ABSTRACT
Water institutions 1 play a vital role in managing and sustaining water resources as well as encouraging economic development and poverty alleviation in India. Designing institutional mechanisms to allocate scarce water and river flows has long been an important legal, constitutional and social issue in India (Marothia, 2003). The water resource sector in India is confronted by several institutional challenges, which can be classified into three main areas: (a) poor performance and deterioration of public (canal and tank) irrigation systems, (b) high extraction levels of ground water and related economic and environmental problems, and (c) transition from a water management focus to an integrated management system that takes wider hydrological boundaries into account (Shah et al, 2004; Gulati et al, 2005). Most of these problems are manifestations of weak institutional design and therefore the task of reconfiguring water institutions remains a high priority in India.
