Water access in the Himalaya comprises both formal and informal systems. Formal water systems involve multiple departments and boundaries, creating confusion for communities. With limited formal water sources, community-managed and private systems step in. This issue brief focuses on community-based rights in Darjeeling, where groups use collective ownership and infrastructure to establish rights outside government control. The overlapping boundaries complicate the exercise of rights, as communities develop systems alongside and beyond official frameworks. Conducting a legal pluralism assessment is essential to understand these dynamics and to promote equitable access to water through localised, inclusive policies that do not bypass communities.
Keywords:
Formal and informal rights; water infrastructure; hydraulic citizenship; community rights; legal plurality
Water coverage by state or formally designated water bodies is limited and not widespread in the Himalayan region. Formal water sources are few and scattered, leading to water scarcity even in high-rainfall areas. This is likely due to the region’s unique topography, the presence of springs, and urbanisation patterns. The mountainous terrain complicates the harnessing, pumping, storage, and distribution of water. Additionally, the pattern of urbanisation and seasonal demand adds to the social complexities specific to mountain areas. Not all households qualify for formal water connections because of legal and financial hurdles. While formal water service fees are low, lower-income households often pay more for alternative sources. As a result, water rights are governed not only by state laws overseeing formal systems but also by customary, local, and religious laws governing informal sources. Recognising and understanding this rights framework is essential for ensuring fair and universal water access for all.
Water rights involve a combination of state, traditional, and customary laws, making legal plurality the way forward. Incorporating legal plurality would enable us to rethink the territorialities of water governance, which are defined by the state through official documents that delineate jurisdiction and boundaries. The variety of collective ownership systems in the Himalaya is a case in point, highlighting how legal plurality supports water provisioning through hydraulic properties and hydraulic citizenship.
Hydraulic property refers to the creation, preservation, and integration of a system involving normative water allocation, technological water use, and organisational water management (Boelens and Vos 2014). It intermixes individual and collective water rights with infrastructure system management, enabling communities to define their hydraulic citizenship.
Hydraulic citizenship involves feeling connected to the city through social and material claims to its water infrastructure (Anand 2011). For communities that are primarily dependent on informal water systems, hydraulic citizenship is not derived solely from the state; it also emerges through collective action by non-state actors. These mechanisms cannot be considered merely coping strategies because communities often do not see themselves as deserving of state support; they may even sympathise with the municipality’s limited water supply and survive despite a largely absent municipal supply (Cleaver 2000). This underscores the collaborative approach to resource management and emphasises the importance of everyone's participation.
This piece complements past issue briefs (Shah 2025a; 2025b), which discussed laws around water governance and springs at the national and state levels. They concluded with a push for legal plurality (Shah 2025b). This issue brief focuses on the customary norms and local laws that communities use to define their hydraulic citizenship outside the state. The state is often unable and/or unwilling to provide for marginalised geographies (Gurung and Kollmair 2007) and communities (Harris et al. 2020). This issue brief revisits specific state definitions and explains why the definition of water rights should be plural. It illustrates how biophysical and jurisdictional boundaries highlight the state’s limitations in defining water governance, territories, and access to water, creating a mismatch between management and water rights. State boundaries and their interactions determine whether access to water is enabled or disabled. This issue brief therefore explores hydraulic properties and, hence, hydraulic citizenship through collective ownership systems outside the state's purview. It concludes with a reflection on rethinking water governance.
Understanding Formal Water Rights
Colonial laws and regulations of water governance and management have had a lasting impact on current water ownership and management, creating inequalities among local communities (Bhattacharya 2013; Domenech et al. 2013; Meehan 2014). These inequalities are furthered by continuous urbanisation, which is transforming rural-urban regions and affecting access and control over water resources (Hommes and Boelens 2017). Water rights are interpreted in various ways, accounting for the unequal experiences people face related to water scarcity (Mehta 2006). Laws and regulations ignore the inherent agency of water and community experiences, neglecting their importance in planning and management (Gandy 2006; Björkman and Harris 2018).
