Archives: Books

The urgency of optimally harnessing the vast potential of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) Basin, which is home to the largest concentration of the worlds poor, is the theme of this second consensual volume on regional co-operation between Bangladesh, India and Nepal. This concludes a collaborative effort by the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, the Bangladesh Unnayan Parishad, Dhaka and Institute for Integrated Development Studies, Kathmandu, that commenced in 1990.

A new window of opportunity opened in 1996 with the signing of the landmark Mahakali and Ganga Water Sharing Agreements between Nepal and India and Bangladesh and India. This volume sees Water as the most appropriate entry point for integrated co-operative GBM regional development. It takes the human condition of this region as the starting point since the whole object of developing its natural endowments is poverty alleviation and sustained socio-economic progress. It portrays this as an eminently win-win situation, using water as a springboard for overall basin development.

Harnessing the waters of the GBM region is central to feeding burgeoning populations, generating employment, reducing out-migration, upgrading the environment and producing cheap, clean energy – all these as a means of stimulating investment and growth with equity. The authors see potential for augmenting Ganga flows below Farakka through a multi-purpose storage on the Sapta Kosi in Nepal, or from a proposed dam on the Sunkosh in Bhutan and its diversion westwards to the Teesta and thence, Ganga basin. Alternative alignments for transferring water from the Brahmaputra to the Ganga are also posed for consideration. The authors draw particular attention to emerging issues of water quality.

The contributors to this volume are Dhoj Adhikari, Senior Advisor, Water Resources Development Study, IIDS, Kathmandu, former Chief Secretary, Nepal; Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad, an Economist and Chairman of Bangladesh Unnayan Parishad, Dhaka; Shankar Krishna Maila, Team Leader, Water Resources Development Study, IIDS, Kathmandu, former Member-Secretary, Planning Commision, Nepal; Bharat Bahadur Pradhan, Senior Advisor, Water Resources Development Study, IIDS, Kathmandu, former Finance Minister, Nepal; Khalilur Rahman, Member of the Joint Rivers Commission, Bangladesh; R. Rangachari, Visiting Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and former Member, Joint Rivers Commision and Central Water Commission; K B Sajjadur Rasheed, Professor of Geography, Dhaka University and Member, BUP Study Team; &, B G Verghese, Research Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Regulation of water is of immense importance because water is central to every aspect of life. This includes provision of sufficient and safe basic water to every person, something that is not yet fully achieved. Water is also central to livelihoods, particularly agriculture, which remains by far the primary sector in terms of individual livelihoods. Simultaneously, it needs to be regulated in a manner that privileges its protection and preservation in both the short and long term, to ensure the sustainability of human uses. This represents an immense challenge in a context where water regulation has been largely conceived around either the predominance of the state as the actor controlling all water for ‘public purposes’, or of individual landowners having unrestrained control over groundwater found under their land, including at the cost of similar use by other landowners.

First published in 2011, Water Law in India is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of the legal instruments concerning water in India. It presents a variety of national and state-level instruments that make up the complex and diverse field of water law and policy. This book fills a critical gap in the study of water law, providing a rich reference point for the entire gamut of legal mechanisms available in India.

This edition has been extensively revised to include new chapters on international legal instruments; new instruments on water regulation, including the draft National Water Framework Bill, 2016, and the Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Act, 2016; and new water-related instruments in such varied fields as criminal law, land acquisition law, and rural employment legislation. Chapters on drinking water supply, environmental dimensions of water conservation, water infrastructure for irrigation and flood control, groundwater regulation, and institutions catering to water have been thoroughly updated for a more complete coverage of water law.

The study aims to identify and highlight issues of policy-significance in the planning, building and running of New Towns with over 100 settlements until 1977. New Towns of India are a major Indian experience. Though the initial planning for a few, such as, Chandigarh, or Bhubaneswar, were inspired by foreigners; by and large the design, construction and upkeep of India’s New Towns has involved a whole generation of Indian Planners and Architects, Indian Engineers and Indian Administrators. As in other fields the experience has been characterized by many hopes and fears, weaknesses, successes and failures, but together, the experience is of sufficient importance to merit study and documentation.

