Exploring policy coherence in Indias electricity-water nexus

The governance for nexus approach calls for coherence among interdependent sectors like electricity and water. Water availability for future electricity generation in India is increasingly becoming a concern for planners and policy makers, especially under climate change scenarios or scenarios of increasing water use for competing sectors like irrigation. The nexus approach focuses on policy coherence, i.e., the systematic identification and management of trade-offs, conflicts and synergies between policies across sectors. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 which directs to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development also outlines policy coherence as a major pathway to achieve this. This chapter applies a nexus framework to investigate the existing coherence between policies for electricity production and related water use in India. Through the framework, we examine the inter-linkages between 12 policy solutions across eight policy objectives existing in India's electricity and water sectors. We find that majority of the interactions are positive (indivisible, reinforcing, enabling) indicating that progress on most of the objectives affects progress on the other objectives positively. However, some interactions are also constraining, counteracting and cancelling. We highlight that among all the policy solutions that we examine, the nexus impact of policies promoting solar and wind is most positive and beneficial in terms of its nexus implications.