Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Canal irrigation and the hydrosocial cycle
The morphogenesis of contested water control in the Tungabhadra
Left Bank Canal, South India
Peter P. Mollinga
Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Irrigation
Hydrosocial cycle
Morphogenesis
Technology
Space
Time
India
a b s t r a c t
Using South Indian large-scale surface irrigation as a case, this paper combines emerging interdisciplinary
conceptualisation in resource geography of the hydrological cycle as a hydrosocial cycle with Archer’s theorisation of society’s structure-agency dynamics as a morphogenetic cycle. Characteristic of large scale
canal irrigation are a pronounced spatiality of social process, and a strongly cyclical nature of social interaction around water through seasonality and rotational supply, framed by irrigation infrastructure that is
both grid and subject of water resources management practices. This allows an investigation of how
human agency as the animator of structural elaboration reproduces and transforms a hybrid and
multi-scale water control system, thus establishing a ‘hydromorphogenetic’ cycle of unequal irrigation
water distribution. The detailed account of irrigation practice provides caution against simplified interpretations of dam + canals based irrigation as abodes of green revolution capitalist farming, and of the
objectives of neoliberal irrigation reform policy. It is, lastly, suggested that the hydrosocial relations focus
produces new insights and questions for irrigation studies, but that complexity and emergence rather
than hybridity are the key analytical challenges.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction: socio-technical systems and hydrosocial
relations
In irrigation studies, conceptualisation of irrigation systems as
combined physical and human socio-technical systems dates from
the 1980s (Uphoff, 1986; Vincent, 1997). The interest in ‘hybrid’,
socio-technical understanding of irrigation derived from the perceived poor performance record of irrigation interventions in the
context of international development assistance and national
planned development – both in mainstream and critical observation of the sector.1 For large-scale formally government managed
irrigation, a well known illustration is Uphoff’s suggestion that the
levels of primary, secondary, and tertiary canals of surface irrigation
systems do not only have hydraulic significance for the physical conveyance of water, but also constitute social spaces for irrigation
management activities as contested by irrigators and government
officials (Uphoff, 1991: 33). For smaller-scale farmer managed irrigation Coward has shown that the creation and upkeep of irrigation
E-mail address: pm35@soas.ac.uk
1
‘Critical’ (irrigation studies) here refers to approaches explicitly addressing the
social relations of power that are part of irrigation and which have a normative
concern about its often problematic equity/poverty, democracy, and sustainability
dimensions.
infrastructure go hand in hand with the (transformation of the) social relations: they co-evolve and are each other’s expression as
‘hydraulic property’ (Coward, 1990).
Theorisation of the socio-technical nature of irrigation processes received a boost with the advent of the ‘social construction
of technology’ (SCOT) perspective (Pinch and Bijker, 1984). Theorisations from this SCOT, and later ANT (Actor-Network Theory) literature, mostly focusing on western societies, and without specific
interest in irrigation or water resources, could be usefully transposed to the study of irrigation infrastructure. The social construction of irrigation artefacts, notably division structures,2 the devices
connecting Uphoff’s levels and embodying Coward’s hydraulic property rights, has been a central theme (Mollinga, 2013). The concept
of ‘water control’ has posited that technical/physical, organisational/managerial and socio-economic/political control of water are
internally related (Bolding et al., 1995). Methodologically, this
2
In irrigation science ‘structures’ is the generic technical term for built devices in
water control systems (like discharge measurement structures, division structures,
outlet structures, escape structures, etc.). It needs to be distinguished from structure
as used in ‘structure-agency’, and the more general use of structure as enduring
composition and pattern of organisation of objects and processes (having structure, or
being structured). All three meanings are used in this paper.
0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.05.011
Please cite this article in press as: Mollinga, P.P. Canal irrigation and the hydrosocial cycle. Geoforum (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.geoforum.2013.05.011
2
P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
current of work has articulated ‘technography’ as a method for interdisciplinary irrigation studies (Bolding, 2004).
Conceiving the hydrological cycle as a hydrosocial cycle is an effort to avoid the pitfalls of reductionist and depoliticised water resources management analysis.
‘‘In a sustained attempt to transcend the modernist nature –
society binaries, hydro-social research envisions the circulation
of water as a combined physical and social process, as a hybridized socio-natural flow that fuses together nature and society in
inseparable manners (...). It calls for revisiting traditional fragmented and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of water
by insisting on the inseparability of the social and the physical
in the production of particular hydro-social configurations (...).’’
(Swyngedouw, 2009: 56)
In water studies binarism is clearly visible in early conceptions
of the hydrosocial cycle like that of Falkenmark (1997), where the
social and the material appear in conceptual models as separate
boxes, linked with arrows.3 What such modelling is unable to capture is exactly hybridity. In contrast, hydrosocial analysis conceives
of the relation as internal and infested with social power (Swyngedouw, 2009). The hydrosocial perspective also suggests that ‘scalar
politics’ is a key element; scale is not given but politically constructed (Swyngedouw, 2007).
The programmatic announcement of ‘hydrosocial research’ as a
new perspective focusing on analysis of the ‘‘intricate and multidimensional relationships between the socio-technical organization
of the hydro-social cycle, the associated power geometries that
choreograph access to and exclusion from water, as well as the uneven political power relations that affect flows of water’’ (Swyngedouw, 2009: 59) for many a critical irrigation scholar may sound
like sticking a new label on already existing research. However,
much critical irrigation research has remained irrigation system
confined, taking the boundaries of the infrastructural systems
and the communities using and managing them as defining the object of research.4 The emerging hydrosocial research perspective can
be used to bring together in a single framework the different scales
and dimensions of the socio-technicality and hydrosociality of irrigation. It resonates with the increased (largely policy-driven) interest
in irrigation studies to ‘scale up’ analysis from the system level to
the level of the basin (Wester et al., 2003), and is able to provide a
political economy and political ecology infusion into that research
(cf. Lebel et al., 2005 on scalar politics in the Mekong basin). Simultaneously the detailed socio-technical analysis of irrigation studies
can help to elaborate the general notion of hydrosocial relations.
