From Damming Rivers to Linking Waters Is

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16 From Damming Rivers to Linking Waters: Is thisthe Beginning of the End of Supply-Side Hydrology in India?

Rohan D’Souza

INTRODUCTION

Increasingly, in the twilight years of the British Empire’s presence in India,Bengal’s rivers were declared to be an indisputable ‘water problem’. For many in the colonial government, the delta’s fluvial arms were tootemperamental 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 irrelevanttrickle in winter, such hydrographic quirks, it was authoritatively held,regularly depressed and enfeebled the Bengal peasant. Some time inDecember of 1945, R.G. Casey, then governor of Bengal, in a radiobroadcast argued for a definitive response to this perplexing hydrology:

the water problem of Bengal necessitate[s] our so handling [of] the greatrivers 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)

The governor’s emphatic suggestions for getting a ‘balanced output’ fromthe Bengal rivers was not exceptional for its time. Pursuing total river control through multipurpose river valley development (MPRVD), more soin the 1940s, enjoyed a near overwhelming acceptance across theideological spectrum (D’Souza 2008). Spurred on by the ‘triumph’ of theTennessee Valley Authority (TVA) model, large-scale hydraulicmanipulation, especially in soon to be decolonising countries, increasingly fired social, economic and engineering imaginations.1

Placed in a contemporary context, however, the governor’s broadcaststands out for another significance. Notably, the challenge of equalising,controlling and balancing river flows, which captures in a single frame, as I

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will argue in this paper, the apogee and limits of the supply-side hydraulicparadigm. As an ideological and material force, supply-side hydrology was

choppily assembled through the course of the nineteenth century in Indiabefore maturing and achieving dominance in the early decades of thetwentieth.2 Simply put, in the words of some of its enthusiasts, it refers to astrategy 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 shapedin a historical/cultural context nor does it possess ecological qualities. Theconceptual understanding of water, in such an ideological framing, isthereby simplified as being one of a pure unmediated volume, which thenas mere quantity can, through technological fixes, be niftily hefted across

ecological zones or piped across distances. Small wonder that hydraulicmanipulation in the modern era has been often, if not always, described asnarratives about the human quest to dominate flows or voiced in themetaphor of getting deserts to bloom. The supply-side hydraulic paradigm,by deeply drawing upon the modern legacy of emptying water of its culturaland ecological qualities, has tended to develop in four specific directions:

1. technical expertise as civil engineers (Cosgrove and Petts 1990; Shallat1994);

2. perfecting skills as quantitative hydrologists (Biswas 1970);3. carrying out high-modernist social planning agendas (Scott 2006); and4. 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 reservoirsand canalisation.

Despite the triumphant conquest of flows, supply-side interventionshave been dogged by innumerable complications, sharply expressed in theform of disagreements, disputes and outright conflict. In a recentcompilation on water conflicts in India – interestingly titled a ‘“MillionRevolts” in the making’ – it was noted with considerable alarm that clashesover water were ‘percolating’ to every level of society and were now erupting as a relentless series of interconnected confrontations over issuesof allocation, equity, quality, access, ecological impacts, trans-border andinter-states quarrels and various micro-level antagonisms (Gujja et al. 2006:570). Added to which has been the considerable political and social attritiongenerated around large dams, MPRVD schemes and alarms against inter-basin water transfers (IBWT). Forced to grapple with both the growing scaleand exasperating nature of many of these challenges, water planners, inrecent years, have begun to press for a number of new arrangements. These

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358 A History of Water

‘solutions’ have been primarily aimed at advocating managerial andtechnical interventions, with an emphasis on evolving ‘resilient’ bargaining

and efficiency-sharing frameworks. In the case of inter-basin water-sharingdisputes, for example, there has been a reinforcing of attempts to further empower institutional mechanisms such as water tribunals, independentcommissions and river basin authorities, even though many such effortshave not necessarily yielded desired outcomes (Richards and Nirvikar 2002;Hill 2008).

