Do dams improve water security in India? A review of post facto assessments

Today India is the third largest dam building country in the world with over five thousand large dams. However, despite the significantly large expenditure, the actual area irrigated by canal has shown an overall decline since 1991. Today, more than 60% of India’s irrigation happens through groundwater. Evaluation reports by official agencies like Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), and independent evaluations by civil society organizations have pointed out to the poor performance of dams during construction, operation and maintenance. Despite this, the narrative that the dams “play a vital role in providing overall water security to the country” has not been validated with help of a closer look at the empirical evidence on performance of dams in the academia.

To address this, we embark on a comprehensive socio-hydrologic review of evaluation studies to understand if large dams have in fact improved water security defined broadly (beyond just the canal command area). We ask two questions (i) What types of studies have been conducted? (ii) What do they collectively say about dams improving water security?

We find that while the engineers and experts have ex-ante promised water security through dams, the ex-post studies have highlighted several pathways through which dams adversely affect water security. They essentially highlight the tradeoffs between water security of different stakeholders and bring out the ‘losers’ that go unnoticed. Growing empirical evidence shows that despite massive investments, dams are unable to deliver on their promises. We argue that this repeated under-performance suggests that the inherent ‘social-technical’ nature of irrigation systems has not been internalized in the dam design process.

In the way forward, we have discussed the need to design and implement dams as socio-technical systems, need for empirical field-based ex-post research to establish factual evidence. Further, it must feed back into ex-ante water planning. Structured processes like shared vision planning can be used to negotiate competing normative claims.