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16 From Damming Rivers to Linking Waters: Is this

the Beginning of the End of Supply-Side Hydrology
in India?
Rohan DSouza

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)

The governors emphatic suggestions for getting a balanced output from

the Bengal rivers was not exceptional for its time. Pursuing total river
control through multipurpose river valley development (MPRVD), more so
in the 1940s, enjoyed a near overwhelming acceptance across the
ideological spectrum (DSouza 2008). Spurred on by the triumph of the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) model, large-scale hydraulic
manipulation, especially in soon to be decolonising countries, increasingly
fired social, economic and engineering imaginations.1
Placed in a contemporary context, however, the governors broadcast
stands 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 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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solutions have been primarily aimed at advocating managerial and

technical interventions, with an emphasis on evolving resilient bargaining
and efficiency-sharing frameworks. In the case of inter-basin water-sharing
disputes, for example, there has been a reinforcing of attempts to further
empower institutional mechanisms such as water tribunals, independent
commissions and river basin authorities, even though many such efforts
have 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 strategies
have 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 principles
and forming cultivators into irrigation associations to run the network
through various types of publicprivate partnership models (Sivakoti et al.
2005). Lastly, on the political and social challenges that have engulfed large
dam construction there has been a gradual, though uneven, momentum
toward developing relatively more informed responses to ascertain projectrelated ecological consequences through environmental impact
assessment (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 basic
assumptions or the status quo on manipulating and moving water as
unmediated volumes.
While this seemingly reflexive turn toward demand-side management
and the adoption of different sensibilities toward technology marks a shift
from previous perceptions about water management, the supply-side
paradigm has, however, been unable to convincingly resolve several of its
severe contradictions. In particular, its crises as a paradigm, in post-colonial
India, have been made most pronounced in the realm of flood control. The
recurrence of inundation and even the heightening of flood losses have all
but outwitted the many sustained efforts of water managers, engineering
establishments and hydrocracies. In great measure these crises have been
aggravated, as I will argue, not only by the fact that floods as a phenomenon
have been conceptualised in a flawed manner within the supply-side
hydraulic 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 historical
quantity and flows as possessing ecological qualities has reached a
conceptual 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 hydraulic
imagination 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 OF
FLOODS AND DRAINAGE
Recent scholarship on South Asian environmental history has begun to
suggest that much of the Indian subcontinents flood and deltaic plains
were organised by communities as flood-dependent agrarian regimes
rather than being treated as flood-vulnerable landscapes (Mishra 2000;
DSouza 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 inundation
irrigation in the Bengal delta. According to him, the muddy crest waters of
the annual inundations were leached by cultivators through an intricate
system of channels. These silt-laden waters of the swollen rivers,
furthermore, carried fish eggs. While the eggs spawned into fish, who then
proceeded to voraciously devour mosquito larvae, the organic silt helped
nourish and fertilise soils. Besides, the continuous deposition of sediment
in 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 bid
to consolidate its administrative and economic imperatives in the region
began 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 latters main
channels, and central to these technical arrangements was the desire to
secure land as a revenue-paying commodity (DSouza 2006a: 97125). In
addition, they also constructed a large number of roads, railway lines and
bridges, which ended up interrupting drainage flows (Iqbal 2007). While in
Bengal and Bihar, for example, most of the natural drainage lines dropped
from north to south, the roads and railways tracks were constructed across
them, running east to west (P. Singh 2003). Colonial administrators and
engineers have, in fact, left a sizable number of observations on how
intricately organised village-level drainage systems were. The Epidemic
Commission of 1864, to quote an example, while investigating the causes
of malaria in Bengal recorded that:
The drainage of all villages in lower Bengal is effected by the water first
running 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 with

navigable rivers. (Noted in the Report of the Drainage Committee 1907:
201)

A somewhat similar description on drainage is also available for villages in

the 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 and
from 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 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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audience among engineers, planners and governments (DSouza 2006a:

