The politics of rural-urban water conflict in India: Untapping the power of institutional reform

Animating the contemporary politics of water governance in India is a combination of institutional path dependence and a neo-liberal restructuring that has extended the ability of Indian cities to establish new forms of water entitlement in rural and peri-urban areas. This paper explores the politics of rural-urban water conflicts that are occurring in this changing political context. Building upon Schlager and Ostrom's conceptualization of operational and collective choice rules, it examines the role of agrarian institutions (primarily in the form of land rights) in shaping the politics of rural-urban water transfers in Mumbai and Chennai, two of India's largest and fastest-growing cities. By doing so, it makes the case that Mumbai's ability to secure water entitlement has been facilitated by an institutional legacy of prior appropriation that has been applied in a context of weak and limited tribal authority over land and resources. Chennai by contrast has become far more dependent upon the commodification of water in the form of quasi market and allocation contracts, reflecting the riparian rights of commercial farmers in the Chennai region. The paper generates theoretical and empirical insights about the ways in which variations in urban and agrarian institutions affect the politics of rural-urban water allocation. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.