By unravelling the contestations ongoing within irrigation projects,
it can add to the space and landscape focus of hydrosocial analysis
an emphasis on time and technology. The latter is virtually absent
in political ecology.5 It can also nuance all too sweeping analyses
of the role of dams + canals for irrigation in the project of state
and/or market-led modernisation and assessments of neoliberal irrigation reform.
This paper, thus, seeks to combine ‘hydrosocial analysis’ and
the socio-technical study of irrigation. It does so in three steps,
and by investigating one particular case, unequal water distribution in the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal irrigation system in
South India (Mollinga, 2003). First it discusses in general theoretical terms how Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic approach resonates with the endeavour of hydrosocial analysis, providing the
3
I thank Susanne Mauren for collecting conceptual models of the hydrosocial cycle.
Theorisation of irrigation as a ‘large technological system’ in SCOT/ANT mode (cf.
Hughes, 1987) has, to the knowledge of this author, not been undertaken.
5
Political ecology has focused on knowledge rather than technology, while water
has not been a particularly popular topic in such research (Budds, 2009; also see
Linton, 2008; Shah, 2008; Trottier and Fernandez, 2010).
4
general framework for investigation of the Tungabhadra case. In
a second step the paper looks at irrigation ‘from without’, interpreting the meaning of the ‘slicing off’ of irrigation from the
hydrosocial cycle. It is shown that the storage and diversion of
river water for the productive purpose of irrigation is an act of
power, a strategy of state rule, and an effort to singularise the value and meaning of water to serve particular trajectories of political economic development. Third, the paper looks at the
irrigation system ‘from within’ along the axes of technology, time
and space. It provides an analysis of the hydrosocial dynamics
within the system that produce a recurrent pattern of unequal
water distribution,6 and shows that the project of state rule and
political economic development is far from accomplished and
inherently contradictory. The paper concludes with reflecting on
how hydrosocial analysis can be elaborated beyond confirmation
of the fact that, indeed, water resources management structures
and practices are ‘hydrosocial relations of power’.
2. Hydrosociality, structure-agency and morphogenesis
The basic theoretical puzzle of hydrosocial analysis is to capture
the ontological complexity of water resource management situations, as being structured, stratified and heterogeneous, and in critical perspectives, contested, systems and processes, animated by
configurations of actors networked in variety of social relations
of power that shape their individual and collective agency. Conceptualisations of the circulation of water, as for example in models of
the hydrological cycle, need to be combined or integrated with
conceptualisations of social dynamics, as for example, and foundationally, in models of structure-agency dynamics.
The hydrological cycle as understood in hydrology is a circulation process in which water moves through different phases
and ‘compartments’. Details are too well known to bear repeating – the intricacies of the circulation have been documented
and modelled in great detail. With the advent of Geographical
Information Systems, spatially explicit modelling has become
possible (Sakthivadivel, 2006). Combined with a river basin history perspective, trajectories of hydrosocial evolution of basin
structure may be described (for the Krishna river in South India,
see Venot, 2009). The ‘social (re)construction’ of the hydrological
structure and stratification of the water circulation system can
thus be mapped, modelled and understood in relation to societal
dynamics, mediated by technology and institutions. Time plays a
role in such trajectories as the (short term) yearly climatic cycle
and the (long term) gradual change of the hydrosocial
configuration.
This imagery closely resonates with that of Archer’s (1995) picturing of the morphogenetic cycle. She uses the term morphogenesis to refer to the way societal structuration and stratification
develops through the interaction of agency and structure.7 Against
Giddens (1984), for whom structure and agency are inseparable and
two sides of the same coin, she argues for analytical dualism in
6
The Tungabhadra irrigation system exhibits the classical head-tail pattern of
water distribution, in which those located upstream along a canal (at its head)
appropriate water beyond their entitlement, depriving those located further downstream along the canal (towards its tail). In the perspective of this paper ‘locational
advantage’ (implying queuing for access) is an emergent property, constituted by a
complex hydrosocial structure, that needs to be explained, rather than a geographical
‘given’.
7
And morphostasis in case of reproduction.
Please cite this article in press as: Mollinga, P.P. Canal irrigation and the hydrosocial cycle. Geoforum (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.geoforum.2013.05.011
P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
which structure precedes agency in time, and time is needed for
‘structural elaboration’, which happens in cycles (Archer, 1995,
chapters 4–6).8 In this critical realist ontology (Sayer, 1992) this ever
continuing process constitutes a stratified reality,9 in which, according to Archer, three types of structures have three kinds of emergent
properties: structural, cultural and agential (Archer, 1995, 175 ff.).
Structural emergent properties are characterised by their primary
dependence of material resources, physical or human. Cultural
emergent properties are the items in a society’s ‘propositional register’, the cultural system of a society. The features of agential relations represent the third type of emergent properties, people’s
emergent properties ‘‘with their two defining features – that is they
modify the capacities of component members (affecting their consciousness and commitments, affinities and animosities) and exert
causal powers proper to their relations themselves vis-à-vis other
agents or their groupings (such as association, organization, opposition and articulation of interests).’’ (Archer, 1995, 184)
Archer thus pictures society as consisting of a heterogeneous
set of evolving structures that is continuously reworked (elaborated) by human action, leading to cyclic (in the sense of episodic)
change of these structures and their emergent properties. Though
Archer’s morphogenetic perspective is not directly concerned
about material-social hybridity in the way hydrosocial analysis
is, the analytical dualism of structure and agency linked over time,
and the distinction of different types of structures and emergent
properties much more easily allows the inclusion of, for example,
the features of canal infrastructure as a component of social analysis than Giddens’ approach, where structures are only ‘instantiated’ when agency is actively deployed. The challenge is to
explain, by providing ‘analytical histories of emergence’, the configuration of heterogeneous objects, structures, and their emergent
properties (Archer, 1995, 324 ff.).
The circulation of water through the hydrological cycle almost
seems an archetypical example for Archer’s framework: time cycles are ‘naturally’ given, the (spatial) features of the landscape
are the medium of the terrestrial part of the cycle, both of which
provide the basis for building complex human societies by
(re)shaping the time, space and other dimensions of the circulation
(and value and meaning) of water through sets of technologies and
institutions. If it wasn’t so cumbersome, the concept of hydrosocial
cycle could be usefully rephrased as hydromorphogenetic cycle.
