Tanzania has successfully circumvented the States-Central government cooperation issue by having rivers declared as national resources, with the Water Ministry having a separate division for each major river system, such as Wami Ruvu Basin WaterOffice, Pangani Water Office, Rufiji water office, and so on. In this manner, they have jurisdiction of managing water resources over the entire river basin, thereby precluding upstream-downstream conflicts between states or provinces. Each Water Office is in charge of issuing water use permits to agriculture, industry, municipal, etc. and thereby can have a wholistic river basin approach to safeguard ecosystems, minimize water conflict, promote monitoring and conflict resolution for water sharing. India would do well to assume greater Central Govt control over entire rivers. That being said, ecological aspects of river management are totally missing in water resource management, which has more of a civil and agricultural engineering perspective, in that water is a resource to be used for development, without any regard to how aquatic, riparian and coastal marine ecosystems have evolved over tens of thouands of years to existing natural river flows. Likewise, there is very little government or institutional concern about restoration of natural vegetation (forests, grasslands, wetlands as the case may be)  in order to increase rain inflitration, that is especially urgent given the increasing uncertainty of rainfall.  And I wonder, do the powers read these forums, or are we just wasting our time preaching to the choir?

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Tanzania has successfully circumvented the States-Central government cooperation issue by having rivers declared as national resources, with the Water Ministry having a separate division for each major river system, such as Wami Ruvu Basin WaterOffice, Pangani Water Office, Rufiji water office, and so on. In this manner, they have jurisdiction of managing water resources over the entire river basin, thereby precluding upstream-downstream conflicts between states or provinces. Each Water Office is in charge of issuing water use permits to agriculture, industry, municipal, etc. and thereby can have a wholistic river basin approach to safeguard ecosystems, minimize water conflict, promote monitoring and conflict resolution for water sharing. India would do well to assume greater Central Govt control over entire rivers. That being said, ecological aspects of river management are totally missing in water resource management, which has more of a civil and agricultural engineering perspective, in that water is a resource to be used for development, without any regard to how aquatic, riparian and coastal marine ecosystems have evolved over tens of thouands of years to existing natural river flows. Likewise, there is very little government or institutional concern about restoration of natural vegetation (forests, grasslands, wetlands as the case may be)  in order to increase rain inflitration, that is especially urgent given the increasing uncertainty of rainfall.  And I wonder, do the powers read these forums, or are we just wasting our time preaching to the choir?