Boundaries of state agencies exist at multiple levels—some are distinct, while others overlap. They define how water sources are perceived and valued by different departments, institutions, and individuals, which in turn influence how they are controlled, planned, and managed. Jurisdictional boundaries often overlay biophysical borders. For example, the Model Groundwater Act 2016 mandates Gram Panchayats (GPs) and Municipalities to record springs. Although these authorities have administrative boundaries at the surface, this approach fragments springs by disregarding aquifer extents. This creates a complex overlay of underground and surface governance that affects water management, particularly when recharge areas span multiple villages. For example, a spring recharge zone may be in one village and its discharge zone in another.
Springs are governed by the Easement Act of 1882, where any resource below the ground belongs to the landowner, making it a private resource, contrary to the popular imagination that springs are public or common property (Shah 2025a). This reinforces the interwovenness of land and water rights, which define access to groundwater. While landowners control private springs, in the case of public or community springs, community-based organisations set the rules of access, thereby controlling the supply.
Community-Based Water Rights
Public springs today are on land donated by landowners for the benefit of the wider community. These springs have become essential to residents, acting as landmarks in towns. Because they are accessible to the public and relied upon by the community, these springs resist privatisation. Conversely, private springs are typically reserved for individual household use or sale. With rapid, unregulated urbanisation, smaller springs are often privatised as they are encroached upon by residential developments. The transformation of a private resource into a public good happens when the community steps in to provide for areas where government support is lacking.
Community boundaries based on kinship, ethnicity, and geography also influence access to water (Davis 2022). The samaj is one of the major community-based organisations that has been a key stakeholder in spring management. These organisations are built around ethnicity, religion, geography, and other factors. They are a unique feature of Sikkim and the Darjeeling Hills of the Eastern Himalayan Region. The samaj considered here is the geographical samaj, composed of villages and settlements within the municipal town. They may be located within a single ward or extend across multiple wards. Of the 130 samaj in Darjeeling town’s 32 wards, 32 have access to a perennial spring (Figure 1), while some have access to non-perennial springs (Shah 2023).
The samaj plays a crucial role in managing water resources, including springs. Rules apply to springs, and access can be restricted during the dry season by putting up notices or locking the taps. Often, neighbouring samaj or villages adjacent to the spring-owning community are also cut off from access during these times.
Figure 1 32 wards of Darjeeling along with the springs
Source: Author (2020)
Samaj also makes rules for access to municipality-provided public taps. Such systems are present in Jawahar Busty‐2, Bose Printing Press Area, and Ganesh Gram. The samaj justifies these rules by citing the involvement of households present during tap installation or those who negotiated with the municipality for the tap. In some areas, only households with ownership are permitted to use these taps, establishing themselves as hydraulic property creators and owners (Boelens and Vos 2014). Hence, tenants are excluded from such systems.
Slums receive a temporary or “kaccha” holding number that grants them access to electricity but not to water. Only a few households with the necessary finances and municipal connections have private water connections. The rest depends on springs, public taps, or private water suppliers. Households outside the informal settlements in registered settlements must prove the legality of their land and house to be considered for access within the municipality's eligibility boundary. Insurmountable legal and financial obstacles have to be crossed to gain access to private municipality connections. Around 80-85% of households are left outside the state's water supply, forcing them to rely on more expensive private water sources and rendering municipal private water connections a luxury, rather than a necessity.
Case Study: Working of the Mangalpuri Water Protection Committee
The Water Protection Committee (WPC/Water Supply Committee) for Mangalpuri was established in 1992. This committee operates independently of the samaj. Mangalpuri has been designated as a wasteland by the Municipality, with an NOC (No Objection Certificate) from the neighbouring Gram Panchayat. Most residents here pay house tax but do not have a registration number; they have only a kaccha holding number, which makes them ineligible for government loans or municipal connections. The WPC consists of 15 members, including multiple water point leaders. It has a president, a secretary (the interviewee), an advisor, and a cashier, all elected for three-year terms. Water-related issues are discussed within this group of 15 members. The committee was dormant for several years after 1992 but has been active since 2005.