On the other hand, for the many often intractable dilemmas of access,rights and distribution brought on by surface or canal irrigation schemes,an entirely new wave of what has been termed demand-based strategieshave been advocated. Such management interventions include a number of measures aimed at cutting state subsidies on canal maintenance and

operation costs, getting irrigators to accept ‘full cost-recovery’ principlesand forming cultivators into irrigation associations to run the networkthrough various types of public–private partnership models (Sivakoti et al.2005). Lastly, on the political and social challenges that have engulfed largedam construction there has been a gradual, though uneven, momentumtoward developing relatively more informed responses to ascertain project-related ecological consequences through environmental impactassessment (EIA) exercises and even the far more intractable challenges of community displacement has been sought to be moderated by compensation and rehabilitation packages.3 In all, supply-side hydrology enthusiasts have sought to tweak and recalibrate many aspects of their water-management paradigm, without fundamentally upsetting the basicassumptions or the status quo on manipulating and moving water asunmediated volumes.

While this seemingly reflexive turn toward demand-side managementand the adoption of different sensibilities toward technology marks a shiftfrom previous perceptions about water management, the supply-sideparadigm has, however, been unable to convincingly resolve several of itssevere contradictions. In particular, its crises as a paradigm, in post-colonialIndia, have been made most pronounced in the realm of flood control. Therecurrence of inundation and even the heightening of flood losses have allbut outwitted the many sustained efforts of water managers, engineeringestablishments and hydrocracies. In great measure these crises have beenaggravated, as I will argue, not only by the fact that floods as a phenomenonhave been conceptualised in a flawed manner within the supply-sidehydraulic paradigm, but by the fact that the latter can no longer credibly sustain its familiar arguments for comprehensively ‘controlling’ the latter through embankments, MPRVD, large dams or IBWT. Put differently,supply-side hydrology in its failure to engage with water as a historicalquantity and flows as possessing ecological qualities has reached aconceptual dead end. Thus, the repeated inability to either contain or attenuate floods and flood damage has decisively dented the hubristic view



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that nature as unmediated volumes can be bent, controlled, regulated,manipulated or dominated by a collection of hydraulic artefacts assembled

in reinforced concrete and steel. To explain this call for a new hydraulicimagination in dealing with the challenge of floods in India one would first,however, need to recover a sense of history and ecology.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY: RECASTING THE IDEA OFFLOODS AND DRAINAGE

Recent scholarship on South Asian environmental history has begun tosuggest that much of the Indian subcontinent’s flood and deltaic plains were organised by communities as flood-dependent agrarian regimes

rather than being treated as flood-vulnerable landscapes (Mishra 2000;D’Souza 2006a; Weil 2006; P. Singh 2008). In fact, as early as the late 1930s,the celebrated British engineer William Willcocks delivered a series of essays in which he claimed to have uncovered a long history of ‘inundationirrigation’ in the Bengal delta. According to him, the muddy crest waters of the annual inundations were leached by cultivators through an intricatesystem of channels. These silt-laden waters of the swollen rivers,furthermore, carried fish eggs. While the eggs spawned into fish, who thenproceeded to voraciously devour mosquito larvae, the organic silt helpednourish and fertilise soils. Besides, the continuous deposition of sedimentin time built up the delta and raised the land above the level of the river beds (Addams Williams 1931; Willcocks 1984).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, colonial rule in a bidto consolidate its administrative and economic imperatives in the regionbegan to implement comprehensive strategies for flood control. Efforts were mainly directed at constructing systematic embankment lines that were intended to hem in and contain the rivers within the latter’s mainchannels, and central to these technical arrangements was the desire tosecure land as a revenue-paying commodity (D’Souza 2006a: 97–125). Inaddition, they also constructed a large number of roads, railway lines andbridges, which ended up interrupting drainage flows (Iqbal 2007). While inBengal and Bihar, for example, most of the natural drainage lines droppedfrom north to south, the roads and railways tracks were constructed acrossthem, running east to west (P. Singh 2003). Colonial administrators andengineers have, in fact, left a sizable number of observations on how intricately organised village-level drainage systems were. The EpidemicCommission of 1864, to quote an example, while investigating the causesof malaria in Bengal recorded that:

