Article Water Security or Security of Water? A Conceptual Analysis

The present article tries to understand the concept of water security. What is the threshold beyond which water qualifies to be a security issue? Do our security concerns emanate from the conflictual interests emanating from demand and supply, riparian rights of the intra- or inter-state actors or the ownership of the resource? Does the resource study get special attention from the people, national or international actors, when water falls within the security zone? Do efforts to meet the requirements of people and state end up in securitising water as a resource. Keywords Water security, security of water, water in South Asia, concept of water security Water, studied by hydrologists, came out of the domain of natural sciences and became a source of enquiry by the social scientists. The non-renewable resources such as coal, oil and gas were studied within the realm of demand and supply, distribution pattern, availability and so on, whereas the renewable resources such as water, wind, solar were not critical of depletion. The search for new resources of energy brought in attention towards non-renewables. Also the essentiality of water for life could not be negated. If oil gets depleted some other source o