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The chapter discusses the resource balance between the demand and availability of water – a critical resource for agriculture and livelihood security – in global as well as Indian context. The data and discussion of basin wise balances of surface and ground water indicate widely varying severity of ecological limitations of water resources over regions due to uneven spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation in India. It critically discusses all the important options of water resource development – like large storage development, inter-river linking, micro water shed development, and ground water conservation. It further reviews the ground water revolution of India augmenting agrarian productivity as well as its attendant problem of conflicts over the rights of its use, and policy issues relating to water institutions for equitable sharing of the scarce resource. It further discusses the sources of qualitative degradation of the resource, its valuation and control including government policies and actions.

This chapter focuses on the construction of dams in Trinity. The Arkansas Dam was the first dam built in the gold-rush days. The 1890 landslide in Burnt Ranch, known as the China Slide, created a temporary dam on the Trinity River that extended thirteen miles with the water level about one hundred feet deep. The third big dam occurred in the Salmon River during the big flood of 1964. In the aftermath of the 1964 flood, California's Department of Water Resources (DWR) proposed to build more dams in the North Coast, arguing that coastal dams would help control floods. The chapter highlights the California Water Plan, which proposed damming almost the entire length of the Klamath River and the Trinity River. It also explains the major factors that brought the construction of dams in the Klamath region to a close.

This chapter explains the origins and development of the Indus waters dispute in terms of the fragile Indian and Pakistani states’ search for power and legitimacy after independence. Both new governments framed their claims on Indus water not just necessary for economic development, but as part of their respective nation-making projects. The chapter argues that the Indus dispute helped Indian and Pakistani policy elites to formulate particular ideas about water resources, riparian rights and ‘national’ territory. India, upstream, asserted a sovereign right to use all water flowing within its borders. Pakistan, downstream, appealed to the idea that its own historical uses of Indus Basin water overrode India’s right to autonomy. Controlling the flow of water out of, or into, a state’s territory was a vital marker of its fitness to govern.

Chapter 12 presents the progress of and problems faced by the Open approach in the Bengal Delta and draws attention to the special merits of the Open approach in confronting the adverse effects of climate change in this delta. It surveys the findings of river scholars in the Indian part of the delta favoring the Open approach. Reviewing progress in the Bangladesh part of the delta, the chapter follows the struggle against the Flood Action Plan (FAP) that argued for big embankment projects in the wake of the historic flood of 1988. It notes the changes that took place in Bangladesh’s water-related institutional set up following the FAP process and the prospects they hold for promoting the Open approach. The chapter also presents a few examples of water projects that conform with the Open approach. It offers a critique of the recently formulated Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 that fails to make a clear break from the Cordon approach. It reviews the development of the renewed, broad-based civic movement in Bangladesh for adoption of the Open approach.