The drainage of all villages … in lower Bengal is effected by the water firstrunning into the nearest paddy-fields lying in the direction of their slope,

thence it collects in the bheels [lakes, ponds] from which it rushes through




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khals [channels] into larger streams. Which again communicate withnavigable rivers. (Noted in the Report of the Drainage Committee 1907:

20–1)

A somewhat similar description on drainage is also available for villages inthe command area of the Sone canal in South Bihar:

the village aharas [tanks] … are made so as to intercept the greatest

portion of it [drainage] near the south and west boundaries of the villages;the tal or reservoir being above the ahara, and the putsar (irrigated rice

land) below it … The water thus flows from and to ahara to ahara andfrom putsar to ahara or tal , till excess water is absorbed, or finds its way

into the drainage nullas [drains] of the district. ( Report of the Committee

1888: 18)

Clearly, from even these two brief observations, one can get a sense of how intricate and yet fragile connections were established and sustainedbetween flows and a plethora of water bodies. By the beginning of thetwentieth 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 breedingmalaria’ were debilitating populations and eroding soil fertility. In time,drainage congestion increased the virulence of flood pulses that wereaggravated, in great measure, by the rapidly deteriorating embankmentsystem as well.

Thus, by reading against the grain of the historical record on drainageand 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 suggestedabove, much of what are considered to be irremediably flood-proneregions in India are actually greatly altered landscapes with drainage, inparticular, being considerably distorted by the layering of innumerablephysical obstructions: imperatives for transport and for securing theprimacy 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 incolonial India. This involved the systematic damming of rivers through aseries of reservoirs that were imbricated along the main stem andtributaries. The belief was that flows could now be stored and thereforereleased or manipulated and moderated according to human will. Thequest for the total control of nature, not surprisingly, found a ready



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audience among engineers, planners and governments (D’Souza 2006a:182–214; Klingensmith 2007).

In 1943, the Damodar river in eastern India – with a channel that hadearlier been greatly embanked – had so violently flooded its surroundingplains that the event is often considered to have been crucial in spurringthe colonial administration to initiate plans for constructing MRPVDs, as theonly viable ‘solution’ to the region’s flood problem. Typically, in the moodof the times, in the neighbouring district of Orissa, A.N. Khosla (then Chief Engineer of the CWINC, 1945–53) grandly declared that the Hirakud dam,across the Mahanadi river, would ‘banish forever’ floods in the Orissa delta.4

The Hirakud dam, in fact, even though begun in the cusp period – announcing the end of colonial rule and India’s emergence as anindependent country – acquired the distinction of being the first flood-

control reservoir for the period.The systematic planning for flood management, immediately following

India’s independence in 1947, was initiated with the launching of theNational Programme of Flood Management on September 1954. The 1954flood control policy (FCP) was, in fact, among the first in terms of an officialgovernment initiative on the subject.5 The FCP essentially reiterated, withrenewed emphasis, the colonial response to recurring inundation,involving, in the main, treating floods as calamitous events which neededto be controlled through an overt reliance on structural engineeringmethods. Accordingly, for short-term measures, embankments were to bebuilt to hem in rivers,6 while for the long term the government intendedto contain flood flows in storage reservoirs of large dams or with MPRVDprogrammes.7 Dinesh Mishra observes that such was the optimism for controlling floods by these structural measures that the then Minister for Planning, Irrigation, and Power, Gulzari Lal Nanda believed that ‘floodscould be effectively controlled in 14 to 15 years to come starting from 1954’(Mishra 2008: 37).

