Water, Social Differentiation, Politics and Participation

A Review Essay

Sailen Routray 

A View of Tungabhadra River (Wikimedia Commons)

Over the last three decades, water has become as much a focus of environmental debates as forests. This is true across quite a few disciplines like environmental sociology, environmental history and institutional economics. The shift has come about with a growing concern over water scarcity, its implications for livelihoods and human survival in the future.  There is a widespread agreement that the world in the twenty first century will face major health, security or economic crises due to increasing water scarcity. The solution generally preferred by technocrats is to prescribe the treatment of water as economic goods. But what kind of economic goods is water? Water is not one goods but many. These goods differ along the dimensions of physical and biological characteristics and in the varied ways that human societies construct and evaluate them.

The framework of tragedy of commons initially governed the study of natural resources, including water. It was generally observed that the management of the natural resources in the commons leads to the degradation of the resource over a period of time due to the problem of free riding (Hardin, 1968). Therefore, establishing private property rights or rights of the state over the resource was seen as key to optimal resource utilization. 

Quite a lot of subsequent scholarship of the analysis surrounding natural resource management draws from Common Property Resource (CPR) theories. These theories, by demonstrating theoretically, and in some cases empirically, the potential for collective action in natural resource management have provided a foundation for a whole wave of experimentation in community-based management of common property resources.

CPR analysts often take their theoretical groundings from game theory and show how rules can be purposively crafted to produce collective action. Institutions are seen as ‘rules of game’ and collective action is seen as a rational option that produces results beneficial to all, whereas self-interested action would produce sub-optimal results for the collective. This model has been at the center of a clutch of policy prescriptions. These prescriptions include investments in establishing formal legal systems, fixing property regimes, and formalizing informal institutional arrangements. The discourse of ‘design principles’ comes from such an approach (Ostrom, 1990).

As opposed to these ‘mainstream’ views that focus on local areas, bounded communities and rule-based management, emerging views in the study of natural resources look at multiple levels (global to local) and diversity (in terms of livelihoods and perceptions) and see institutions as part of the constant process of negotiation that involves power and conflicting interests within communities, and between their members and other actors. Emerging views try to break down the distinctions between local/global and between formal/informal institutions in order to understand better the complexities and uncertainties that face the governance of natural resources like water today (Cleaver, 2001).

The books under review can be seen as attempts to rethink the issues surrounding the water sector in India along the lines discussed above and to take the emerging concerns forward. One of the most important changes has been the shift from looking at water only as a natural resource that needs to be managed, to seeing it as an important factor in the process of social differentiation. One of the central themes of Peter Mollinga’s study, titled On the Waterfront: Water Distribution, Technology and Agrarian Change in a South Indian Canal Irrigation System, is social differentiation in the context of a canal irrigation-based economy. The canal in question is the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal. In the study of this system Mollinga tries to locate the linkages between the introduction of protective, localised irrigation in the command areas of the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal, to particular patterns of agrarian change in the region.

One of the important features of the Left Bank Canal case is the role of migrant farmers in the process of social differentiation and its spatial characteristics. In fact, migration seems to be an important result of almost all medium to large irrigation schemes in peninsular India. The settler farmers in the Left Bank Canal mainly came from the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh and were mostly small and medium sized farmers in their home region. The combination of smallholdings and a high land price difference between coastal Andhra Pradesh and Raichur, Karnataka was the major reason for farmers to migrate. Canal irrigation induced a dynamic process of agricultural intensification and commoditisation. Because of the protective nature of the canal system’s design, this intensification process resulted in unequal water distribution. There seems to be some correlation between availability of water and the concentration of land holdings. Thus, particular patterns of agrarian differentiation seem contingent upon particular types of irrigation technology.  

In contrast to this view from the present, David Mosse in his book titled ‘The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology and Collective Action in South India’ brings us a much more historically rooted analysis about social differentiation, water management and political change. Mosse bases his study in the tank irrigation systems of the old Ramanathpuram district in south-eastern Tamilnadu. According to Mosse “In the region under study tank-based agriculture developed after 1300 during a period of major transformations in the human geography of south India when people moved out of the core irrigated zones, and the older medieval order of the Pandyas was disturbed by the military adventurers and agricultural settlements of south India’s largest empire, the Vijaynagar empire”.

