Groundwater governance in Bangladesh: Established practices and recent trends

Legal framework is very crucial to protect the vital resources, to provide rights to public and administration, to support national policy and to bring technological intervention to ensure equitable distribution, fair management, and effective decision making. In Bangladesh, groundwater is not directly priced (other than pumping costs), perhaps such issue is not surprising that users do not meter the volumes of water usage. Beside the industry, agricultural sector is by far the biggest groundwater consumer of this country, contributing significant amount of annual meter drop in the groundwater table to the annual decline of groundwater table. Additionally, the groundwater resources are severely affected by, pollution, encroachment and overexploitation. National Water Policy (1999) and Bangladesh Water Act (2013) are considered as country's pivotal legal framework but both of these lag behind to provide effective guidelines on permission, extraction limit, monitoring, protection of quality, water harvesting procedure, and recharge mechanism. Existing institutions suffer from consistent crisis, politics, corruption, absence of public participation and coordination of other institutions, mismanagement, and empirical assessment. This study evaluates the existing water related policies and functions of multidimensional institutions, and discusses the key challenges of effective groundwater management. The present paper also provides an overview of established practices around the world to cope with the common challenges.