The flood-prone area in India, from being calculated as capable of affecting 19 million hectares in 1953, is now considered to be anywherebetween 40 and 60 million hectares. That is, approximately between one-sixth to one-eighth of the total land area is classified as being flood vulnerable.8 The average area annually affected by floods has similarly registered an increase from being calculated at 2,290,000ha in 1953 to now standing at 7,650,000ha in 1997 (Ahuja 1997). In effect, there did not follow any significant decrease in the level of flood vulnerability nor an attenuationin the financial damage caused by the annual rampaging of flood torrents:this despite the fact that structural methods had been sought to becomplemented by a range of what came to be termed as non-structuralmethods as well. Hence, besides storage reservoirs, flood embankments,drainage channels, anti-erosion works, channel improvements, detentionbasins, the non-structural measures comprised flood forecasting, floodplain zoning, flood proofing and disaster preparedness.9 The impossibility




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of comprehensively addressing the challenge of flood and flood vulnerability within the technical armature of supply-side hydrology was in

fact crucial to spurring the conceptual elaboration for IBWT in India,popularly referred to as the inter-linking river scheme (ILR).

In essence, the origins for the idea of the ILR appears to have drawndeeply from Governor R.G. Casey’s earlier formula to harness Bengal’s river potential by balancing, equalising and controlling flows. According to oneaccount, the context for the ILR was first set by a seemingly innocuousobservation in the Planning Commission’s Ninth Five-Year Plan document, which noted that the average Indian’s access to water was highly variable, with an availability of close to 18,470 m3 in the Brahmaputra basin but, incontrast, a mere 383m3 in the peninsula rivers. When the problem waspresented as a ‘hydraulic anomaly’, it quickly provoked several politicians

from south India to approach the Supreme court in 2000, seeking promptaction from the government (A.K. Singh 2003: 1). The Apex court inOctober–November of 2002 further directed the Indian government notonly to carry out plans to link rivers but to do so within ten years.Subsequent to the court rulings, the ILR quickly achieved political tractionand was presented as a technical problem that needed to be resolved as anissue of hydraulic justice. Put differently, nature’s natural imbalance, it washeld, could be righted through water transfers, diversions and storagereservoirs. The claim for the ILR, moreover, was soon given its own history by treating it as part of an unrealised technical quest, voiced as early as thenineteenth century. In the late 1850s, Colonel Arthur Cotton, a colonialengineer, had drawn up a plan to connect the Indian subcontinent througha grid of navigation and irrigation canals. A peninsula system, for him, couldlink Karachi in the north-west to Madras in the south via Kanpur, Calcuttaand Cuttack, with additional lines to Poona and the west coast (Headrick1988: 20).

In the 1960s K.L. Rao, the then Union Minister of State for Power andIrrigation, spoke of linking the Ganga with the Cauvery through a 2,640kmlong canal. By the 1970s, the plan was reworked as a ‘national river grid’ by which the surplus waters of the Ganga and Brahmaputra were to bediverted to the central and southern states. In late 1970, one CaptainDastur, an air pilot, proposed that a 4,200km long Himalayan canal and9,300km long southern canal be linked up at Delhi and Patna. CaptainDastur’s proposal was popularly referred to as the Garland Canal scheme(Alam 2003: 48). These plans were subsequently examined by theGovernment of India, which set up the National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development Plan (NCIWRDP). In their report, submittedin 1999, the NCIWRPD concluded that Rao’s proposal was ‘very costly andlower cost alternatives were available’. The Commission was even morecurt about Captain Dastur’s proposal, which was dismissed as being ‘primafacie impractical’ (SANDRP 2003: 3). The Indian courts, however, in beingconceptually wedded to the supply-side hydrology paradigm, viewed the



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NCIWRPD’s assessment as one merely outlining technical and logisticalbarriers rather than drawing upon a different sense of history in which

India’s floodplains could be understood as bearing a long legacy of flooddependence and flood utilisation rather than recurring vulnerability toflows. By thus insisting, like their earlier colonial predecessors, that rivers were mere quantitative or unmediated volumes the courts helped enablethe push for treating the ILR as a solution to the problems of MPRVD andembankments. Moreover, in refusing to recognise the legacy of flooddependence, supply-side hydrologists have thereby stymied possibilitiesfor debating and exploring other kinds of hydraulic imaginations for thesubcontinent. On another level, as well, as I will point out below, this elisionof the historical experience of flood utilisation in India has worked tosustain the official view that ecological qualities of flows can be ignored.10

