"From the backyards of the city, the river sings the blues" Governance of rivers in India: a technographic analysis of subaltern rivers in Madhya Pradesh

Abstract

Governance of rivers in India finds itself at the crossroads where the environmentalists are demanding strict preventive measures to stop river pollution, watershed development programs, and rainwater harvesting laws to recharge the groundwater table and river streams. At the same time, the government is preparing to connect the Himalayan rivers with the Peninsular rivers in its grand interlinking of rivers program. While the support and opposition for both discourses and ideologies can be found, the state has been making policies and implementing projects that are directed towards solving the everyday problems in and around the river. At the same time, NGOs, civil society organizations, and ‘green’ institutions such as the National Green Tribunal (NGT) have also played a key role in persuading the state to frame policies for the protection of river ecology and ecosystems.This thesis studies the governance of rivers in India from an ecological perspective to find out why after several decades of campaigning for, and expenditure on the rivers of South Asia, the cherished goal of a clean and unobstructed river has not been achieved, nor does it seem achievable in the current socio-political conditions. It uses the example of river Kshipra, flowing in the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh1, as a case study to examine the micro level policies, actors, institutions, and apparatuses that are assembled in the processes of everyday governance of rivers in India. Using the methodological lens of ‘technography’ (Bolding, 2004), this study describes and analyzes the technological and political interventions in the everyday governance ofKshipra river as well as the actors and institutions that are involved in the (re)shaping of these governance strategies. The choice of river Kshipra as the case study was determined through my fascination with the Simhasta Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world, that is held on the banks of this river once in every twelve years. This choice was also tempered by a sense of frustration that there was so little known, written and researched about Kshipra, which was otherwise an immensely important river in Indian history and mythology, a river that had nourished the Malwa region and provided drinking water to the perpetually expanding cities of Indore and Ujjain. Today it is polluted beyond recognition and on the verge of disappearance, only kept alive by the piped water transported from the Narmada river located 47 km away.This thesis has extrapolated the concept of “subaltern” to designate such minor tributary rivers, which only have a regional presence and are overlooked by the centralized planning of the state, which mostly funds projects aimed at the development of major rivers. Gradually such rivers have disappeared from the public sphere and are now on the verge of their geographical disappearance. This study attempts to highlight the plight of such abandoned sub-tributary rivers in the cities of India which are hidden from the eyes of the public. These sub-tributaries of major rivers have been categorized as “subaltern” because irrespective of the importance they hold for developing cities, they fail to qualify to be included in conceptualizing schemes, programs, and policies of the state. Instead, they are assumed to be included in the plans prepared for major rivers. This kind of disregard is one of the causes that leads to degradation of minor rivers.This study argues for the need to go beyond and reinterpret, the empirical methods and their fundamental building blocks of research in river governance. One of the reasons for failure to achieve an agreeable river ecosystem and aquatic health in India can be located through the analysis of the instrument through which our knowledge of the rivers is communicated in the publicsphere which is predominantly empirical. This thesis argues that the philosophical foundations of empirical ecological studies, which form the basis of water policy making and governance measures, are shallow and seldom inquired into. It is one of the reasons for the failure of the ecological paradigm and prevents the popularity of ecologically sensitive statehood as well as citizenship. This thesis stresses the need for theoretical modeling and provides a critique of the empirical approach. It uses this approach to explore the area of river water governance, especially in India. A constructive approach to the study of river governance allows us to use theoretical perspectives and explore the philosophical foundations of the ecological ideology. This study aims to contribute to the interpretation of the way in which contemporary societies construct and process their socio-environmental issues using the example of river governance.Statement of Problem: The increasing deterioration of rivers has been emphasized in Central Pollution Control Board’s (CPCB) report titled “River Stretches for Restoration of Water Quality” (2015). It identified 302 polluted stretches in 225 rivers, of which most were smaller tributaries of the major rivers in India. Despite the data, the emphasis nevertheless has been on the major rather than minor rivers, and the minor rivers like Kshipra have received minimal attention from scholars and policy-makers alike. Such minor tributary rivers have been designated as “subaltern” for the purpose of this study.The term subaltern was introduced in Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Prison Notebooks” (1971). For Gramsci, the word subaltern stands for any low rank person or group of people in a society suffering under the hegemonic domination of ruling elites. Ranajit Guha further developed the term subaltern in “The elementary aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India” (1983). For him, subaltern studies refer to the general attributes of subordination in South Asian studies whether in terms of caste, class, gender, age, and office or in any other way (Guha, 1982). In 1988 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak critiqued thisunderstanding of subaltern and instead argued that there is no specific methodology which can define who and what constitutes subaltern. She is talking about the interdependence between elites and subalterns of the society. However, we note that from Gramsci to Guha to Spivak, the term “subaltern” has been used to understand the everyday lives of human society. This study extends this conceptual category to explore how it can be usefully employed to study urban rivers, keeping its anthropocentric allusion on hold, for the course of this study. The term “subaltern” here refers to the smallest tributaries of major rivers, to understand the plight of minor tributary rivers in India, which are subjected to systematic negligence and institutionalized marginalization. This study shows that the smallest tributaries of major river systems have been neglected in the conceptualization and development of schemes, policies, and river rejuvenation programs in India. This means that the gaps in implementations affect minor rivers more than they affect the major ones. Interestingly, the problem further aggravates when the government uses purely technicalsolutions to solve the problem of deterioration of rivers which have been established as ‘socio-natural’ in the recent studies (Swyngedouw, 1996, p. 66), with explicit political, social and cultural components. The hard-engineering interventions such as dams, dikes, and locks are created to keep the river in its predefined structure and to guarantee the efficient functioning of the river system for human value. Therefore, the centralized hard- engineering responses take little account of fluvial processes and socio-political elements of the functioning of the river ecosystems, often exacerbating these problems. To explicate the dominance of purely technical approaches of river ecosystems for the management of deteriorating rivers, this thesis proposes using the theoretical and analytical framework of technography. Technography is ‘observing and describing stages’ of the technological development cycle (Kein, 2008). It helps to bridge the gap between nature and society (Bolding, 2004) and so it has been used in this study to evaluate the effects of technological interventions on the rivers in different socio-cultural contexts.