The WPC operates the Police Dhara Water System in Ward 17, which is a spring management system. Police Dhara is at a lower altitude than the village. In 2005, there were 110 households and a 5 HP (horsepower) pump. The Public Health and Engineering Department under the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC PHE) provided the tank and pipe network for the community. DGHC supplied cement, pipes, and a pump, costing ₹ 3–3.5 lakh, and covered half of the labour costs. The second installed pump was a 10 HP model. Its head is 475 feet from the dhara or source and it uses a 3-phase pump. From the road head, 3,000 litres are drawn downward, with the total capacity at the road head reaching 4,500 litres. Two villagers are employed—one at the pump and another for distribution. The latter opens and closes (kholne/jodne) connections at the dhara. For salaries and electricity, households pay ₹100–150 in water fees. Any surplus income is profit.
At the source, the Police Dhara includes a water storage tank, a pumping system, and a flowing outlet. The outlet is used for washing clothes and for procuring household water needs by those outside the samaj from Mangalpuri, Dhobi Talao, and Lachan Paari. Water distribution is organised so that one street receives water at a time, with a point leader responsible for that street. The supply occurs every 2–3 days, providing 100 litres each time. Households are not allowed to draw water directly from the spring. When asked why their water system functions so well, the interviewee explained that it is due to members' honesty and their avoidance of unnecessary expenses. Lower costs imply that there is no need to collect more. They automatically receive 600 litres during a house funeral without needing to apply. For other occasions, such as weddings and functions, an application is required, and they receive 1,000 litres. The WPC also monitors the cleanliness of the vessels that household members use to collect water. Regarding support for upgrading their system, there was a plan to request the government to build an additional reserve tank to store water overnight, estimated to cost around ₹11 lakhs. The primary issues faced are related to the availability of electricity and the pumps. The Mangalpuri WPC’s structure and functioning are replicated in other WPCs and samaj.
Hydraulic Property Creation via Collective Systems of Ownership
A majority of households in the Global South depend on informal water sources (Harris et al. 2020). Hydraulic property is frequently established through processes outside the scope of state structures (Boelens and Vos 2014). Informal self-service systems and community-based organisations create their own parallel water rights (Pradhan and Meinzen-Dick in (Moench et al. 2003)). This strains individual-state relations, raises questions about the state's legitimacy, and exacerbates patterns of inequality. Yet, they actively fill the gaps where the state is lacking. The growing preference for provisioning decentralised and flexible service highlights the need for policies that support these systems, ensuring they deliver tangible benefits rather than being overlooked or overridden (Allen et al. 2006). This leads to the creation of hydraulic property as a collective ownership model, made visible through community-based groups such as Water Protection Committees (WPCs) or the samaj (Boelens and Vos 2014).
Decades ago, in Darjeeling, social worker Pemba Lama started WPCs in informal settlements that lacked municipal water or had only public taps. These committees function like pani panchayats (Joy et al. 2011; Negi et al. 1998; Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology 2005). These committees manage water storage infrastructure, install pumps, and regulate water use through scheduled turns and monitoring. In doing so, they effectively turn springs into a form of hydraulic property (Boelens & Vos 2014). This self-organised management illustrates how communities create and maintain access to water resources in the absence of formal state intervention.
Public springs, which are perennial and relied upon by 200-300 households, such as Lal Dhiki, have existed for decades. The owners of the land (where these springs are located) designated them for public use. Lal Dhiki Ekta Samaj is responsible not only for the operation of the spring in Lal Dhiki but also for functioning as a regular samaj. It is one of the best-known perennial springs in Darjeeling located in the town centre. Other spring-based community initiatives in Darjeeling include the Jawahar WPC, Maharani Dhara Samaj, Dhara Gaon, Koseli Sangh (Lhasa Dhara), Jagriti Yuwa Samaj (Jail Dhara), Nawin Gram Samaj, Giri Dhara Samaj, Gandhi Gram Samaj (Boju Dhara), Astha Samaj (Police Dhara), and Gau Shala Dhara Committee, among others.