NEW ECOLOGY AND THE RIVER

In sharp contrast to the construction engineer’s view that rivers are merely moving masses of water crying out to be regulated and dammed, a new wave of river ecologists have now begun to demonstrate convincingly thatfluvial regimes are complex geomorphologic, chemical and biologicalprocesses in motion. Rivers are made up of habitat mosaics that support a wide variety of aquatic and riparian species. And the beating heart thatkeeps alive the river’s ecological health and viability is its natural flow regime, which organises and defines the river ecosystem itself. It is now understood that natural variable flows create and maintain particular dynamics between the channel, floodplain, wetland and the estuary. Themagnitude and frequency of high and low flows consequently regulatenumerous ecological processes. While wetlands provide important nursery grounds for fish and export organic matter and organisms into the mainchannels, the scouring of floodplain by inundations helps rejuvenateinnumerable habitats for plant species within the basin. Even periods of low flow provide certain kinds of ecological benefits, through the recruitmentof different plant species. A large body of recent evidence indicates thatnatural flow regimes of virtually all rivers are inherently variable, and thatthis variability is critical to ecosystem function and native biodiversity. Ineffect, rivers with highly altered or artificially regulated flows might in mostcases lose their ability to support riverine processes (Ward and Stanford1995; Poff et al. 1996).

By thus recasting, in fundamental ways, the manner in which fluvialprocesses are understood, river ecologists are now suggesting that a freshparadigm is required for managing hydraulic endowments. Centrally, whatis being argued is that flows are embedded in ecological contexts andtherefore transferring them through technological fixes can and will haveseveral unintended environmental consequences. Hence, civil engineers,




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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 andgroundwater acquifers, besides transporting fish populations(Bandhyopadhyay 2009: 49–102).

If river flows are thus treated as being primarily ecological qualities, arigorous questioning of the very basis for IBWT projects can follow. For theILR plan in India, in particular, placing water in ecological contexts hashelped 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 basinsaccording 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 andPerveen 2006: 34).

In a similar vein, Ramaswamy Iyer contests the view that thesubcontinent suffers from the ‘paradox of floods and drought’. Both floodsand droughts, he argues, should be considered as ‘natural phenomena’, which occur in area-specific ways and sustain a range of ecologicalrelationships in terms of the environmental contexts these water regimesestablish. Hence, shuffling huge volumes of water between basins, withoutregard to local environments and conditions, might result in potentially disastrous consequences (Iyer 2006). Here, Iyer also implies that there isneed not only to relate perspectives on water to specific biophysical andecological properties but to link them to particular social and economicprocesses. In effect, arriving at an understanding that water is ‘scarce’ or ‘abundant’ or ‘limited’ is significantly a challenge of interpretation. LylaMehta’s book The Politics and Poetics of Water (2005) sets out to examinethe 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 hydraulicrhythm). Put differently, the book puts to test the foundational myth of modern hydraulic engineering, which in turn draws its economics from theneoclassical supply-side strategy for water management.

In a largely ethnographic study of the village of Merka, somewhere in theheart 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 waysby 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 thegovernment holds on to a ‘manufactured’ notion of scarcity, which treatsthe latter as being universal, naturalised and absolute. It is by deploying this version of a manufactured scarcity that the government generates supportsfor its quest to build a large dam (the Sardar Sarovar Dam) as a permanentsolution. What gets elided, left out and suppressed, however, is the variedsurvival and livelihood practices that had been crafted by women, dry-landcultivators, rural poor and pastoralists to cope with cyclical scarcity. Termedby Lyla Mehta as the ‘lived/experienced’ notion of scarcity, these innovativeresponses enabled the mostly weaker sections of Merka’s 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 culturalunderstanding11 of how water is perceived by varied social groups decisively unsettles the rather naïve and narrow civil engineering view of rivers asbeing mere carriers of volumes. In fact, the persistence of supply-sidehydrology enthusiasts to empty water of its historical, cultural and ecologicalproperties, I argue, proved particularly fatal in two dramatic flood-relatedevents 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 mountainousterrain 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, besidesrepeatedly shifting its channel almost at will. The length of theembankments along its banks were steadily increased from 160 km in 1952to roughly 3,465km in 1998 (Krishnakumar 1999). On 18 August 2008, aportion of the eastern bank, lying in the Sunsari district of Nepal’s Terairegion, breached. The break in the embankment wall, not unexpectedly,rapidly widened and unleashed vast quantities of the river’s monsoonaldischarge and sediment onto about 50,000 or so people living in the vicinity. Soon rampaging waters inundated much of eastern Bihar andaffected close to 3.5 million people (Dixit 2009). The full magnitude of themisery, damages and loss, in fact, remains yet to be credibly totalled.