This formal and abstract conceptualisation is elaborated
through an analysis of the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal irrigation
system in the next two sections.
3. Canal irrigation from without: the political economy of
‘slicing off’
The Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal irrigation system is located in
interior South India in the State of Karnataka (Fig. 1). The reservoirfed irrigation system on the left bank of the Tungabhadra river,
operational since 1953, has a planned irrigated area of about
240,000 ha. The main canal running from the reservoir and ending
8
Archer (1995) critiques three types of conflation (one dimensional theorising) of
structure and agency. In downward conflation structure determines agency, in
upward conflation agency determines structure. Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration is a case of central conflation. ‘‘[E]ndorsement of [structure and agency’s]
mutual constitution precludes examination of their interplay.’’ (Archer, 1995: 14)
‘‘Lack of ontological depth’’ is the central fallacy of Giddens’ type of ‘‘elisionist
thinking about society’’. (Archer, 1995: 133)
9
The approach is committed to a framework that ‘‘incorporates (a) pre-existent
structures as generative mechanisms, (b) their interplay with other objects possessing
causal powers and liabilities proper to them in what is a stratified social world, and
(c) non-predictable but none the less explicable outcomes arising from interactions
between the above, which take place in the open system that is society’’ (Archer,
1995, 159)
3
close to the district capital of Raichur town has a length of about
227 km. An approximately similarly sized irrigation area was created on the river’s right bank, having two main canals. These are
not discussed.
3.1. The establishment of the irrigation system
The construction of a dam across the Tungabhadra river created
a reservoir that, with an accompanying system of canals, allowed
electricity generation and intensification of agriculture through
irrigation.10 The government agencies who built it thus pursued economic growth and development objectives, in combination with
welfare objectives – the latter related to the fact that the Tungabhadra irrigation system was conceived as a protective irrigation system, as discussed below. The storing and diversion of river water
that the grafting of the project on the landscape amounted to, implied not only a physical change in the hydrological cycle by altering
the time and space contours of water availability, but also an intervention in the meaning and value of the river water. The project, like
many dam + canals projects, was an effort at ‘singularising’ the
meaning of water: storage and diversion means to reserve the water
for exclusively productive purposes. The socio-ecological meaning of
that water in terms of supporting a river ecosystem was ignored, as
well as the livelihoods of people depending on the river eco-hydrology. Along the river many communities had livelihoods based on river fisheries, which seems to have severely declined, to almost nonexistence in the zone downstream of the Tungabhadhra dam.11
The effects on the flora and fauna of the Tungabhadra river valley
can only be guessed at, and similarly unknown are the ecological effects of the subsequent intensification of agriculture, for instance
through non-point pollution of water by agricultural chemicals (cf.
Gooch et al., 2010, chapter 10).
This lack of knowledge on eco-hydrological effects, and the concomitant livelihood impacts, reflects the ease with which this dam
and irrigation system could be constructed, as compared to many
contemporary dams. This is no doubt partly due to the centralised
imperial and feudal modes of governance of the two riparian states
in the colonial period (the directly ruled Madras Presidency and
the formally autonomous ‘princely state’ of the Nizam’s Dominions), and the unquestioned legitimacy of the first post-independence ‘planned development’ governments of India. It also has to
do with the marginality of the region in which the project is located. For Madras Presidency the area was a remote and marginal
area upstream of the prominent agricultural area of the Krishna
delta (a reason why within the Madras Presidency government
there were always forces opposing construction on the ground that
the project would reduce water supply to the delta). For the Nizam’s Dominions the Raichur District was not a core agricultural
or economic area either – the dam site chosen would even inundate part of the feudal estate of the Salar Jung family, a prominent
family in the Nizam Dominians’ ruling elite. This was one, though
not the main, reason why project construction was a political hot
potato for the 80 years between the 1850/1860s first formulation/design by Sir Arthur Cotton as part of his interlinking of Indian
rivers plan, and the 1940 agreement of the riparian governments to
build the system.12
State-driven canal irrigation development in India is based in
the contradictions of colonial rule, and the reworking of these after
10
The hydropower dimension of the dam + canals is left aside – the irrigation
function was and is predominant.
11
There is virtually no research-based evidence on this. The conclusion is based on
interviews with members of a fisher(wo)man caste in one of the study villages.
12
Cotton’s interlinking of rivers plan is discussed in the Indian Irrigation Committee
1901-1903 report (IIC, 1903), which includes a map with the right bank ‘Bellary’ canal
and the Kurnool-Cuddapah Canal, as part of the ‘Tungabhadra-Kistna Project’. The
map is reproduced in Mollinga (2003: 102). Also see MICC (1859, 1867).
Please cite this article in press as: Mollinga, P.P. Canal irrigation and the hydrosocial cycle. Geoforum (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
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P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
Fig. 1. Location of Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal irrigation project.
Independence. The contradiction of the imperial pursuit of economic gain while maintaining political control and stability, in irrigation translated in the articulation of two types of canal irrigation
in the second half of the 19th century. ‘Productive’ irrigation systems were systems that generated sufficient revenue (expressed
as a percentage of total financial outlay for construction), while
‘protective’ irrigation systems stayed below the revenue threshold
but were still considered, and occasionally constructed, for protection against crop failure, to avoid the social unrest and misery associated with famines, and to reduce the costs of famine relief (for
detailed discussion, see Mollinga, 2003, chapter 3). In the colonial
period few protective systems were built; the revenue consideration tended to get preference. The terminology survived independence (GOI/MOIP, 1972); the logic of protective systems was now
argued on rural development and poverty alleviation grounds.
Many protective irrigation systems were built in the first decades
after independence, the Tungabhadra irrigation system was one
of them.
The productive/protective distinction was not only financial. It
also translated into specific agricultural and infrastructural characteristics. Productive systems mainly aimed at the cultivation of
commercial crops – which is what made them remunerative. Protective systems mostly aimed at irrigation of subsistence food
crops, notably, in South India, sorghum and millet. Productive systems were often designed for intensive irrigation, i.e. aimed at the
supply of full water requirements to crops, in South India often
rice. Protective systems were often designed for supplementary
irrigation, i.e. for only a part of the full crop water requirements,
of low-water consuming crops. Protective irrigation also aimed to
spread water thinly over as large an area/number of villages, in
tune with its famine, social stability and poverty alleviation objectives. In protective irrigation systems water is ‘scarce by design’
(Jurriëns and Mollinga, 1996), with low water allowances (or in Indian terms high irrigation duties13) for the planned irrigated area.
