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INTRODUCTION
Increasingly, in the twilight years of the British Empires presence in India,
Bengals rivers were declared to be an indisputable water problem. For
many in the colonial government, the deltas fluvial arms were too
temperamental and snaked their way across the capacious flood plains only
to wastefully empty millions of tons of their watery burden into the Bay
of Bengal. Usually a swollen rage during the monsoon and an irrelevant
trickle in winter, such hydrographic quirks, it was authoritatively held,
regularly depressed and enfeebled the Bengal peasant. Some time in
December of 1945, R.G. Casey, then governor of Bengal, in a radio
broadcast argued for a definitive response to this perplexing hydrology:
the water problem of Bengal necessitate[s] our so handling [of] the great
rivers that their flow is equalised and controlled as between summer and
winter in order that they may provide an adequate and balanced output .
This would avoid the disastrous flooding in the monsoon and would cure
the dry or stagnant state of many of our rivers in the winter. (Casey 1945)
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will argue in this paper, the apogee and limits of the supply-side hydraulic
paradigm. As an ideological and material force, supply-side hydrology was
choppily assembled through the course of the nineteenth century in India
before maturing and achieving dominance in the early decades of the
twentieth.2 Simply put, in the words of some of its enthusiasts, it refers to a
strategy wherein the need for an additional quantity of water is met by
increasing the available supply of water through new development projects
(Biswas and Embed: 351). This disarmingly matter-of-fact definition,
however, is underpinned by a strong belief that water-use is neither shaped
in a historical/cultural context nor does it possess ecological qualities. The
conceptual understanding of water, in such an ideological framing, is
thereby simplified as being one of a pure unmediated volume, which then
as mere quantity can, through technological fixes, be niftily hefted across
ecological zones or piped across distances. Small wonder that hydraulic
manipulation in the modern era has been often, if not always, described as
narratives about the human quest to dominate flows or voiced in the
metaphor of getting deserts to bloom. The supply-side hydraulic paradigm,
by deeply drawing upon the modern legacy of emptying water of its cultural
and ecological qualities, has tended to develop in four specific directions:
1. technical expertise as civil engineers (Cosgrove and Petts 1990; Shallat
1994);
2. perfecting skills as quantitative hydrologists (Biswas 1970);
3. carrying out high-modernist social planning agendas (Scott 2006); and
4. assembling giant centralised national water bureaucracies (Molle et al
2009).
Crafted and deployed in concert, these knowledges helped harness water
through a range of modern hydraulic infrastructures such as barrages,
weirs, large dams, groundwater mining technologies, storage reservoirs
and canalisation.
Despite the triumphant conquest of flows, supply-side interventions
have been dogged by innumerable complications, sharply expressed in the
form of disagreements, disputes and outright conflict. In a recent
compilation on water conflicts in India interestingly titled a Million
Revolts in the making it was noted with considerable alarm that clashes
over water were percolating to every level of society and were now
erupting as a relentless series of interconnected confrontations over issues
of allocation, equity, quality, access, ecological impacts, trans-border and
inter-states quarrels and various micro-level antagonisms (Gujja et al. 2006:
570). Added to which has been the considerable political and social attrition
generated around large dams, MPRVD schemes and alarms against interbasin water transfers (IBWT). Forced to grapple with both the growing scale
and exasperating nature of many of these challenges, water planners, in
recent years, have begun to press for a number of new arrangements. These
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Clearly, from even these two brief observations, one can get a sense of how
intricate and yet fragile connections were established and sustained
between flows and a plethora of water bodies. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, however, such natural drainage networks survived only
in pockets, as vast parts of eastern India had been transformed into a
succession of water logged morasses in which dismal swamps breeding
malaria were debilitating populations and eroding soil fertility. In time,
drainage congestion increased the virulence of flood pulses that were
aggravated, in great measure, by the rapidly deteriorating embankment
system as well.
Thus, by reading against the grain of the historical record on drainage
and flood events in nineteenth-century India, one could, in contrast,
question the now conventional understanding that all floods were simply
natural calamities brought on by river overflow. Rather, as suggested
above, much of what are considered to be irremediably flood-prone
regions in India are actually greatly altered landscapes with drainage, in
particular, being considerably distorted by the layering of innumerable
physical obstructions: imperatives for transport and for securing the
primacy of land as a source of revenue. In effect, one could argue that by
the early decades of the twentieth century several areas in deltaic India
were now open to a substantial degree of un-natural flooding; that is,
overflows and currents that were generated by disturbed and altered flows.