The subsequent blame game that followed the Kosi flood, as reported inthe popular Indian press, ran the full spectrum of charges against the usualsuspects: embankment failure, lack of maintenance, official apathy, neglect,and even Nepal’s intransigence in facilitating regular repairs. While the nature




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of the flooding and the inevitable consequences from aggravating Kosi’sferocity with embankments received sparse discussion,12 arguments soon

veered toward demanding the construction of large storage dams in Nepal.In a sense, the supply-side hydraulic imagination was limited to choosingbetween either embankments or storage reservoirs (Pratim and Gupta 2008).That is, structural interventions were offered as the only solution.

In a bizarre twist, however, just as support for the Saptakoshi High Damat Barahshetra (near Chatra village in Nepal), as a permanent flood controlmeasure, was being drummed up, on 20 September 2008 an unrelentingspell of rainfall turned the Mahanadi river system in Orissa (eastern India)into a raging torrent. Within a couple of days close to 2.5 million people inthe coastal districts found themselves marooned between vast sheets of water.13 The Hirakud Dam, which was intended to be Orissa’s bet against

total submergence, was forced to open 43 of its reservoir gates. That is, theHirakud Dam had to unburden its reservoir, in haste, by ejecting vastquantities of water onto the delta in order to prevent its main structurefrom being ripped apart by frothing currents.14

In effect, within the span of two months, both embankments and largedams stood exposed as inadequate if not entirely inappropriatetechnologies for containing or limiting losses from floods. If anything,arguments were now emerging, with enough of an evidence base, thatfloods could not be controlled nor managed in the supply-side format.Rather, the need for an altogether different and new paradigm had perforcebecome chillingly obvious. For one, it would be important to recognise thatthese so called ‘flood-prone’ regions, as pointed out earlier, are also theproduct of long historical alterations in landscapes that refer to changes inthe ‘spatial and temporal patterns of water levels and volume’(Bandhyopadhyay 2009: 54–5). Consequently, in Jayant Bandhyopadhyay’sopinion many of the strategies for flood containment through modernflood control devices would most likely come to grief. Dinesh Kumar Mishra, engineer extraordinaire from Bihar, who has studied and writtenabout floods for close to 20 years, in fact, argues a case for ‘living withfloods’.15 In Mishra’s words, ‘living with floods is a concept that must belearnt from people and polished in the background of modern science. Itdoes not mean inaction or total surrender to the natural forces but it surely means minimum interference with them’ (Mishra 2008: 199).

The idea of ‘living with floods’, as elaborated by Mishra, on the one hand,aspires to redeem traditional knowledges, historical associations andexperiences about rivers and water management, while, on the other, suchlearning is intended to be brought into fruitful dialogue with modernhydraulic science and technology. Put differently, Mishra believes that river flows need to be grasped in a far more nuanced and tactile sense andunderlying such a plea is another equally significant implication: theneed to understand and recover knowledges about rivers through‘riverine communities’ – their histories, livelihood strategies and cultural



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embeddedness with flows. In fact, recent scholarly attention has begun tobe directed at exploring the complex nature/culture interfaces of such river

and marine-based communities by foregrounding, in particular,knowledges on and negotiations with their fluvial environments (Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa 2007; Kanta 2009; Subramanian 2009).