In protective irrigation systems like the Tungabhadra LBC attempts at commodification of and accumulation through irrigated
agriculture have a contradictory history. In several ways water has
been an ‘uncooperative’ commodity – to transplant Bakker’s (2003)
phrase from UK urban water to Indian agricultural water.14 Well
documented, notably for the Nira Left Bank Canal in present Maharashtra and the Kurnool-Cuddapah Canal in present Andhra Pradesh,
is the lack of interest of South Indian farmers in utilising the irrigation services provided by the British rulers and engineers in the second half of the 19th century to secure local food production
(Attwood, 1987; Bolding et al., 1995). The reasons were located in
the character of the soils (highly water-retentive vertisols that become waterlogged when irrigation is followed by rainfall, suffocating
crops), and the response of local crop varieties to irrigation (mainly
vegetative growth without increased grain production). This issue
presented itself also in the early years of Tungabhadra LBC operation.
Local farmers were hesitant to irrigate their sorghum, millet and cotton crops fearing they would lose them through over-watering, and
destroy the quality of the soil in the process, even when they had the
financial means to do the land preparation and levelling required for
effective irrigation. It took the immigration of experienced rice
farmers from coastal Andhra Pradesh (Upadhya, 1988) to show that
13
Water allowance is the amount of water envisaged for irrigating a piece of land,
usually expressed as the continuous flow (l/s ha) needed over the length of the
growing season. The South Asian term ‘duty’ is the inverse of this, expressing the
extent of land to be irrigated with a unit flow (usually expressed as acres/cusec).
14
The earliest comprehensive statement on the inherent problems of commodification in irrigation as caused by the character of water and water infrastructure is
Moore (1989).
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P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
intensive irrigation of vertisols (‘black cotton soils’) was possible.15
Through a trial-and-error based innovation process animated by a
strong pioneer spirit, the fact that rice can be grown in submerged
conditions, the advent of the green revolution, and government procurement policy, rice cultivation became very productive and before
long local farmers also started practising it. The government managers of the Tungabhadra LBC allowed intensive rice cropping in the
1960s and 1970s because full reservoir capacity was available for
an only partly developed planned irrigated area16 and because the
national ‘Grow More Food’ campaignrequired intensification of agricultural production. Thistriggered an agricultural ‘rice’ boom in the
district, which counted more than 100 rice mills in 1991–1992.
The uncooperativeness of water in terms of agricultural growth
was thus partly overcome – through a combination of concerted effort and circumstance.
This agronomic and economic success greatly intensified unequal water distribution, as that success was dependent on crop
and space–time changes in the equitable design of the protective
irrigation cycle. Inequality intensified because widespread cultivation of rice was allowed, meaning a shift from design low water
consuming crops to a high water consuming crop, and double season irrigated cropping was allowed as against the protective design
of a single irrigated crop per year on each individual piece of land.
Instead of supplementary irrigation, irrigation to full crop water
requirements came to be practised. As compared to an ‘average’
design localised irrigated plot, the shift to rice double cropping implied a multiplication of water use in the order of 4–5 times. The
dramatic geographical concentration of water as a result of this
is immediately visible to any visitor to the region who makes the
effort to drive down, for instance, a secondary canal.
Based on this account, the design and construction of irrigation
projects like the Tungabhadra project could be interpreted with
some validity as top-down, and perhaps violent, state-led acts of
‘modernisation’ that ‘freed up’ water as an input for new processes
of accumulation of a class of (newly emerged) capitalist farmers
(on the role of irrigation capitalist agricultural development in India see Thorner and Thorner, 1962; Byres, 1981; Jairath, 1985; Gorter, 1989). Creation of irrigation systems by government then
becomes understood as a ‘state simplification’ (Scott, 1997), an attempt to reduce the complexity of the meaning and embeddedness
of water (use) in order to make it amenable for the pursuit of statedefined objectives by selected local actors. Critiques of dam-based
irrigation development have tended to adopt interpretations of this
nature (Mollinga, 2010).17 This interpretation, however, risks to
overlook the continued (p)relevance of the private/common good
contradiction, and the complications involved in ’slicing off’ irrigation from the broader hydrosocial cycle.
3.2. The structural elaboration of a contradiction
The protective design and policy paradigm imposed the task to
ration water on colonial government managers, as well as on contemporary government managers, that is, to discipline irrigators to
accept supplementary levels of irrigation water. From a government perspective the economic logic of spreading water thinly is
that it maximises total agricultural output, and thus makes the
15
Debate on the irrigability of these soils ranged from the late 19th century to at
least the 1970s (Venkata Ramiah, 1937; UAS, 1973). The debate seems to have died
down with the practice of effective intensive irrigation of these soils getting
established.
16
The last secondary canal was constructed in 1968, 15 years after the first water
releases from the dam. Land preparation to make individual plots suitable for
irrigation was an even much longer-drawn process (see below).
17
For instance, Morrison (2010: 182) quotes Goldsmith (1998) as stating ‘‘Modern
irrigation systems in tropical areas are, almost without exception, social, ecological,
and economic disasters.’’
5
largest contribution to ‘national development’. It has also been argued that protective irrigation generates more agricultural working days, that is, employment (Dhawan, 1988, 1989; Mitra, 1986,
1987). Further, welfare/equity considerations have carried political
force in both colonial and post-independence periods, even with
that logic being partly utterly pragmatic, deriving from political
stability and constituency based politics considerations. However,
this differentially constituted spreading logic for the common good
contradicts the individual farmer logic of maximising of agricultural output per unit area, that is, his/her farm, which has equally
been carrying considerable political force in both the colonial and
post-independence period.
Different rationing approaches were followed in different regions of India, involving different institutional and infrastructural
arrangements (Wade, 1976; Attwood, 1987; Bolding et al., 1995).
