Falling or stagnant agricultural growth, increasing dependence on groundwater, climate variability, swift industrialization, and unplanned and unregulated urbanization in South Asia have spawned a variety of challenges for water resources governance, management and use: groundwater overdraft; insufficient, ill-managed and poor-quality freshwater supply vis-à-vis escalating demand; and water pollution. Water policies in each of the South Asian countries thus call for a more holistic understanding for the efficient management, equitable distribution and sustainable use of this scarce resource. Analyzing the economic, demographic and ideological context in which water policies are framed and implemented, this book argues for an integrated framework in formulating and implementing water policies in South Asia. It also highlights some common missing links in the national policies: problems of techno-centric and blueprint approach to water management, growing influence of international donor agencies and inadequate concern for issues such as equity, sustainability, gender sensitivity, accountability, regional diversity in property rights regimes and water management practices, and regional conflicts over water access. The innovative and nuanced knowledge on water resources produced from detailed case studies in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka will be useful for professionals, academics, policymakers and activists as well as those in development studies, environmental studies, natural resource management and public administration.

This report is a review of the conjunctive water use of surface water and groundwater within the Rechna Doab. The Rechna Doab is located in the Punjab province and has an area of 2.98 million hectares (Figure 1). The cultivated area in the Rechna Doab is regarded as the granary of the Punjab province and comprises eight districts, namely, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad, Toba Tek Singh, Jhang, Narowal and Hafizabad. The area consists of two distinct agroclimatic zones, i.e. the Punjab Rice-Wheat (PRW) zone and the Punjab Sugarcane-Wheat (PSW) zone (WAPDA, 1979). Irrigated agriculture started in the Rechna Doab in 1892 via Lower Chenab Canal. The irrigation system in the Rechna Doab consists of 504 km of branch canals, 240 km of main canals and 373 km of link canals, and about 0.2 million tubewells are installed in the freshwater areas. This report is prepared to provide an overview of land and water resources available in the Rechna Doab and the institutional issues that need to be addressed for effective conjunctive water management in the Rechna Doab.

Annotation This specific objective of this book is to explore potential avenues for generating more resources for the public sector to invest in sustainable development.

In 1961 archaeologists discovered a family archive of legal papyri in a cave near the Dead Sea where their owner, the Jewish woman Babatha, had hidden them in 135 CE at the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Babatha's Orchard analyzes the oldest four of these papyri to argue that underlying them is a hitherto undetected and surprising train of events concerning how Babatha's father, Shim'on, purchased a date-palm orchard in Maoza on the southern shore of the Dead Sea in 99 CE that he later gave to Babatha. The central features of the story, untold for two millennia, relate to how a high Nabatean official had purchased the orchard only a month before, but suddenly rescinded the purchase, and how Shim'on then acquired it, in enlarged form, from the vendor. Teasing out the details involves deploying the new methodology of archival ethnography, combined with a fresh scrutiny of the papyri (written in Nabatean Aramaic), to investigate the Nabatean and Jewish individuals mentioned and their relationships within the social, ethnic, economic, and political realities of Nabatea at that time. Aspects of this context which are thrown into sharp relief by Babatha's Orchard include: the prominence of wealthy Nabatean women and their husbands' financial reliance on them; the high returns and steep losses possible in date cultivation; the sophistication of Nabatean law and lawyers; the lingering effect of the Nabateans' nomadic past in lessening the social distance between elite and non-elite; and the good ethnic relations between Nabateans and Jews.