Experience makes one wise, and it is wisdom, in the Tennysonnian sense, that lingers. After his long innings in government service, the second book written by the former Secretary for the Ministry of Water Resources, Ramaswamy R Iyer, certainly does not fail to create a lingering concern in its readers. In Towards Water Wisdom, Iyer calls broadly for "reasonableness in the use of water, and responsibility towards future generations", which he says should come close on the "concept of dharma".
Lest it be prematurely assumed that this work is merely another of those tedious expositions of the distilled astuteness of a retired civil servant, it is important to note from the start that Iyer offers no quick-fix solutions to Southasia's longstanding water problems. Neither does he present brusque opinions on the state of the bureaucracy, nor lob blame at any single party. Rather, this work seeks to deconstruct the deeply dispiriting idea of the Subcontinent's 'water crises'. In so doing, Iyer undertakes to rethink many of the water-related core issues that are currently taken as settled. "The world has changed," he writes, "let our thinking change."
Whereas the 2006 Human Development Report pinned the blame for global water scarcity on disproportionate distribution of power and inequality, Iyer goes significantly further, to hint at the inherently flawed understanding of 'development'. This pregnant term, he notes, has been a cause for misinterpretation of what truly constitutes 'progress', and why it should take any particular trajectory. Water scarcity and the development paradigm are, after all, causally related. If the term development has been used to hoodwink the global states – with conglomerates such as 'South Asia' and 'Latin America' being considered as single units when promoting international policies – at another level the World Bank (and its likeminded institutions) has time and again employed expressions such as demand and supply with regards to water, with a view to redefining the language of understanding and negotiating natural resources.
In so doing, such groups bestow a thoroughly economic character to what is indisputably a natural resource. These types of distortions of language have also found refuge in international and national policy promulgations, in which it would not be considered overly audacious to use expressions such as 'environmental flows', 'ecological flows' and 'water for nature'. This, Iyer warns, is an extremely incorrect way of thinking about water. "We receive water from nature as bounty," he writes. "We cannot presume to allocate water to nature."