182214; Klingensmith 2007).
In 1943, the Damodar river in eastern India with a channel that had
earlier been greatly embanked had so violently flooded its surrounding
plains that the event is often considered to have been crucial in spurring
the colonial administration to initiate plans for constructing MRPVDs, as the
only viable solution to the regions flood problem. Typically, in the mood
of the times, in the neighbouring district of Orissa, A.N. Khosla (then Chief
Engineer of the CWINC, 194553) 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 Indias emergence as an
independent country acquired the distinction of being the first floodcontrol reservoir for the period.
The systematic planning for flood management, immediately following
Indias independence in 1947, was initiated with the launching of the
National Programme of Flood Management on September 1954. The 1954
flood control policy (FCP) was, in fact, among the first in terms of an official
government initiative on the subject.5 The FCP essentially reiterated, with
renewed emphasis, the colonial response to recurring inundation,
involving, in the main, treating floods as calamitous events which needed
to be controlled through an overt reliance on structural engineering
methods. Accordingly, for short-term measures, embankments were to be
built to hem in rivers,6 while for the long term the government intended
to contain flood flows in storage reservoirs of large dams or with MPRVD
programmes.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 floods
could 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 anywhere
between 40 and 60 million hectares. That is, approximately between onesixth 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 2,290,000 ha in 1953 to now
standing at 7,650,000 ha in 1997 (Ahuja 1997). In effect, there did not follow
any significant decrease in the level of flood vulnerability nor an attenuation
in the financial damage caused by the annual rampaging of flood torrents:
this despite the fact that structural methods had been sought to be
complemented by a range of what came to be termed as non-structural
methods as well. Hence, besides storage reservoirs, flood embankments,
drainage channels, anti-erosion works, channel improvements, detention
basins, the non-structural measures comprised flood forecasting, flood
plain 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 drawn
deeply from Governor R.G. Caseys earlier formula to harness Bengals river
potential by balancing, equalising and controlling flows. According to one
account, the context for the ILR was first set by a seemingly innocuous
observation in the Planning Commissions Ninth Five-Year Plan document,
which noted that the average Indians access to water was highly variable,
with an availability of close to 18,470 m3 in the Brahmaputra basin but, in
contrast, a mere 383 m3 in the peninsula rivers. When the problem was
presented as a hydraulic anomaly, it quickly provoked several politicians
from south India to approach the Supreme court in 2000, seeking prompt
action from the government (A.K. Singh 2003: 1). The Apex court in
OctoberNovember of 2002 further directed the Indian government not
only to carry out plans to link rivers but to do so within ten years.
Subsequent to the court rulings, the ILR quickly achieved political traction
and was presented as a technical problem that needed to be resolved as an
issue of hydraulic justice. Put differently, natures natural imbalance, it was
held, could be righted through water transfers, diversions and storage
reservoirs. 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 the
nineteenth century. In the late 1850s, Colonel Arthur Cotton, a colonial
engineer, had drawn up a plan to connect the Indian subcontinent through
a grid of navigation and irrigation canals. A peninsula system, for him, could
link Karachi in the north-west to Madras in the south via Kanpur, Calcutta
and Cuttack, with additional lines to Poona and the west coast (Headrick
1988: 20).
In the 1960s K.L. Rao, the then Union Minister of State for Power and
Irrigation, spoke of linking the Ganga with the Cauvery through a 2,640 km
long 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 be
diverted to the central and southern states. In late 1970, one Captain
Dastur, an air pilot, proposed that a 4,200 km long Himalayan canal and
9,300 km long southern canal be linked up at Delhi and Patna. Captain
Dasturs proposal was popularly referred to as the Garland Canal scheme
(Alam 2003: 48). These plans were subsequently examined by the
Government of India, which set up the National Commission for Integrated
Water Resources Development Plan (NCIWRDP). In their report, submitted
in 1999, the NCIWRPD concluded that Raos proposal was very costly and
lower cost alternatives were available. The Commission was even more
curt about Captain Dasturs proposal, which was dismissed as being prima
facie impractical (SANDRP 2003: 3). The Indian courts, however, in being
conceptually wedded to the supply-side hydrology paradigm, viewed the

