Journal Articles

This article analyses two new proposed central water laws, the Draft National Water Framework Bill, 2013 and the Draft River Basin Management Bill, 2012. Each of them reflect a centralising paradigm of water law that sits uneasily with the decentralised framework found in the Constitution and with recent proposals by the Planning Commission for a coordinating union framework and with the progressive recognition of the need to move away from state control over water, first initiated by the Supreme Court in the mid-1990s.