Question

How significant are the laws, people’s actions, in the context of water as a common pool resource?

Answer 1

Instructions:

1. Start with an introduction.
2. Explain the context and elaborate how water is a common pool resource.

Solution:

It has been a matter of debate whether water is a common pool resource or not. A common pool resource can be defined as; a common resource with individual ownership, it cannot be utilized unilaterally.
In the last few years, groundwater depletion has become a common problem. In this context it has become important to rethink over the laws related with water utilization pattern.

In context of laws related to water utilization:

1. Over the past few decades groundwater has become the main source, especially for domestic use and agriculture.
2. This tremendous increase in the use of groundwater has a significant impact on water availability and access to it.
3. The current laws about groundwater in many states are both outdated and inappropriate. They were developed at a time when groundwater was a marginal source of water.
4. Current laws on groundwater use are inappropriate because the basic link between access to groundwater and land ownership on which these rules are based are flawed.
5. Since groundwater has to be extracted from the land above, a link was established between land ownership and control. The water drawn from the underground system was assumed to be ‘owned’ by the landowner.
6. This implies that groundwater is mostly controlled by individuals that own the land. Landowners were not restricted in the amount of water they could take out.

In context of people’s action

1. Water is a flowing resource and what is extracted from an individual tube well or well depends on the underground rock formation, the recharge from rainfall or surface water.
2. All these factors are happening over a large area. Hence the actions of others in the region will affect this particular well. For example, over-extraction from one tube well often dries up other tube wells around.
3. Each one competes to go deeper than their neighbor and soon all tube wells up to a certain depth dry up, since these wells are interconnected by the underground structures in the region. It is therefore inappropriate to think of ‘ownership’ of a flowing resource such as water.
4. Compare this to the air over the plot of land - it is always flowing and there’s no way one can create boundaries. Similarly, there are no boundaries in the flowing water underground.