Increasingly, as pointed out earlier, ecologists have begun to argue thatrivers need to be understood as dynamic, complex and non-linear flowsand, most importantly, they have to be situated within ecological contexts. Water, in other words, is not simply a unit of volume but is integrally tiedto a web of geomorphological, chemical and biological relationships. Thus,floods must be understood as part of an active process that connects floodplains to deltas, drainage to lands and an incalculable number of linkagesbetween flora, fauna and human action.

The supply-side hydraulic paradigm, however, sits uneasily with this new ecological understanding of flows. With its emphasis instead onquantitative hydrology, supply-side enthusiasts have pursued water management strategies through centralised bureaucratic agencies, whichare expert driven and involve large infrastructural investments, whilesimultaneously delegitimising a vast corpus of historical experiences andtraditional/cultural practices and skills on water-use and management. Andthis largely civil engineering view of rivers is furthermore driven by conceptually simplified notions about scarcity, surplus and water development, besides revealing a persistent lack of sensitivity to localhydraulic complexity. David Biggs, for example, in a recent examination of regional development plans in the Mekong river basin, shows how stateplanners failed to grasp the intricate relationships between local water-usepatterns with their location-specific hydraulic possibilities. In other words,he argues, water planning organised at such an abstract and distant scale was unable to either anticipate hydraulic complexity or appreciate pocketsof diversity within even small regions (Biggs 2001: 119).

The ‘ecological blindness’ of supply-side hydrology, however, has notmeant that proponents for the latter have been entirely unreflexive. Inrecent years, in particular, a fresh set of policy perspectives, and studiessupported by the World Bank have begun to draw vital connectionsbetween modern irrigation, environmental distress, inequity andcontemporary water management practices. According to these claims, acollection of factors have led to a breakdown in the current water paradigm: namely, state interference, politicians, subsidies, rent-seekingbehaviour of the irrigation bureaucracy, and lack of clarity in water rightsor property (Shivakoti et al. 2005). The solutions, accordingly, lie in nestingnew institutional arrangements in order to plug irrigators directly tomarkets, premise irrigation on full cost-recovery, and finally transform water into an economic commodity. These aims are sought to be realisedthrough a whole range of programmes with acronyms such as PIM(participatory irrigation management), IMT (irrigation management




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transfer), IWRM (integrated water resources management), WUA (water user association), IA (irrigation association) and so on. In turn, all these

essentially market-oriented water strategies are sought to be glued intoplace through formal rhetoric on ‘accountability’, partnerships (private andpublic), social capital and transparency (Briscoe et al. 2006).

Nonetheless, despite the seemingly strong and consistent critique of state-supported centralised water management, this turn towards themarket approach does not fundamentally challenge the basic tenets of thesupply-hydrology framework. For one, it retains the same type of ‘ecological blindness’ towards flows by being committed to quantitativehydrology rather than treating water as being embedded in ecologicalrelationships or webs. Secondly, the market approach remains committedto large infrastructure projects such as big dams or the IBWT, both

hydraulic technologies which have failed to grapple with the ecologicalcomplexities of flows. Lastly, the market approach is intended to rationalisethe existing supply-side paradigm rather than retool the fundamentalnature of its interventions.

While debates and discussions over India’s hydraulic resources, in recent years, have been concentrated upon issues of scarcity, irrigation efficiency,commodification, groundwater recharge, IBWT or flood management andcontrol, little attention has been paid towards understanding water-use aspossessing a historical context and an ecological quality. This chapter, inlooking at the challenge of recurring inundations, on the other hand, has triedto suggest that supply-side approaches, with its rootedness in quantitativehydrology, is now unable to suggest an alternative hydraulic imagination tothe current impasse. Instead, the strong reassertion of supply-side ideasthrough the IBWT is further exacerbating struggles such as anti-dam protests,demands for treating water as a human right, movements againstembankment construction and disputes over groundwater extraction.