In the panorama of development policies in most of the less developed countries, the pride of place has always been given to the industrial policy. The reasons are simple enough and are well known. But what should the key policy objectives of industrial development be? Are the existing frameworks adequate or should the industrial policy frameworks be reexamined and be made subservient to the basic socio -economic policies so that the directions of the national movement are clear as we move towards the 21st century. The present study places at the very core of industrial policy the four key socio-economic objectives of meeting (a) the minimum needs of the masses, (b) the strategic requirements of the nation, (c) the export objectives, and (d) the R&D goals to be abreast of the developed nations by the 21st century. Two factors which loom large and which, in one way, form the prerequisites of effective industrial policy are (1) population control, and (2) food production. The study estimates the policy implications of the four policy objectives and the feasibility of their achievement by the year 2000 A. D., and suggests several measures including those relating to the industrial structure. It does not deliberately work out the micro implications for each of the industrial sectors for the simple reason that unless the overall policy objectives are acceptable, the details would be too premature. We hope the study will encourage a debate on the overall industrial policy to enable us meet the needs of the Indian society by the year 2000 A.D. Authors P.D Malgavkar started his career as a businessman, changed over to academics from where he joined the tribe of Government bureaucrats. Restless as ever, he had a stint as Research Consultant and Senior Fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu. Back home in 1978, as Visiting professor at Centre for policy Research, New Delhi, he concentrated on development issues as he saw them. He dabbles in management and development consultancy and potters around in his rocky garden. He can well said to be a rolling stone that has gathered quite a bit of moss.

India has been the first among the developing countries to recognise the importance of population control and to launch a nation-wide programme of family planning. The programme has, however, seen many vicissitudes in its long journey since 1952 and by 1975, the nation realised that its achievements in this field had been less than satisfactory.

The Government of India, therefore, launched a new population policy in April 1976 in pursuance whereof a wide variety of incentives and disincentives were offered to the people to encourage them to adopt family planning. These measures no t only failed miserably in attracting the people to family planning but alienated them completely from the programme because of extensive use of coercion in its implementation . The campaign of forcible sterilization, which became a part of these measures was in fact instrumental in bringing about a total collapse of the policy itself.

The present publication is the first major attempt at analysing the policy implication s of the scheme of incentive s and disin centives introduced in 1976. The book brings out in sharp focus the limitations of the scheme as well as its consequences on the morale of the people and the administration. The study also makes some useful suggestions which should help formulate the future population policy of India on a more pragmatic and viable basis.

Bureaucracy as a social and administrative institution has been at the centre of attention in capitalist, socialist as well as the developing countries. The consequences of bureaucratization in the three worlds are, however, significantly different. The dilemma of the developing countries is especially severe. In the absence of alternative instruments of implementation of the programmes of social and economic change, the state has increasingly depended upon the bureaucracy as its principal machinery.

Theoretically as well as policywise, the important question is: to what extent is the bureaucracy a viable instrument for implementation of development administration. Basically, are the values of bureaucracy and development administration congruent or is there any incompatibility between the two. And if there is, what are the options.

The present study examines these issues through empirical investigation and arrives at a set of new propositions. These deserve the attention of scholars and practitioners of public administration with a view to developing policy alternatives and options. All the more so as India is embarking upon new and more ambitious and complex plans and programmes of development with special emphasis on rural areas.

The study of national societies as “systems” is of recent origin. For reasons of the complexities which are involved in such systems, their study has been considered out of reach for social scientists. Yet such studies are the crux of any broad spectrum effort to move societies in the desired direction , which incidentally is the essence of modern planned development. The book looks at the aggregate societal system in India and to examines the viability of both the approach and the model. Few people in the country are more qualified to do such a study than Prof. P. N. Rastogi. Prof. Rastogi applies the cybernetic model to the Indian societal system. He views a society as a self-governing system which steers itself through its information and control system. Steering of a society means guiding and directing its course in an intelligent manner. Despite some of the essential quantification, Prof. Rastogi’s model and study is reasonably simple to comprehend, and its various scenarios for the country and conclusions deserve a careful study by national planners and policy makers, even after his caveat that this is only a modest beginning. In particular, his finding of two basal levers of system change, viz. (1) Investible resources , and (2) Education, deserve serious consideration. Author

P N Rastogi s an internationally known social scientist who has done pioneering work in the fields of social and management cybernetics, computer simulation of complex social systems and methodology of unstructured problem solving. He has done advanced research work at M.I.T (1967-68) and London School of Economics (1971 -72) and has been an invitee to international conferences In Cybernetics, Computer Science, Political Science, Sociology and Systems Research. Apart from numerous research papers and reports, he has also written The Nature & Dynamics of Factional Conflict (Macmillan, New Delhi, 1975), The Behaviour of Societal System (lIAS, Simla, 1978), Cybernetic Analysis of Indian Societal System (CPR, New Delhi, 1978), Social and Management Cybernetics (Affiliated East West Press, New Delhi 1979) and Intelligent Management Systems. He is associated with management systems studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.