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NCIWRPDs assessment as one merely outlining technical and logistical

barriers rather than drawing upon a different sense of history in which
Indias floodplains could be understood as bearing a long legacy of flood
dependence and flood utilisation rather than recurring vulnerability to
flows. By thus insisting, like their earlier colonial predecessors, that rivers
were mere quantitative or unmediated volumes the courts helped enable
the push for treating the ILR as a solution to the problems of MPRVD and
embankments. Moreover, in refusing to recognise the legacy of flood
dependence, supply-side hydrologists have thereby stymied possibilities
for debating and exploring other kinds of hydraulic imaginations for the
subcontinent. On another level, as well, as I will point out below, this elision
of the historical experience of flood utilisation in India has worked to
sustain the official view that ecological qualities of flows can be ignored.10
NEW ECOLOGY AND THE RIVER
In sharp contrast to the construction engineers 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 that
fluvial regimes are complex geomorphologic, chemical and biological
processes in motion. Rivers are made up of habitat mosaics that support a
wide variety of aquatic and riparian species. And the beating heart that
keeps alive the rivers 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. The
magnitude and frequency of high and low flows consequently regulate
numerous ecological processes. While wetlands provide important nursery
grounds for fish and export organic matter and organisms into the main
channels, the scouring of floodplain by inundations helps rejuvenate
innumerable habitats for plant species within the basin. Even periods of low
flow provide certain kinds of ecological benefits, through the recruitment
of different plant species. A large body of recent evidence indicates that
natural flow regimes of virtually all rivers are inherently variable, and that
this variability is critical to ecosystem function and native biodiversity. In
effect, rivers with highly altered or artificially regulated flows might in most
cases lose their ability to support riverine processes (Ward and Stanford
1995; Poff et al. 1996).
By thus recasting, in fundamental ways, the manner in which fluvial
processes are understood, river ecologists are now suggesting that a fresh
paradigm is required for managing hydraulic endowments. Centrally, what
is being argued is that flows are embedded in ecological contexts and
therefore transferring them through technological fixes can and will have
several 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 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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of the flooding and the inevitable consequences from aggravating Kosis

ferocity 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 choosing
between 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 Dam
at Barahshetra (near Chatra village in Nepal), as a permanent flood control
measure, was being drummed up, on 20 September 2008 an unrelenting
spell 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 in
the coastal districts found themselves marooned between vast sheets of
water.13 The Hirakud Dam, which was intended to be Orissas bet against
total submergence, was forced to open 43 of its reservoir gates. That is, the
Hirakud Dam had to unburden its reservoir, in haste, by ejecting vast
quantities of water onto the delta in order to prevent its main structure
from being ripped apart by frothing currents.14
In effect, within the span of two months, both embankments and large
dams stood exposed as inadequate if not entirely inappropriate
technologies for containing or limiting losses from floods. If anything,
arguments were now emerging, with enough of an evidence base, that
floods could not be controlled nor managed in the supply-side format.
Rather, the need for an altogether different and new paradigm had perforce
become chillingly obvious. For one, it would be important to recognise that
these so called flood-prone regions, as pointed out earlier, are also the
product of long historical alterations in landscapes that refer to changes in
the spatial and temporal patterns of water levels and volume
(Bandhyopadhyay 2009: 545). Consequently, in Jayant Bandhyopadhyays
opinion many of the strategies for flood containment through modern
flood control devices would most likely come to grief. Dinesh Kumar
Mishra, engineer extraordinaire from Bihar, who has studied and written
about floods for close to 20 years, in fact, argues a case for living with
floods.15 In Mishras words, living with floods is a concept that must be
learnt from people and polished in the background of modern science. It
does 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 and
experiences about rivers and water management, while, on the other, such
learning is intended to be brought into fruitful dialogue with modern
hydraulic science and technology. Put differently, Mishra believes that river
flows need to be grasped in a far more nuanced and tactile sense and
underlying such a plea is another equally significant implication: the
need 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 to

