Governance Issues for Sustainable Water Management in Rapti River Basin, Uttar Pradesh

Abstract

During the last two decades, various key concepts emerged in the field of water management both in developed as well as developing countries. In the developing world compulsion for the integration of ecological, social, and economic aspects of sustainable development in water management led to several debates on the notions of integration, good water governance, and participatory water management. The present empirical study on a small river basin shows that even if integration, good governance, and participation have many potential benefits, these are difficult to achieve in practice. In this context, a critical analysis of water resource management is pertinent. The Rapti is a hill-fed river basin shared by two riparian nations, i.e., India and Nepal. Due to inadequate management, the resource potential of the river basin is not fully utilized, rather the river became a symbol of underdevelopment in the region. With the increasing concentration of anthropogenic activities both at upstream as well as downstream part, river ecology has been continuously degrading and numbers of environmental and social conflicts are emerging. With the help of primary and secondary data, the study highlights how integration is difficult in the case of a river shared by two riparian nations and identified the complexity caused by multiple stakeholders at the basin level. The study also identifies a number of governance issues like, management of floodplains and their resources, compliance to flood forecasting and warning, public utility management within the active channel zones, annual maintenance of river banks, illegal sand mining, integration of development schemes within the context of floodplain environment, livelihood issues and incorporation of community expectations that need to be prioritized for sustainable water management at basin scale at microlevel. Besides, the study highlighted several potential issues for future research. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.