The northern part of India adopted the warabandi system of areabased time-shares, with a semi-modular distribution technology,
the so called Crump outlet.18 In the present day Maharashtra part
of Western India the introduction of the so called ‘block system’
was attempted in the early 20th century. It involved permission to
grow sugarcane (a water intensive commercial crop) on one-third
of the land, with the other two-thirds protectively cultivated with
food crops like sorghum, the main subsistence food crop of interior
South India. The block system design involved this new cropping
pattern, packaged with institutional elements (bulk delivery of water
against volumetric payment to groups of users) and a technical innovation (a modular outlet structure that could measure the volumes
delivered and would be tamper proof), for which design competitions were held (for details see Bolding et al., 1995).
The present South Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh
and Tamil Nadu have harboured the strongest state attempt to regulate irrigation water use for maximising aggregate production in
the form of ‘localisation’. Localisation is a form of land use planning
avant la lettre. It was designed in the 1930s and 1940s as a mirror
of canal irrigation design practice, which has to assume cropping
patterns on certain extents of land to calculate necessary canal
capacities (and thereby construction costs). In reverse this becomes prescriptive land use planning.19 In the Tungabhadra LBC
this took the form of the publication in the State Gazette of lists of
survey numbers (cadastral units) with irrigation entitlements, defined as permission to irrigate in either the kharif (monsoon) or
the rabi (post-monsoon) season, with the type of crop allowed
specified.
The assumption, apparently, was that state agencies would be
able to implement this, and distribute water according to the localisation pattern in both space (survey number) and time (season).
Non-adherence to this prescribed pattern was made a violation,
with fine levels defined, under the Irrigation Act as Unauthorised
Irrigation (irrigating outside the prescribed area) and Violation of
Cropping Pattern (irrigation of other, notably more water consuming, crops than prescribed). When intensive irrigation (double rice
cropping) won the day, as explained above, many farmers went to
court – till the early 1980s thousands of writ petitions were registered at the Karnataka High Court. After that the belief in the prospects of legal action seems to have waned.
Government of Karnataka committees deliberated on how to
better implement localisation well into the 1970s (GOMYS/DOA,
1968, GOKAR/PD, 1976). However, in the late 1970s/early 1980s
localisation practically became a dead letter for day-to-day
18
For modular outlet structures neither upstream nor downstream canal water
levels determine discharge; for semi-modular outlets only the upstream water level
does; for non-modular outlets both upstream and downstream do (for hydraulic
details see Mahbub and Gulhati, 1951).
19
For discussion see Mollinga, 2003, chapter 3; the 1956 Hyderabad State Rules for
localisation are reproduced there.
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P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
irrigation management, even when, till today, water release schedules (for different levels of canals) are calculated based on the official localisation pattern, and unauthorised irrigation and violations
of cropping patterns continue to be administratively recorded, and
the ensuing fines calculated. Efforts to implement the ‘spreading
logic’ of localisation shifted to other policy instruments.
The 1980s saw a shift to water management improvement by
organisation of water users in associations, first through the Command Area Development (CAD) programme, later under the umbrella of Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM), including
piloting by Non-Governmental Organisations. These efforts have
been extensively researched (Joshi and Hooja, 2000), basically
showing their lack of effectiveness (for a summary statement, see
Mollinga et al., 2007). The two main sticking points are (a) the
unwillingness of government (including both the Irrigation
Department and elected parliamentarians) to devolve power over
budget allocation and water allocation to irrigator associations,
and (b) diverse interests in (un)equal water distribution among
the farming community. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the advent
of (neo)liberalisation seems to have brought new dynamism to
‘irrigation reform’. Under the Chief Ministership of Chandra Babu
Naidu, seen and projected as a neoliberal ‘champion’ (Mooij,
2007) Andhra Pradesh adopted and implemented the Andhra Pradesh Farmer Management of Irrigation Systems (APFMIS) Act in
1996–1997. This is the most far reaching effort in India so far at
legislating irrigation reform through devolution of power to irrigator organisations. It has served as a model Act for several other
states. Reforms aim at achieving financial sustainability of the government irrigation management enterprise through ‘cost recovery’
as well as at more equitable water distribution, which would enhance the revenue base of the irrigation system and its financial
sustainability. As another instance of neoliberal thinking, in recent
years the states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh have been at
the forefront of establishing Regulatory Authorities for the water
sector, the concrete effects of which on irrigation management remain to become manifest.
The situation is thus more complex and contradictory than a
singular ‘victory’ of the rich/larger farmers’ class power interpretation suggests. The post-construction story of Tungabhadra LBC economic and socio-political transformation harbours a complex
dynamic of capitalist accumulation in agriculture, with irrigation
management getting ensnarled in the post-independence Indian
politics of ‘competitive populism’, both underpinning a changing
role and image of large-scale surface irrigation systems as instruments of development. This is a story of the changing fortunes of
farmers and farming in the post green revolution area, including
the rise and decline of middle and large farmers’ class power
(Brass, 1995; Nadkarni, 1987), of a series of institutional interventions (partly internationally supported) attempts at enhancing irrigation system performance through ‘water user participation’, and
of the logic of their half-heartedness in India’s competitively populist democracy and system of ‘political and administrative corruption’ characteristic of the public works bureaucracy and the polity
and administration in general (Wade, 1982), and a story of new efforts at institutional reform under neoliberalism. The story also includes elements such as the impacts of economic growth in the
region, and the contestation and partial renegotiation of the productive singularisation of the meaning of diverted water.
For the theoretical purposes of this paper a narrower focus than
this monograph-wide canvas suffices. By ‘zooming in’ on the concrete water distribution dynamics in the Tungabhadra LBC, a specification of the hydrosocial conceptual apparatus is undertaken.
This more limited focus will turn out to be more than complex
and empirically rich enough to suggest how analysis of water resources management in terms of a ‘hydrosocial cycle’, and ‘hydrosocial relations of power’ can be usefully linked with Archer’s
(1995) ‘morphogenetic approach’ to structure-agency dynamics,
while giving materiality its due. In the process the political economic and socio-political dynamics of recent decades will be illustrated at case-level.
