Offered by

Center for Water Policy, Regulation, and Governance, TISS

About the centre

The Centre for Water Policy, Regulation, & Governance (CWPRG) is a comprehensive initiative of the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. This initiative is focused on facilitating interdisciplinary studies, teaching, training, and outreach activities in the field of governance of the water sector.

Aim

MWPG is an interdisciplinary program and aims at preparing and equipping policy-professionals with a comprehensive conceptual and theoretical understanding as well as with practical expertise and skills necessary to deal effectively with factors, processes, practices, and instruments that determine the outcome of efforts to govern the water sector.

Objectives

The program focuses on imparting in-depth knowledge on ecological, political, economic, legal, socio-cultural, and other aspects of governance of the water sector, encompassing the local, national, and global contexts.

To this end, the program will introduce students to debates on critically important and, often, contentious themes such as water security and sustainability, water-poverty, and legal-institutional models of water management.

The MWPG program is designed to equip students to understand and address the complex and intertwined challenges before the water sector. These challenges include: equitable allocation, efficient use, and sustainable management of water resources. The program will view these challenges in the broader developmental context, and with a particular focus on policy and governance aspects.

Further, the program seeks to provide an in-depth understanding on the multidimensional issues plaguing the urban-industrial, agricultural, energy, and rural domestic sectors.

The syllabus and course contents of this interdisciplinary program draw from a variety of disciplines from physical, engineering, and social sciences as well as law. The program is also designed to impart the knowledge of methods and practical skills from different disciplines that would be required by policy- professionals in the water sector.

Pedagogy: How do we teach?

The program lays a special emphasis on balancing the conceptual, theoretical, policy, and practice aspects appropriately.

Through the classroom coaching and field-exposure, the program would build a base for further interdisciplinary and intensive inputs on different cross-sectoral themes and sectoral knowledge. These intensive inputs will rely heavily on group and independent work, which the faculty will support through different mechanisms for handholding.

Responding to the need for building professional capabilities, the program provides significant space for courses imparting various research and professional skills and expertise in analytical and research methods. These include some of the advanced skills such as systems thinking, GIS, financial and regulatory analysis.

The program also provides unique opportunities to directly interact and engage with movements, non-profit organizations, government authorities and other agencies working in the sector.

Structure of the program

• The MWPG would begin by laying conceptual and theoretical foundations through class-based coaching in foundation and perspective courses in the initial semester.
• This semester would be followed by classroom training on various governance-related issues, themes, debates, and discourses from different subsectors of the water sector. This will be achieved through a combination of taught courses in the modular and semester format.
• Rigorous ‘Reading and Seminar Courses,’ with a combination of field exposure would primarily occupy the third semester. These are aimed at providing intensive inputs on sub-sectoral policies and cross-sectoral themes.
• The program would conclude with the independent work by students on dissertations or projects in the fourth semester.
• The program also offers opportunity to work independently and in teams through the mechanisms of Summer Internship and Winter Institute.

Eligibility

Admission to the program is open for students coming from diverse backgrounds, but mainly from two categories: (a) professional training such as engineering, law, agriculture, management, public-health, or finance, and (b) academic training in social sciences such as economics, political sciences, and geography.

Working professionals in early stages of their career are strongly encouraged to apply.

How to apply

For detailed information exam-schedule and selection procedure, please visit the admissions website: https://admissions.tiss.edu