However, just as embankments were beginning to be doubted for their
efficacy by the mid-1930s, the idea that a more comprehensive form of river
control could be achieved through MPRVD started gaining ground in
colonial India. This involved the systematic damming of rivers through a
series of reservoirs that were imbricated along the main stem and
tributaries. The belief was that flows could now be stored and therefore
released or manipulated and moderated according to human will. The
quest for the total control of nature, not surprisingly, found a ready
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with their steel and concrete approaches, must give way to an entirely new
spectrum of knowledges, which will treat flows as possessing non-linear,
stochastic and complex qualities rather than simplified homogenous or
quantitative volumes. Moreover, as Jayant Bandhopadhyay points out,
natural floods, historically, have provided a range of ecological services
from delivering valuable silt, to recharging the soils, ponds, lakes and
groundwater acquifers, besides transporting fish populations
(Bandhyopadhyay 2009: 49102).
If river flows are thus treated as being primarily ecological qualities, a
rigorous questioning of the very basis for IBWT projects can follow. For the
ILR plan in India, in particular, placing water in ecological contexts has
helped challenge some of the basic claims for inter-basin water transfers.
As pointed out by Jayanta Bandhyopadhyay and Shama Perveen, no clear
and peer-accepted methodology thus far exists for classifying river basins
according to their natural surplus (Bandhyopadhyay and Perveen 2006:
33). More so, given that each river basin is defined by its own intrinsic
variability in water endowment, suggesting that they possess either a
surplus or deficit cannot be credibly established (Bandhyopadhyay and
Perveen 2006: 34).
In a similar vein, Ramaswamy Iyer contests the view that the
subcontinent suffers from the paradox of floods and drought. Both floods
and droughts, he argues, should be considered as natural phenomena,
which occur in area-specific ways and sustain a range of ecological
relationships in terms of the environmental contexts these water regimes
establish. Hence, shuffling huge volumes of water between basins, without
regard to local environments and conditions, might result in potentially
disastrous consequences (Iyer 2006). Here, Iyer also implies that there is
need not only to relate perspectives on water to specific biophysical and
ecological properties but to link them to particular social and economic
processes. In effect, arriving at an understanding that water is scarce or
abundant or limited is significantly a challenge of interpretation. Lyla
Mehtas book The Politics and Poetics of Water (2005) sets out to examine
the validity of the now widely believed and dominantly held assertion that
water is a scarce resource: that water crises are brought on by natural
(rather than human-induced) scarcities, and that the latter is universal
(rather than something that can be cyclical or a sequence in a hydraulic
rhythm). Put differently, the book puts to test the foundational myth of
modern hydraulic engineering, which in turn draws its economics from the
neoclassical supply-side strategy for water management.
In a largely ethnographic study of the village of Merka, somewhere in the
heart of the arid and seemingly foreboding landscape of the Kutch
(Gujarat), Lyla convincingly argues that the notion of water is saturated by
multiple, conflicting and contradictory meanings and perceptions. Water
scarcity in Merka is perceived differently and often in non-overlapping ways
by the landless, pastoralists, women, the lower caste community, state
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officials, distant urban planners and the powerful local landed elements.
These differing perceptions, moreover, do not simply exist as a simple
collage of views but are in fact in competition, from which a dominant view
is then sought to be imposed. Lyla Mehta then points out that the
government holds on to a manufactured notion of scarcity, which treats
the latter as being universal, naturalised and absolute. It is by deploying this
version of a manufactured scarcity that the government generates supports
for its quest to build a large dam (the Sardar Sarovar Dam) as a permanent
solution. What gets elided, left out and suppressed, however, is the varied
survival and livelihood practices that had been crafted by women, dry-land
cultivators, rural poor and pastoralists to cope with cyclical scarcity. Termed
by Lyla Mehta as the lived/experienced notion of scarcity, these innovative
responses enabled the mostly weaker sections of Merkas rural populace to
tide over seasonal water shortages (Mehta 2005). In effect, though water
scarcity can convey a notion of limits, it nevertheless is layered politically
by contradictory and contested meanings, perceptions and power.
Thus, the turn towards new ecology and a nuanced cultural
understanding11 of how water is perceived by varied social groups decisively
unsettles the rather nave and narrow civil engineering view of rivers as
being mere carriers of volumes. In fact, the persistence of supply-side
hydrology enthusiasts to empty water of its historical, cultural and ecological
properties, I argue, proved particularly fatal in two dramatic flood-related
events that occurred in India on 18 August and 20 September 2008.
THE DENOUEMENT SCRIPTS: A CONCLUSION
The Sapta Kosi river (seven rivers) falls steeply from the mountainous
terrain of eastern Nepal and then cuts across the broad alluvial plains of
Bihar before it merges into the Ganges. Often referred to as the sorrow of
Bihar, the Kosi is known to be moody and prone to flashy floods, besides
repeatedly shifting its channel almost at will. The length of the
embankments along its banks were steadily increased from 160 km in 1952
to roughly 3,465 km in 1998 (Krishnakumar 1999). On 18 August 2008, a
portion of the eastern bank, lying in the Sunsari district of Nepals Terai
region, breached. The break in the embankment wall, not unexpectedly,
rapidly widened and unleashed vast quantities of the rivers monsoonal
discharge and sediment onto about 50,000 or so people living in the
vicinity. Soon rampaging waters inundated much of eastern Bihar and
affected close to 3.5 million people (Dixit 2009). The full magnitude of the
misery, damages and loss, in fact, remains yet to be credibly totalled.