In this region Ramnad was a kingdom that was ruled by its dominant social group, the martial caste of Marvars. They rose to prominence with the militarisation of the plains of south India under the Vijaynagar Empire in the mid-14^th century. The growth of military power depended upon the expansion of agriculture in hitherto marginal areas. This involved growing investments in tank-irrigation systems that could sustain wetland paddy cultivation. Thus, militarisation encouraged the expansion of agriculture. This expansion was made possible by massive population displacements that brought in new settlers. Emerging local needs and local political power drove this process of cumulative, interdependent building of tanks.

This historical picture tells us that the patterns of resource extraction that made irrigation and agriculture possible in the Ramnad district were products of particular processes of social differentiation and caste-based domination. These patterns of resource extraction and utilisation (either directly or as idealisations) have subsequently formed the basis of legitimising the power of particular social groups and political institutions. Mosse points at the fact that warfare and tank building were two elements in the same mode of statecraft in the pre-colonial era. The political logic of this mode of statecraft mostly favoured investments in new irrigation works rather than maintaining or repairing them after damage.

The pre-colonial institutions of water management that were transformed by colonialism were neither stable nor ecologically adapted institutions of autonomous communities. And these forms bore all the signs of ecological vulnerability and economic uncertainty. Even after the colonial encounter tank systems remained political institutions incorporated into strategies of rule. But after 1800, the Zamindars had little real political power to disperse. The willingness and the ability of Zamindars to invest in tanks, even in their own estate villages, were generally undermined by tenurial insecurity. It was this state of tank irrigation and the lack of investment that lay at the roots of peasant resistance to the Zamindari state during the colonial era. Thus, the centrality of water as a ‘political’ resource remained constant (although varied in its significance) across the colonial divide in the tank irrigated territories of coastal Tamilnadu.

Mollinga makes an important contribution to our understanding of water as a political resource as well. In his study of the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal, he found that in all three pipe-outlet command areas that were studied, sets of rules existed for internal distribution of water in the outlet. All rules were the product of local rule making by water users themselves. But the local M.L.A.s (Members of the local Legislature in the Karnataka State) seem to be important mediators between the farmers and the irrigation department in this context. In all the three cases, rule sets functioned as resources, mobilised when necessary. 

Thus, water management, as it has evolved over the last few decades in the command area of the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal, draws upon broader political processes for its survival. Water management is also the site at which the polity interacts with local actors. Mollinga contrasts this political mediation in resource allocation and use, to the supposed relative insulation of the planning and designing process of the irrigation system from socio-political mediation.  What Mollinga fails to do is to consider in detail the structural and historical factors that led to the insulation of the designing phase of the project from ‘political interventions.’ The choice of particular technologies in the irrigation sector is a socio-politically mediated choice. So, what is important is not merely to say that a particular choice of technology was insulated from ‘political’ pressures and processes, but to unearth the particular brand of politics that led to such insulation in the first place.

Ramaswamy Iyer in his book Water: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns also deals with water as a political resource, but at a much more macro level. As a part of his extensive survey of the water sector in India, Iyer looks at the thesis that links political conflicts with resource scarcities and makes some incisive comments. According to him the linkages between political conflicts and resource scarcities are not necessarily unidirectional. Iyer shows that the thesis that conflicts over water bodies lead to (or can lead to) broader political conflicts is a slim one. More often than not, conflicts over both international and national waters get prolonged and difficult to resolve because of the fact that they are enmeshed within broader political conflicts between nations and other local administrative units like the states in India.

Iyer seems to be making a case for water as a site for inter-national politics and therefore the use of water as a political resource. For example, the way Bangladesh’s political relationship with India has shaped over the years, seems to have had a significant impact on the ways the river waters have been shared between the two countries. This might be somewhat obvious to state, but considering the growing discourse about political conflicts arising out of resource scarcities, this point definitely needs re-emphasising.

Iyer quite comprehensibly brings another set of conflicts related to water to the fore.  Quite a significant part of the book is devoted to the conflicts surrounding big water resource development projects in India. Using his experience as a former bureaucrat, he tries to give us a nuanced view of the debates surrounding big dams in India. In an important chapter of the book (chapter 16) he tells us about his changing views and how he has come to see dams as choices of the last resort to respond to the perceived water scarcity in India. In this context, he quite masterfully analyses the October 2000 judgment of the Supreme Court of India on the Narmada (Sardar Sarovar) case. He brings into the light the miscarriage of justice in the judgment and analyses the verdict and the process leading to the verdict in detail, so as to expose the other side of judicial ‘activism’ in India. 