Apart from directly developing springs, various samaj water systems operate as pseudo-municipality systems (Shah 2022). Jawahar Busty employs a spring-based system with access rules, providing a fixed list of samaj members who have access on a rotating basis. They collect funds to build reserve tanks for the springs, which flow continuously. Their land is also designated as wasteland, similar to Mangalpuri. However, it is apparent that they find it difficult to seek funds from the municipality or the state government. This is because they believe that the authorities know they have survived so far and will be able to do so in the future, leaving them to fend for themselves. Had they maintained a distressed image of their area, formerly known as Man Pari Busty,ii they believe there would have been more incentives and support. Most residents are labourers caught up in their work, and water issues take up extra hours each day. It is the springs that attract people to settle here.
A, B, and C (Ward 27) of Frymal village, located in the northern part of Darjeeling, has established a water supply system that relies on private tankers because the area lacks natural springs. It is situated between two roads, one above and one below, both accessible by vehicle. Since 6,000-litre tankers cannot reach these households, the local community has developed a distribution network which has an inlet at the road and several outlets at the other end. The tankers deliver water to the road, connect to the network, and then distribute it.
These spring-based systems and the creation of samaj infrastructure are in areas designated as slums or informal settlements. Because of the segregation and barriers created by the state by identifying certain regions as illegal, these places are forced to turn to self-provisioning. Even if they want to improve their self-devised systems, they cannot apply for government loans. Resources are managed more effectively at the local level, where both state and private entities often cannot intervene (Domenech et al. 2013). People tend to act collectively and use various institutional arrangements during times of scarcity (Mehta 2006). Sociological factors are integral to how water systems operate, requiring communities to organise aspects of water access, such as secure transfer, distribution, payment, and disposal (Coward 1985). Communities have been developing their own water supply systems along with the committees that manage them, often outside government oversight. Insufficient public services have driven wealthier individuals to self-provision through private tubewells, making them private suppliers in the process.
In contrast to global public-private partnerships, where governments invite private entities to collaborate, Darjeeling's private water systems are small-scale, often managed by one or two individuals or a samaj, and have developed independently. Changes to local water systems occur with or without government-led rehabilitation and are subject to modifications within institutional and organisational frameworks (Coward 1985). Occasionally, new types of water systems also appear. However, the success of water infrastructure depends on including private, community, and government systems in planning, given the significant investments involved (Hillmann 2013). Therefore, it is essential to understand people's interactions with water resources and infrastructure at all stages, from access to disposal (Coward 1985).
Conclusion
Overlapping biophysical, jurisdictional, administrative, and community boundaries complicate water rights. Communities have been the primary stakeholders in developing their own water systems, sometimes even for profit. Darjeeling features various such setups that reflect community involvement in establishing hydraulic property through collective ownership systems outside the state's purview, covering public taps as well, approved by the municipality. Samaj and WPCs have been key pioneers in this process.
The creation of hydraulic property regimes is parallel and lie outside state definitions. These are seldom captured by national‐ and state-level studies. The state establishes the territorial boundaries of mountain water governance exclusively through a variety of documents with different jurisdictions and borders. This complexity needs to be urgently assessed within a legal pluralism framework, given the intricate interactions at and across scales amid ecological calamities. This issue brief demonstrates that this oversight presents a significant problem in Darjeeling.
As climate change and urbanisation accelerate, community-based water systems that sustain the mountain communities are threatened because they cannot keep pace with these changes. Achieving fair access to water in the Global South is complex, and effective solutions will require locally focused approaches rather than sweeping, large-scale plans. Policies should support these systems to ensure that they deliver tangible benefits rather than neglect or bypass them. It is crucial that future local solutions also address gender considerations by examining intra-household dynamics, differences among women across socio-economic backgrounds, and local hydro-social and historical factors that influence water scarcity.
ENDNOTES
Revealed in response to household questionnaires collected by the author
man pari or “do as your heart desires”
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About the Author : Dr Rinan Shah is a former Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR. Her work engages with the question of thinking/rethinking water governance in the mountainous landscapes in a rapidly urbanizing world with uncertain and intense ecological calamities. Her PhD thesis attempted to disentangle the drivers of domestic water scarcity in the volumetrically “water-rich” Eastern Himalayan Region. She can be reached at her email id [email protected].