The subsequent blame game that followed the Kosi flood, as reported in
the popular Indian press, ran the full spectrum of charges against the usual
suspects: embankment failure, lack of maintenance, official apathy, neglect,
and even Nepals intransigence in facilitating regular repairs. While the nature
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4
5
6
For some recent studies on the TVA and the experiences with its transfer to
different regions and river basins see Biggs 2006; Hoag 2006; DSouza 2006a
and Klingensmith 2007.
The English East India Company, through a clutch of spirited military
engineers, initiated a radical break in both technique and hydraulic principle
by introducing perennial canal irrigation. For the first time in British India,
permanent head-works in the form of barrages and weirs were thrown across
river-beds and their waters diverted through extensive canal systems. These
barrages and weirs were equipped with a series of shutters to regulate flows
by impounding water during lean seasons and diverting it into canals, and
conversely the former could be flipped open to release waters during periods
of the rivers peak discharges. In effect, by impounding the rivers variable
flow regime at certain points along its course, irrigation was transformed
from a seasonal to a perennial possibility. This phase is often referred to as
the advent of the era of modern irrigation. For an introduction to the
modern hydraulic moment in British India see Whitcombe 1983; Stone 1985;
Ali 1988; Gilmartin 1994; DSouza 2006b; Hardiman 2008.
Literature on dam displacement in India is vast, but an excellent introduction
on the subject is available in Dreze et al. 1997. For a compelling account on
the suffering of the dam displaced in India see Roy 1999. A recent informative
review and critique of the use of EIAs in India is available in Menon 2009.
On A.N. Khosla see Klingensmith 2007: 21153. CWINC refers to the Central
Water Irrigation and Navigation Commission: independent Indias equivalent
of the American Bureau of Reclamation.
A concise introduction to government initiatives in independent India on
floods is available in Centre for Science and Environment 1991: 914.
The length of embankments currently stands at 34,397.61 km according to
the Internet page for the Ministry for Water Resources, Government of India:
http://wrmin.nic.in/index3.asp?subsublinkid=360&langid=1&sslid=356
(accessed 7 May 2010).
Reservoirs constructed with exclusive flood control storage include Maithon,
Panchet, Tilaiya and Konar in Damodar Valley; Chandil Dam on the
Subarnarekha river and Rengali Dam on the Brahmani river. In addition,
there has been 177 billion m3 of live storage created so far in the various
reservoirs for irrigation, hydropower generation, drinking water store part of
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the flood waters. See the Internet page of the Ministry of Water Resource,
Government of India: http://wrmin.nic.in/index3.asp?subsublinkid=360&
langid=1&sslid=356 (accessed 7 May 2010).
See Centre for Science and Environment 1991: 18. According to the Ministry
of Water Resources (India), out of the total geographical area of 329 m ha.,
the flood prone area has been estimated as 40 m ha. by the Rashtriya Barh
Ayog in its report of 1980. Recently, the Working Group on Flood Control
Programme set up by the Planning Commission for the 10th Five Year Plan
has estimated the flood prone areas as 45.64 million hectare acre (m.ha)., out
of which an area of 16.457 m. ha. was estimated to be protected till the end
of March 2004. http://wrmin.nic.in/index2.asp?sublinkid=352&langid=1&
slid=353 (accessed 7 May 2010).
http://wrmin.nic.in/index3.asp?subsublinkid=360&langid=1&sslid=356
(Internet page for the Ministry for Water Resources, Government of India,
accessed 7 May 2010)).
For excellent critiques of the ILR from an activists viewpoint see Patkar 2003
and Shankari 2004.
The idea that water-use is embedded in cultural logics has, in recent years,
received considerable attention. For two recent works for India see Baviskar
2007 and Lahiri-Dutt 2006.
See the polemical piece by Rorabacher 2008 that challenges the claim that
embankments in Bihar are necessary or required as development investments.
For a detailed description of the impacts and damages following the September
floods on the Mahanadi river system in 2008 see http://orissafloods.wordpress.
com/2008/09/21/worst-floods-in-orissa (accessed 7 May 2010).
See The Hindu (22 September 2008) http://www.hindu.com/2008/09/22/
stories/2008092260021300.htm (accessed 7 May 2010).
Some of the most astute observation on the Kosi river have been discussed
by Dinesh Kumar Mishra see Mishra 1997b, 1998, 1999: 4651. Also see
Krishnakumar 1999 and Mishra 2008.
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