These broader issues of the polity and society get concretised in the field by various plans and programmes. One of the more fashionable policy prescriptions in the water sector in recent times has been that of Participatory Irrigation Management. Iyer succinctly sums up current debates surrounding the participation of farmers in irrigation management and shows how participation only invited in service delivery and not in project development. It is when the government is unable to manage and provide the planned services that it tries out transfers of responsibilities to users. The other two books also problematise the idea of users’ participation in the irrigation sector. 

According to Mosse, the recent discourse on the commons has been profoundly affected by the new international policy consensus. The devolution of rights and responsibilities in resource management to local user groups is one of the significant aspects of this consensus. A variety of programmes for natural resource management now aim to redefine the relationship between farmers and the state. He studies the experience in Nallaneri, a village in Tamilnadu, to look at these programmes in action. According to him the experience of Nallaneri shows that Irrigation Management Transfer “does not imply stabilising village groups around rules of resource use, crafted by communities of appropriators, bound together by the individual economic benefits of co-operative management of shared resources. Moreover, WUAs (Water User Associations) are themselves a resource over which there is competition”.

In Mollinga’s study, the occurrence of water scarcity and the resultant social conflicts, induced changes in the organisation of water distribution in the Tungabhadra Left Bank main canal between 1980 and 1992. Other people than the formally responsible Irrigation Department officials started to get involved in it. Part of the bargaining on water distribution has been institutionalised in the Irrigation Consultative Committee at the project level, in which officials and non-officials (MLAs) have seats. Participation has remained at the level of consultation. A new policy for main canal management emerged in the social process of the negotiation of water distribution by the different actors concerned. But this involvement of farmers has not been institutionalised at the level of local institutions for water management. 

A broad consensus seems to be emerging that water is essentially a political and social resource. As Mosses’s study shows, water has always been central to statecraft and politics in India. Systems for managing ‘local’ resources have rarely, if ever, grown in isolation. Groups have always used ‘local’ resources like water as a site for political action. In fact, as Mosse’s study seems to be suggesting water is as much a symbolic resource, as it is a physical resource. This is especially true in India, where water is central to the ideas of purity and pollution that underlie caste.

The principal use of water in India has been for irrigation. More than four-fifth of water used in India is consumed by agriculture. Therefore, particular irrigation technologies have a significant impact not only on irrigation, but also on other aspects of water use. This makes water use an intensely contested political activity. It also shapes, and is dynamically shaped by, particular patterns of agrarian change and social differentiation. As Mollinga’s study indicates, particular kinds of irrigation technology can induce specific kinds of migration and cropping patterns. But these patterns of resource use and social differentiation don’t happen only on the ‘social’ terrain. These processes are linked to broader patterns of political change, as Mosses’s study so effectively illustrates.

This makes one wary of the currently fashionable rhetoric of participatory irrigation management (PIM). Any programme or plan of action that unquestioningly privileges the local can easily hide inequities. The study of water has ceased to be (to a large extent) a matter of engineering. But it is rapidly threatening to become a matter of ‘management’ under PIM. All the three books under review warn us about this quite unequivocally. The study of water needs both large sectoral overviews and ethnographies that trace patterns of resource use within the broad matrix of social change. The three volumes under study fulfill one or the other part of this mandate and are a welcome addition to the existing body of literature.

 

Books Under Review

David Mosse, The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology and Collective Action in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Pres, 2003. 337 pp. Glossary, bibliography, index.

Peter Mollinga, On the Waterfront: Water Distribution, Technology and Agrarian Change in a South Indian Canal Irrigation System. New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2003. 441 pp. References.

Ramaswamy, R. Iyer, Water: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns. New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2003. 369 pp. Appendices, references and bibliography, names index, subject index.

 

Note: This review essay was first published in a slightly different form in 2006 in the periodical Indian Journal of Social Work 67(4). The books under consideration were all published in the year 2003. All the three books dealt with water, broke new ground in the study of water as a theme in India and have since become minor classics in academic studies of this resource.

References

Cleaver, F., 2001. "Institutional bricolage, conflict and cooperation in Usangu, Tanzania." IDS Bulletin, 32(4), pp. 26-35.

Hardin, G., 1968. “The tragedy of the commons”. Science 162: pp. 1243-1248.

Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press.