Undoubtedly, contemporary India’s flood challenges cannot be entirely captured and explained as being caught in a single hydraulic contradiction:flood dependence versus flood vulnerability; more so, given the fact thatover the course of several decades population numbers and settlementpatterns (with growing urbanisation) have subjected the region to new and different pressures. Consequently, to even argue that people in flood-prone areas need to be rehabilitated in relatively flood-free zones mightnot be a practical option, nor would the idea of getting entire communitiesand settlements trained overnight to adapt to floods be a viable possibility.However, by recovering past experiences of flood utilisation and culturally informed strategies for harnessing inundation waters, the debate on floodmanagement in the subcontinent can be moved to an altogether differentlevel. In particular, such knowledges could also provide new insights andperspectives on the ecological properties of flows, which thereby couldsubstantially add to the fashioning of a fresh paradigm for sustainable

water-use.



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As it becomes increasingly hard for the supply-side hydrology paradigmto provide options and solutions to the various dilemmas of its own

making, we might increasingly see demands for reconsidering localhydraulic complexity, understanding the nature of environmental flowsand, lastly, a fresh dialogue over what is referred to as traditionalexperiences and cultures of water-use. Thus, instead of the mantra of ‘balance, equalisation and control’, perhaps the next layer of water strategists will have to look to harness the many moods and ecologicalrhythms of flows through coexistence and new skills.

NOTES

1 For some recent studies on the TVA and the experiences with its transfer todifferent regions and river basins see Biggs 2006; Hoag 2006; D’Souza 2006aand Klingensmith 2007.

2 The English East India Company, through a clutch of spirited military engineers, initiated a radical break in both technique and hydraulic principleby introducing perennial canal irrigation. For the first time in British India,permanent head-works in the form of barrages and weirs were thrown acrossriver-beds and their waters diverted through extensive canal systems. Thesebarrages and weirs were equipped with a series of shutters to regulate flowsby impounding water during lean seasons and diverting it into canals, andconversely the former could be flipped open to release waters during periodsof the river’s peak discharges. In effect, by impounding the river’s variableflow regime at certain points along its course, irrigation was transformedfrom a seasonal to a perennial possibility. This phase is often referred to asthe advent of the era of modern irrigation. For an introduction to themodern hydraulic moment in British India see Whitcombe 1983; Stone 1985;

Ali 1988; Gilmartin 1994; D’Souza 2006b; Hardiman 2008.3 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 onthe suffering of the dam displaced in India see Roy 1999. A recent informativereview and critique of the use of EIAs in India is available in Menon 2009.

4 On A.N. Khosla see Klingensmith 2007: 211–53. CWINC refers to the Central Water Irrigation and Navigation Commission: independent India’s equivalentof the American Bureau of Reclamation.

5 A concise introduction to government initiatives in independent India onfloods is available in Centre for Science and Environment 1991: 9–14.

6 The length of embankments currently stands at 34,397.61 km according tothe 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).

7 Reservoirs constructed with exclusive flood control storage include Maithon,Panchet, Tilaiya and Konar in Damodar Valley; Chandil Dam on theSubarnarekha river and Rengali Dam on the Brahmani river. In addition,there has been 177 billionm3 of live storage created so far in the variousreservoirs 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).8 See Centre for Science and Environment 1991: 1–8. 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 ControlProgramme set up by the Planning Commission for the 10th Five Year Planhas estimated the flood prone areas as 45.64 million hectare acre (m.ha)., outof which an area of 16.457 m. ha. was estimated to be protected till the endof March 2004.’ http://wrmin.nic.in/index2.asp?sublinkid=352&langid=1&slid=353 (accessed 7 May 2010).

9 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)).10 For excellent critiques of the ILR from an activist’s viewpoint see Patkar 2003

and Shankari 2004.11 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.

12 See the polemical piece by Rorabacher 2008 that challenges the claim thatembankments in Bihar are necessary or required as development investments.

13 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).

14 See The Hindu (22 September 2008) http://www.hindu.com/2008/09/22/

stories/2008092260021300.htm (accessed 7 May 2010).15 Some of the most astute observation on the Kosi river have been discussed

by Dinesh Kumar Mishra see Mishra 1997b, 1998, 1999: 46–51. Also seeKrishnakumar 1999 and Mishra 2008.

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