Water as dispute and conflict.

• Author: D'Souza, Rohan

Interstate Disputes over Krishna Waters: Law, Science and Imperialism

by Radha D'Souza 2006

(Hyderabad: Orient Longman)

And

Conflict and Collective Action: The Sardar Sarovar Project in India

by Ranjit Dwivedi 2006

(London & New York: Routledge)

Throughout the 1990s in India, innumerable vibrant and popular agitations and movements around water helped mature a crop of critiques against the then prevailing orthodoxies on hydraulic development. Following this great watery churning, a number of scholars, activists and researchers sought to fundamentally rework the field of water studies itself. While part of the effort was about asking new questions, the cutting edge of the exercise lay in striving to understand how the flows of water are deeply implicated in varied political and social relationships. In other words, it was emphasised that water management needed to be analysed beyond the simple frameworks of neoclassical economic calculation, which, in large measure, continues to inform and shape most bureaucratic and technoscientific hydraulic practices. Several recent publications on the subject have, in fact, only further intensified this ongoing ideological challenge to post-independent India's conflict-ridden embrace of "supplyside hydrology".

The monographs by Radha D'Souza and Ranjit Dwivedi, the books under review, emphatically address the abovementioned conceptual turn. Consequently, their arguments, in timbre and spirit, are polemical and provide many a refreshing critical insight and attempt nothing less than insistently arguing that new ways of thinking about India's existing water strategy are imperative and eminently possible. What does, however, make these monographs particularly striking is that both the authors adopt a certain encyclopaedic style; not only in the manner with which they supplement their arguments with scrupulous detail and fact but choose to exhaustively review a number of frameworks on the water question in India. Thus, these monographs make for wholesome reading. Though, on the reverse, given such an overflow of claims to be dealt with, a comprehensive treatment on a point by point factual engagement cannot be attempted here. I will, therefore, choose to concentrate on what I consider to be some of the flashy currents that seem to animate their central arguments.

Interstate Disputes over Krishna Waters meticulously discusses the now almost insoluble conundrum of regional water conflicts in India. Most, if not all, such...