulation that takes into account the broader aspects of groundwater use is necessary. Therefore, water should be thought of as a collective pool resource that is meant for all people. Similar to roads, rivers, and parks, underground water is also a ‘public property’, it belongs to all. While this is being recognised today by some state governments, it has still not become widespread.
Regulation is not easy. This is also because for some resources like water, electricity, oil, natural gas etc consumption by one person or a sector affects what is available for others. In fact, in a number of states, the answer to falling water tables has not been to address the issue itself. State governments have thus often chosen to increase power subsidies to make extraction of ever deeper layers of groundwater possible. The limits of an approach that not only refuses to control access to groundwater but seeks to encourage it with specific subsidies have been clearly understood. The political thinking has to change to make these regulation