4. Canal irrigation from within: technology, time, and space in
unequal water distribution
To show how the practice of concentrated unequal rather than
thinly spread equal water distribution is produced, and contested,
on a day-to-day basis, I analyse water management practices in the
Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal along three axes. First I show how the
nature of the technical infrastructure configures unequal outcomes. Second I look at time: the social processes of (unequal)
water distribution derive their institutional specificity from the
time cycles of irrigation and thus constitute hydrosocial cycles
and relations. Third, (unequal) water distribution has strong spatial
specificity, suggesting that the social differentiation of agricultural
producers that shapes and is shaped by irrigation practices has an
irreducible spatial component.
4.1. The technical configuration of unequal water distribution
The low allowance/high duty ‘scarcity by design’ feature of protective irrigation that embodies the objective to spread water
thinly and widely, results in long canals and large spatial extent
of the planned irrigated area. In addition to the ‘hard to police’
characteristic inherent to spatial spread, technical features that
configure water management behaviour in the Tungabhadra LBC
irrigation system include the levelled structure of the canal hierarchy, non-modular water division structures at canal bifurcations,
and the absence of flow regulation facilities in the canal system.
4.1.1. Canal levels and outlet structures20
The process of water distribution that determines the practical
fate of localisation and participatory management efforts is materially configured by the organisation of the canals in a hierarchy of
levels. The levels are a single main canal with a length of 227 km,
over 80 secondary canals with lengths up to several tens of kilometres called distributaries (regularly with sub-distributaries branching off) and the level of the tertiary (or farmer field) canals. The
main and distributary canals are formally the domain of the Irrigation Department managers, the field level canals the domain of
groups of farmers (the local irrigation units measure several tens
up to 100 ha, with several tens of farmers having land within such
a unit). The different canal levels are connected by outlet or division structures. At each bifurcation point a masonry or concrete
structure can be found with steel gates, at least as per design.
These structures serve to determine how much water goes where.
The outlet structure that links the (sub-)distributary with the local
irrigation unit is particularly important. Its operation directly
determines the quantity and timing of irrigation water for groups
of farmers (and thereby the pattern of (in)equality), and it is the
physical interface between the domain of government management and the domain of farmer management. For the government
it is the final point of control for supply and rationing, for farmers
the point of access to a government controlled resource.
The structures at the bifurcations of canals are not only instruments for water distribution activities, but their features are also
the subject of that interaction. The latter is illustrated in Fig. 2
for a three kilometres long subdistributary in the D24 canal area
(see Fig. 1). Fig. 2 shows how the technical features of the outlet
structures systematically change going from the upstream to the
20
See footnote 2.
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j.geoforum.2013.05.011
P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
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Fig. 2. Outlet structures along a subdistributary canal.
downstream side, from efforts to control excess abstraction by heavy, not easily damaged structures, to abandonment of damaged
structures, with the original standard design seen in Section 2.21
For South Indian protective irrigation I have not found evidence
that the technical design of the division structure was actively
thought about in relation to the rationing principle, unlike in the
other two regions referred to above. Non-modular outlets that do
not allow any measurement or assessment of actual water flows
were chosen, possibly as a South Indian path dependent choice
from the historically dominating rice irrigation schemes (in deltas
and otherwise) where there is water abundance by design, not
requiring rationing in the way the upland schemes designed as
protective irrigation schemes do. Moreover, in the 1930s/1940s
protective irrigation design was a relatively new concept for this
region, certainly for the Nizam’s Dominions in which the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal area then fell. For the right bank canals
of the Tungabhadra system, coming under the Madras Presidency
before independence, a ‘melons on a vine’ (Nickum, 1977) system
was designed in which whole local units of irrigation were either
for kharif irrigation or for rabi irrigation, so that the government
could close units off for irrigation at a single point, the outlet structure – by cementing these in the off season. In the Tungabhadra
Left Bank Canal the survey numbers are spread – one irrigation
unit can have cadastral units permitting irrigation in both seasons.
It is unclear how the government anticipated technically managing
the season-wise distribution thus prescribed, a lack of clarity that
facilitates excess appropriation of water.
4.1.2. Absence of flow regulation structures and intermediate storage
Another relevant technical design feature is that the system has
no facilities for flow regulation and storage within the canal system. Once water has entered the canal system at the reservoir, it
has to flow through the system. It cannot be slowed down or
stored, it can only be directed to different places. The size of the
system and its spread over a very large area combined with this
21
The stability of this particular configuration has been documented for a period
exceeding 15 years. The ‘structural elaboration’ from the original uniform design
happened before the first fieldwork in 1991.
lack of regulation facilities means that the possibilities for flexible
forms of management responding to local demands and needs are
highly circumscribed; the system is designed for stable and continuous flow. This is in tune with the protective objective of thinly
and widely spread supplementary irrigation, but not with the actual use of the system.
These infrastructure design features configure a series of arenas
and locations for water distribution interaction with large spatial
extent that is difficult to police, and a ‘top-down’ system with limited options for water flow regulation and flexible management. As
a totality, the irrigation system infrastructure creates a structured
pattern of dependency among individuals, groups of farmers, village communities and administrative sections of the Irrigation
Department that manage different parts of the system. The structure is that of a complex set of queues along canals, in which water
flows in one direction and those located upstream having a strategic, locational advantage, making skewed water distribution highly
likely. Since the start of ‘participatory approaches’ under the CAD
programme, irrigation reform, as the contemporary state effort to
discipline irrigator behaviour, has been conceived as institutional
innovation primarily or only: there is no conscious consideration
of the infrastructure requirements for new governance and management regimes.
4.2. The rhythms of irrigation: contestations and institutional forms
Rainfed agriculture in this region has two seasons, the monsoon
or rainy season (kharif), starting from June and lasting into September–October, and the post-monsoon season (rabi), starting from
September–October lasting till January–February. Exact season
timings depend on the crop grown and the timeliness of rainfall.
The two seasons thus overlap in time, but usually not in space. In
rainfed agriculture, a particular piece of land would normally be
planted either with a kharif or with a rabi crop. Given that average
yearly rainfall is around 600 mm, only a single crop can be grown
on a piece of land.
