India, Feb. 19 -- Water has never been just a developmental input in India; it has been the civilisational artery around which societies, economies, and cultures have grown for millennia. From the hydraulic brilliance of the Harappan cities to the community-governed tanks of peninsular India and the intricate stepwells of the West, water shaped settlement patterns, food systems, architecture, and social organisation. Yet in contemporary policy discourse, this profound historical relationship has been flattened into a technocratic assessment of scarcity, groundwater stress, and monsoon unpredictability. India is not inherently water-poor. It is becoming water-stressed because of ecological negligence, unsustainable extraction, fragmented g...