Strong water systems are foundational to how economies function, attract private investment, and create jobs. “When water systems work, farmers produce, businesses operate, and cities attract investment. Our task now is to align reform, financing, and partnerships to deliver reliable water services at scale,” Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank Group, said recently.
For decades, India’s water narrative has been held hostage by a singular, almost obsessive focus on ‘blue water’—the visible flows in rivers, reservoirs, and groundwater aquifers. We have built colossal dams, drilled millions of borewells, and engineered labyrinthine plumbing networks, yet a farmer in Marathwada still watches his crop wither, a Bengaluru apartment dweller queues up for a water tanker, the Millenium City sinks and stinks during monsoon, and the Yamuna overflows with toxic foam. This policy myopia has brought us to a familiar precipice. Against this backdrop, the book under review— Water, Nature, Progress: Solutions for a New India—arrives not as another incremental technical manual, but as a necessary, almost disruptive, intellectual reset.
Green Water Shift
By placing ‘green water’—the invisible, root-zone soil moisture that sustains 50% of India’s rain-fed agriculture—at its very centre, the book argues that we cannot solve India’s water crisis by only managing what flows in canals and pipes; we must learn to dance with what falls as rain, sinks into the earth, overflows through drains, and breathes through our forests and farms. This is a book not about scarcity alone, but about the architecture of abundance waiting to be rewired.
As a sector professional navigating India’s water-energy-agriculture nexus, I found the book’s strength in its unflinching cross-sectoral gaze. The other bright spot of the book is that it not just addresses and explains complex issues comprehensively, but provides convincing and feasible solutions that may be either homegrown or bought from Israel, Singapore, Johannesburg and Manila.
The chapter on ‘Water-Secure Sponge Cities’ moves beyond the feel-good rhetoric of rain gardens to offer a hard-nosed critique of how our municipal bylaws still incentivise concrete over capture and recharge. It asks a bold question: Can Mumbai, Delhi or Chennai retrofit its morphologically dense cores for sponginess, or is this only for new gated enclaves? The flood management planning of Thane, and rejuvenation of the East Kolkata wetlands as the kidneys of Kolkata offer examples that any plan to prepare climate-resilient cities must deliberate on the proportion of investment in nature-based solutions versus human-engineered solutions.
Wealth from Waste
The chapters on ‘Wealth from Waste’ and the ‘Circular Water Economy’ are particularly timely. Too often, circularity in India is reduced to treated sewage for industry. This book widens the lens to include faecal sludge co-composting, biogas from lagoon covers, and even urban wetland rejuvenation as nutrient sinks. It understands something that many high-level committees miss—that circularity in a country with open defecation still prevalent in peri-urban fringes is as much about last-mile dignity as it is about technology.
There are now good and working models of rejuvenated peri-urban model villages like Noorpur and Sherpur in Rewari (Haryana) with well laid out streets and covered drains, 100% coverage under open defecation-free, more than 150 solar lights, smartcard-enabled RO plants for drinking water, digital learning in schools with lessons created by experts, biogas plants to offset shortage during LPG scarcity, self-help groups for women and capacity building of farmers through dedicated NGOs supported through CSR and programme-related investment funds.
That leads to the core of the book—‘Peri-Urban Water and Sanitation’ and ‘Valuing Water’. The peri-urban interface is where India’s fastest growth meets its weakest governance; groundwater is sucked by both a high-rise and a vegetable grower, while sanitation leaps from septic tanks into open drains. The authors wisely avoid the trap of purely economic valuation (marginal pricing) and instead propose a pluralist framework—ecological, cultural, and risk-based. And finally, the chapters on ‘Behaviour Change’ and ‘Water Governance’ dare to say the unsayable: that India does not have a water scarcity problem as much as a trust and compliance problem.
Drawing from nudge theory and comparative water laws (South Africa’s catchment management agencies vs India’s fragmented irrigation departments), they offer a roadmap from ‘command-and-control’ to ‘adaptive co-governance’—messy, slow, but ultimately the only path that works. The long and coveted experience of Parameswaran Iyer and other authors speaks in the brilliance of the language and discussions of these chapters.
Based on the past real (and perceived) success of the Swachh Bharat Mission, Jal Jeevan Mission, National Mission for Clean Ganga and some other programmes, the authors have offered suggestions to launch new missions on ‘green water mission’ and ‘circular water economy mission’ as solutions for a developed India. The circular water economy mission has merits and is a necessity to tackle the utter mess in India’s urbanisation for a radical shift from a 20-year patchwork to long-term master plans.
However, suggestions like replacing irrigated rice areas of north-west with millets seem fanciful and impractical. This is the only piece of land in India covered with 100% irrigation, best roads, logistics, and markets. One needs to think seriously and innovatively about the highest-value diversification. The authors and publishers should have devoted more care to the maps and figures to improve clarity, details and readability.
Finally, this book will frustrate the engineer who wants a single hydraulic model, and it will unsettle the economist who believes price alone will save us. That is precisely its strength and value. It reminds us that water in India is a social contract, a hydrological flux, a political battleground, and a cultural inheritance all at once. By weaving green water with blue, waste with wealth, and behaviour with bylaws, the volume offers no utopian solutions, but something far more useful—a mature, actionable grammar for a water-secure, climate-resilient, and developed India. The only choice left for us is not whether to adopt this thinking, but how much we can afford to be slow.
Bharat Sharma is Emeritus Scientist (WR), International Water Management Institute, New Delhi. Views are personal
Water, Nature, Progress: Solutions for a New India
Parameswaran Iyer, Arunabha Ghosh, Richard Damania
HarperCollins
Pp 296, Rs 799
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.