Canal irrigation changed all this. Though localisation envisaged
irrigation of part of the area in kharif and part in rabi like in rainfed
agriculture, and of similar crops, this could not be implemented. In
Please cite this article in press as: Mollinga, P.P. Canal irrigation and the hydrosocial cycle. Geoforum (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.geoforum.2013.05.011
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P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
the early years of the canal’s operation in the 1950s and 1960s
water was abundant for those willing and ready to irrigate, as
the canal system and land development for irrigation were ongoing. In the early years the main canal supplied water for eleven
out of twelve months, with one month closure for repairs in the
hot summer period. Availability of canal water allowed two consecutive crops on a piece of land, provided access to the canal
water could be obtained. Because in the 1960s India had high levels of food insecurity, maximum use of water was allowed and
intensive irrigation spread rapidly. The irrigation system created
a new seasonality, that of two consecutive irrigation seasons. A
complex mix ensued of the rainfed and canal seasons as many
crops grown had desirable planting dates in relation to other climate related factors (for example temperature influencing yields).
The issue gained increasing importance with the completion of the
canal system and increasing acreages coming under irrigation. The
canal opening became delayed through upstream water use in
other systems and slower filling of the reservoir; the canal closure
came earlier and earlier in the year because of exhaustion of the
stored monsoon water. It became difficult to fit two consecutive
seasons into the irrigation year.
This created at least three periods in the year with intense social
interaction around water distribution. The first is irrigator lobby
for canal opening to allow timely planting. The release date was
partly a direct product of available water in the reservoir, but also
became related to the yearly maintenance cycle – repairs to be
done in the closure period. As budget allocations for these often
came late, there was often not enough time to do repairs before
re-opening the canal; particularly the main canal regularly breached, which requires time consuming structural repairs in the off
season.
More intensive interaction is found in the other two periods.
The first is the overlap of the end of the kharif/first irrigation season
and the preparation and start of the rabi/second irrigation season,
which is a period of peak water demand. September and October
are usually months with high intensity of water distribution conflicts. The second conflict period is towards the end of the irrigation
year in February–March. Temperatures start rising as summer is
approaching, and the canal closure is usually scheduled for somewhere in March. There is a scramble for water in this period and a
lot of irrigator pressure on the Irrigation Department to extend the
canal opening period to allow crops to mature. This need is unevenly spread over the system as upstream parts are able to plant
earlier than downstream parts through delays in the arrival of
water at the start of the season. In irrigation, time is clearly a resource that is scarce (Carlstein, 1982).
As a response to these constraints, managers and irrigators have
attempted more efficient management of the scarce time resource
by introducing and negotiating rotation schedules at the different
levels of the canal system. Rotation involves the concentration of
water flow and supplying areas in turns rather than continuously.
This increases the efficiency of water use. At main system level
supply is rotated over secondary canals; particularly the shorter
ones with less planned irrigated area may get water only a few
days per week. Within secondary (distributary) canals detailed
rotation schedules exist. These are often formally announced and
introduced by the government managers, but in fact the result of
repeated negotiation processes between government managers
and irrigators, and among irrigators located along the same canal.
At the level of local irrigation units a wide variety of rotation
schedules established by irrigators was documented (Mollinga,
2003). The rotation schedules at the different levels are ‘sleeping’,
that is, not implemented when water is not scarce, and mobilised
when water does becomes scarce in the ‘peak periods’ described.
The evolution of rotation schedules is a typical example of
Archer’s ‘structural elaboration’. The repeated seasonal and yearly
cycles of negotiating water distribution produce sets of rules varying with local physical conditions and social relationships. They
often consolidate, and stabilise to a considerable extent, but
sometimes they do not. In all cases their enactment in water scarce
periods signifies high drama on the canals, including farmers
sleeping on outlet structures at night to avoid manipulation,
nightly and daily canal patrols by government managers, sometimes together with groups of farmers, the blocking of canals and
gates, if not their demolishment, the blocking of roads, demonstrations in front of Irrigation Department offices, and the mobilisation
of local politicians to exert pressure on the administration to supply water. Though intense and seemingly chaotic to casual observers, the interactions are highly patterned, and their structures and
outcomes quite stable. Detailed discussion of the structure of these
water control relationships can be found in Mollinga (2003).
The institutional rhythms of water distribution in this canal system are thus shaped by the rainfall and surface flow patterns of the
hydrological cycle, the latter being influenced by human interventions in the upstream part of the basin influencing reservoir water
availability. These ‘macro’ factors translate into opening and closure dates of the canal system, for which rules have been designed,
and release schedules based on estimated water availability. ‘Within system’ elaborate sets of rules have been negotiated for rotational water supply at all levels. They all work on the principle of
time shares of concentrated flow, but how exactly varies greatly
with physical conditions and social relationships. Time is a continuously contested resource, the structure of its use definitive of canal irrigation management.
4.3. Water distribution, social differentiation and spatial relations
This section discusses how the social differentiation (of different categories of farmer-irrigators) associated with unequal water
distribution takes spatial form.
The Tungabhadra LBC is one of several South Indian upland protective irrigation systems with a history of migrant farmer settlement (Anjaneya Swamy, 1988). From the 1950s, farmers with
small holdings in the coastal deltas of the Krishna and Godavari
rivers sold their intensively used, mostly rice, land dearly and
bought much larger extents of unirrigated land in the new planned
irrigation area. These purchases sometimes took place before canals in the area were built. Settler farmers were interested to
buy land near canals and roads. Because irrigation canals are constructed on the ridges in the landscape, while the villages in this
semi-arid rainfed region were located in the lower parts of the
landscape – the valleys where water could still be found in the
dry season – settlers were able to buy land very cheaply: their preferred locations were far away from the villages around which
rainfed cultivation was concentrated, in the ‘jungle’ as local farmers put it. Local farmers, inexperienced with irrigation, sold such
far-away land on a large scale.22
When canal water started flowing, and the migrant farmers
started to develop the land for (rice) irrigation, it became clear that
this former ‘jungle’ land could be very profitably utilised. An inversion of the landscape took place. Water availability was now concentrated in the higher part of the landscape because of the canal
supply. This allowed much more intensive cultivation than rainfed
farming, and two crop seasons, meaning that the higher parts also
22
The force of the original localisation ruling shows in the settlement pattern of the
migrant farmers. In the 1950s and 1960s they preferentially settled in areas localised
for rice – of which there was a small percentage of 9% in the official, localised
cropping pattern. Rice areas were localised mostly in low lying, valley areas, on the
reasoning of clayey soil prevalence in such locations and better water availability.