be 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 (LahiriDutt and Gopa 2007; Kanta 2009; Subramanian 2009).
Increasingly, as pointed out earlier, ecologists have begun to argue that
rivers need to be understood as dynamic, complex and non-linear flows
and, most importantly, they have to be situated within ecological contexts.
Water, in other words, is not simply a unit of volume but is integrally tied
to a web of geomorphological, chemical and biological relationships. Thus,
floods must be understood as part of an active process that connects flood
plains to deltas, drainage to lands and an incalculable number of linkages
between flora, fauna and human action.
The supply-side hydraulic paradigm, however, sits uneasily with this new
ecological understanding of flows. With its emphasis instead on
quantitative hydrology, supply-side enthusiasts have pursued water
management strategies through centralised bureaucratic agencies, which
are expert driven and involve large infrastructural investments, while
simultaneously delegitimising a vast corpus of historical experiences and
traditional/cultural practices and skills on water-use and management. And
this 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 local
hydraulic complexity. David Biggs, for example, in a recent examination of
regional development plans in the Mekong river basin, shows how state
planners failed to grasp the intricate relationships between local water-use
patterns 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 pockets
of diversity within even small regions (Biggs 2001: 119).
The ecological blindness of supply-side hydrology, however, has not
meant that proponents for the latter have been entirely unreflexive. In
recent years, in particular, a fresh set of policy perspectives, and studies
supported by the World Bank have begun to draw vital connections
between modern irrigation, environmental distress, inequity and
contemporary water management practices. According to these claims, a
collection of factors have led to a breakdown in the current water
paradigm: namely, state interference, politicians, subsidies, rent-seeking
behaviour of the irrigation bureaucracy, and lack of clarity in water rights
or property (Shivakoti et al. 2005). The solutions, accordingly, lie in nesting
new institutional arrangements in order to plug irrigators directly to
markets, premise irrigation on full cost-recovery, and finally transform
water into an economic commodity. These aims are sought to be realised
through 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 into
place through formal rhetoric on accountability, partnerships (private and
public), 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 the
market approach does not fundamentally challenge the basic tenets of the
supply-hydrology framework. For one, it retains the same type of
ecological blindness towards flows by being committed to quantitative
hydrology rather than treating water as being embedded in ecological
relationships or webs. Secondly, the market approach remains committed
to large infrastructure projects such as big dams or the IBWT, both
hydraulic technologies which have failed to grapple with the ecological
complexities of flows. Lastly, the market approach is intended to rationalise
the existing supply-side paradigm rather than retool the fundamental
nature of its interventions.
While debates and discussions over Indias hydraulic resources, in recent
years, have been concentrated upon issues of scarcity, irrigation efficiency,
commodification, groundwater recharge, IBWT or flood management and
control, little attention has been paid towards understanding water-use as
possessing a historical context and an ecological quality. This chapter, in
looking at the challenge of recurring inundations, on the other hand, has tried
to suggest that supply-side approaches, with its rootedness in quantitative
hydrology, is now unable to suggest an alternative hydraulic imagination to
the current impasse. Instead, the strong reassertion of supply-side ideas
through the IBWT is further exacerbating struggles such as anti-dam protests,
demands for treating water as a human right, movements against
embankment construction and disputes over groundwater extraction.
Undoubtedly, contemporary Indias 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 that
over the course of several decades population numbers and settlement
patterns (with growing urbanisation) have subjected the region to new
and different pressures. Consequently, to even argue that people in floodprone areas need to be rehabilitated in relatively flood-free zones might
not be a practical option, nor would the idea of getting entire communities
and 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 flood
management in the subcontinent can be moved to an altogether different
level. In particular, such knowledges could also provide new insights and
perspectives on the ecological properties of flows, which thereby could
substantially add to the fashioning of a fresh paradigm for sustainable
water-use.

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369

As it becomes increasingly hard for the supply-side hydrology paradigm

to provide options and solutions to the various dilemmas of its own
making, we might increasingly see demands for reconsidering local
hydraulic complexity, understanding the nature of environmental flows
and, lastly, a fresh dialogue over what is referred to as traditional
experiences 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 ecological
rhythms of flows through coexistence and new skills.
NOTES
1
2

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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9
10
11
12
13
14
15

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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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