The Politics and Social Dynamics of Damming the Narmada

A Review of  'The Politics and Poetics of Water'

Sailen Routray

Despite the substantial critique of big dams that has emerged over the last three decades or so from all around the world, water resource management in India continues to follow the logic of ‘big is beautiful.’ The controversy surrounding the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), a large dam on the Narmada River in India, and the protests organised against it by the anti-dam movement Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) have helped to bring matters surrounding water management in India into a sharp focus.

The apparent water scarcity in regions such as Kutch in Gujarat has been used as the primary justification for the SSP. Lyla Mehta in her book  The Politics and Poetics of Water: Naturalising Scarcity in Western India deftly argues that such a case has been made by the usage of various persistent narratives that try to posit that the overwhelming markers of Kutch’s socio-ecological reality are, declining and increasingly variable rainfall resulting in emigration and declining population, and land degradation due to the increasing pressure of grazing animals. 

Through rigorous qualitative and quantitative work Mehta shows that there is no factual basis for such narratives. She also shows that despite the use of Kutch as a narrative trope for justifying the SSP, less than two percent of the region’s land will end up getting irrigated by canals from the project, and there has been no comprehensive planning for providing drinking water to Kutch’s villages from it.

What conveniently gets forgotten in the evocation of water scarcity in Kutch as a justification for the SSP is the fact that cyclical scarcity is a part of the rhythm of life in Kutch. Its complex, relatively isolated and heterogeneous society has evolved by adapting to the relatively harsh semi-arid environment. As Mehta shows, people in the region do not experience scarcity as an abstraction, but as a part of the cycle of scarcity and plenty that constitutes their lived reality. 

One of the analytical innovations of the book is the distinction it makes between what the author terms as lived/experienced scarcity and manufactured scarcity. Lived/experienced scarcities are biophysical phenomena having socio-cultural impacts, whereas manufactured scarcity universalises and naturalises these phenomena and completely glosses over the anthropogenic dimensions of scarcity. The book argues for the case that it is manufactured scarcity that heightens lived/experienced scarcities, and it’s the poor who bear its brunt the most.

As her work demonstrates, pastoralism is perhaps the most suitable livelihood strategy for a semi-arid region such as Kutch. But, due to what she terms as ‘the dryland blindness’ of planners, irrigated agriculture gets promoted at the cost of every other option. The promotion of irrigated agriculture goes hand in hand with the growth of ‘drought’ (which is semantically an amorphous word) as a rural industry. There is an over-emphasis on relief as opposed to drought-proofing, and watershed development plans are generally seen and used as add-ons.

This volume is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship surrounding the commons in India. By documenting the numerous ways in which the various kinds of commons (such as pastures, and village tanks) are enmeshed with each other on the one hand and with socio-cultural practices on the other, the book argues that village commons and their management regimes are much socio-cultural phenomena as they are economic institutions. It also adds to our understanding of pastoralism as an important and appropriate socio-ecological adaptation in the semi-arid parts of India that is getting increasingly marginalised by the state’s promotion of irrigated agriculture. 

This book also documents the social changes brought about in the Indian countryside by political democracy, and enriches the field view of caste. It is also an important chronicle of local practices of the developmental state, and adds to the emergent literature constituting of multi-sited, multi-method ethnographies exploring the linkages between environment and development in South Asia.
 
Details About the Book: Lyla Mehta. 2005. The Politics and Poetics of Water: Naturalising Scarcity in Western India. New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited. ISBN 8125028692.

Note: This review was first published in the journal 'Contemporary South Asia' in 2009.