Under the dam’s feet: an ethnographic study of water flow in India’s Narmada River basin

Abstract

A river is, by definition, a body of flowing water. A dam-induced water flow regulation affects its physicality and socio-political character. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 6.6 focused on protecting and restoring water-related ecosystems, including rivers, by 2020. In that sense, we aim to examine the political potential of water flow regulation as an urgent environmental concern in the context of a technology-based river regulatory mechanism. We employ conceptual discourses of depoliticization and repoliticization to explain how large-scale water controlling practices enact flow management and how such practices are challenged through grassroots mobilization. The article findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Omkareshwar, India, during 2017–19, on the community’s everyday struggle due to erratic downstream flow in the Narmada River basin. We conclude by highlighting the need to subdue the existing depoliticized polity by an upward scaling of the repoliticization process for advancing the locals’ claims to regular flow. © 2021 Newcastle University.