Taming India's waters

Sunil Amrith has spent eight years chatting with Tamil fishermen and internationally-known meteorologists and traversing dusty British archives as well as the sub-continent to research this book

Unruly Waters

Sunil Amrith

Allen Lane; 379 pages, Rs 799

Last week, when private weather forecasting agency Skymet predicted that the monsoon could be below normal this year, the country went into a tizzy. Given that Indian agriculture continues to depend largely on rains for irrigation, a poor monsoon augurs everything from farmer distress and rising food prices to sluggish markets and higher food imports. This is why Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters  is a timely book. As climate change is causing increasingly more erratic monsoons and more extreme weather phenomena than ever before, his painstakingly researched treatise establishes a link between the historical quest to tame water and weather to the present condition of the sub-continent. A MacArthur fellow, he has spent eight years chatting with Tamil fishermen and internationally-known meteorologists and traversing dusty British archives as well as the sub-continent to research this book.

Unruly Waters begins with the argument that the Himalayas and the rivers that originate from them control the weather, not just of the sub-continent but indeed, the entire world. Consequently, this region’s quest for mastery over water has planet-wide implications. To argue his thesis, Mr Amrith takes the reader on a sometimes engaging, sometimes academic trip in history.

Much of the sub-continent’s history has been driven by, what he calls “hydraulic ambition”. Long before Babar arrived, rulers and the ruled were both driven by their interest in water. For the Mughals, water was both an ornament and necessity, not just in their formal gardens but also in their architecture. British colonial rule took hydraulic ambition to new heights. The British were the first to study the linkages between monsoons and dry spells; famines and droughts. The canals they built, notably the Ganges canal, were not just great feats of engineering, they were monuments to imperial power; of England’s ascendancy over India and its erratic monsoon, cyclones and unruly rivers.

As British maritime power pushed further inland into the subcontinent, the Gangetic plain became the power axis, with vast quantities of cotton, tobacco, indigo, gunpowder and opium shipped by river to Calcutta. Early on, the British realised that much of their commerce depended on the capricious monsoon, unruly rivers and unpredictable storms that the sub-continent saw with such regularity. Their efforts to tame these forces of nature were aimed more at improving their own fortunes rather than those of the populace they governed. Consequently, their policies worsened the impact of droughts and famines that became a miserably regular feature at the time. In fact, it was when famines and droughts came to be viewed as damning indictments of administrative practices that anger against the British began to build up. Even a Raj loyalist like Dadabhai Naoroji criticised the government’s inability to create drought-resistant water infrastructure even as it levied heavy taxes on Indians.

The quest to harness natural water resources picked up pace after Independence. As Mr Amrith writes, the concept of development became synonymous with the taming of its water resources. Nehru famously referred to dams like Bhakra Nangal and Hirakud as the new temples of modern India. Mega dams and multi-purpose projects came to be seen as ways to improve agricultural output. They could magically address the inequalities of nature by greening vast tracts of land hitherto not irrigated by any rivers. The control of water became a source of power; its absence, a source of enduring exclusion. In the seventies, the subcontinent’s quest for food security led to the Green Revolution and an unprecedented consumption of ground water, tapped through the humble tube well. New power centres emerged in the once-arid regions of north-west and south-east India, which were now irrigated by these mega dams and had emerged as hubs of agricultural growth.

Through all this tumultuous, breathless “development”, few paused to think of the consequences of this mastery over rivers and ground water. The author estimates that since independence, 40 million have been displaced by dams in India. Most of these have been Adivasi, tribals, who have not received any form of compensation. The environmental consequences of large dams have been equally huge: forests drowned, soil, rivers blocked, deltas starved of silt, natural drainage hindered and worse. The present-day scenario is dire from the environmental perspective, as pollution, climate change and accelerating glacial melt have added to the sub-continent’s water woes.

Although Mr Amrith offers a critical analysis well-backed by environmental science, he offers no alternative plan. For example, he writes: “Groundwater has been the cornerstone of Indian food security since the 1970s — but for how long?” Readers might feel compelled to also ask — if not groundwater, what else? The fact is that there is a crying need for us to develop a plan to harness the planet’s water resources sustainably.

Mr Amrith offers an indirect solution though, when he makes the case that rivers, oceans and the weather should be issues that transcend national boundaries. As should the issues of climate change, pollution and carbon emissions. He writes: “Climate change creates problems of distance — between the source of pollution and its consequences — but it also creates new forms of proximity in the form of shared risks and interdependence.” This is what makes Unruly Waters a thought-provoking read. At a time when our planetary commons, so to speak, are under such grave stress, the book offers a critical understanding of the politics of water that could shape the fate of mankind in the years ahead.