This explains early migrant settlement in what are now tail-end areas. Later settlers,
observing the lack of force of the localisation policy, purchased land in upstream
locations directly.
Please cite this article in press as: Mollinga, P.P. Canal irrigation and the hydrosocial cycle. Geoforum (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
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P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
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Fig. 3. Head-middle-tail zones in a secondary canal.
became the core agricultural areas. This was even more so because
the canals constructed served as roads, and thus new commercialisation routes passed through the ‘camps’ that the settler farmers
established, often at the crossroads of canals and main roads.
Moreover, intensive rice irrigation with the attendant seepage
losses could cause waterlogging problems for villages located in
the valleys, and make access to them more difficult. However, after
the initial ‘surprise takeover’ local farmers also adopted the intensive irrigation practices and a less skewed irrigation development
pattern ensued. The migrant/local spatial distribution pattern of
landholding has, however, remained distinct.
To illustrate that binary head/tail descriptions as common in
irrigation studies can be too simplistic for capturing actual patterns, the canal depicted in Fig. 3 can be taken as an example. It
is the D93 secondary canal as indicated in Fig. 1. Fig. 3 shows that
the migrant ‘camps’ are located along the canal, while local villages
are located along the natural drains. In contrast to many other
cases, there is no ‘camp’ along the main road, but the settler habitations are at some distance from the main road. This has to do
with (a) the relatively late settlement of this canal area (from
1979 to 1980) and unwillingness of local large landowners owning
large tracts in the head end area, to part with their land having
seen its potential profitability elsewhere, and (b) the brokerage
networks that facilitated the land deals were most accessible to
settler farmers for land located in the middle part of the canal,
where the main ‘camps’ were thus established. During the 1991–
1992 fieldwork in this canal irrigation was concentrated in the
middle part, with the head part yet hardly developed for irrigation,
and the tail part already struggling to secure access to sufficient
irrigation water for even ‘light’ crops like sorghum and millet.
Fifteen years later when the canal was revisited, the scenario
had changed. Land development for irrigation in the head end region by local farmers had significantly expanded, implying water
supply problems for the middle part, and irrigation having been
abandoned in the tail end part.
This example suggests two general points. The first is that locational advantage is definitely an important factor in explaining patterns of irrigation distribution, but several other factors may be at
play simultaneously that generate other spatial patterns than simple head–tail sequences. Secondly, though a particular pattern of
unequal distribution is apparently reproduced almost identically
from season to season, and year to year, there seems to be a longue
durée of locational advantage ‘coming through’. Qualitative observations of longer term shifting of head and tail locations in the
1991–2007 period in a number of canals strongly suggests that
there is a slow water/irrigation concentration process happening
at all levels of the canal system in the sense of movement towards
geographical head ends.23
The third and last instance of spatial patterning is at the level of
local units of irrigation and the spread of ‘large’ and ‘small’ farmers.
An example of the typical pattern is given in Fig. 4 (the unit depicted in Fig. 4 is the Bhatta outlet in Fig. 3).
23
This conclusion is based on unpublished fieldwork.
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P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
Fig. 4. Cropping pattern (A), categories of farmers (B) and year of land development (C) in a Tungabhadra LBC local irrigation unit (pipe outlet command area) kharif season
1991.
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j.geoforum.2013.05.011
P.P. Mollinga / Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
In these three maps, the canal water source is the secondary canal, with the settler ‘camp’ located in the head end (with the outlet
structure right in between the houses) and the local village in the
tail end of this 64 ha unit. Rice and cotton are the most remunerative commercial crops, with rice being a water intensive crop. They
are grown mostly in the upstream part of the unit. Lighter crops
(notably sorghum and sunflower) requiring less water are primarily grown in the downstream part of the unit.
A typology of farming household-enterprises was prepared
using a qualitative version of Patnaik’s labour exploitation ratio.24
In the second map it can be clearly seen that the upstream rice and
cotton crops are mostly grown by rich and middle peasants, while
the downstream lighter crops are mostly grown by small and poor
peasants. Most of the upstream farmers are settler farmers; most
of the downstream farmers are local farmers. A glimpse of the process that produced this differentiation can be seen in the third
map, which gives the years in which the different plots were developed for irrigation (which involved land levelling and constructing of
field bunds and field channels). Land development in this unit began
with the arrival of settler farmers in 1979–1980, in the head end of
the unit, and gradually moved downstream, up to a point and moment that water availability in the tail end portion became too constrained to warrant land development investment. The first and third
map also show that in places where water could be picked up from
neighbouring units or drainage channels, land development also
took place.
5. Conclusion
The analysis above has established, firstly, that large-scale surface irrigation processes are hydrosocial in character indeed, with
physical and human aspects internally related. By building largescale irrigation systems as part of state projects of economic development, governments attempt to ‘singularise’ the meaning of river
water to its value for agricultural production, by storage in reservoirs and diversion in hierarchically ordered canals, thus rearranging the hydrological cycle in time and space, making it an explicit
hydrosocial cycle. Crucial in this attempt is the deployment of
technology, as dam and canal infrastructure. The paper has shown
how different infrastructural design characteristics of so called
protective irrigation in south India configure a pattern of water distribution that is equal in principle but unequal in practice. The
starkly unequal pattern of water distribution in protective irrigation systems is produced in social practices configured by the
rhythms of the climate and the agricultural seasons, while the social differentiation of peasant farmers associated with unequal
water distribution takes spatial forms, structured by the grid of
the different levels of canals. The different materialities of water
management involved in the production of unequal distribution
do not just constitute the stage and context of social process, but
they are the subject of social interaction and reshaping too: irrigation devices like outlets are remodelled in the episodic distribution
struggles between and among irrigators and government managers; the agricultural seasons of the rainfall cycle are reconfigured
by the definition of irrigation seasons through scheduled canal
water releases and the choice of crop varieties with different
lengths of their growing periods; the spatial grid of canals constituting locational advantage and hydraulically defined queues is reshaped by realigning canals, and re-use of water in drainage
channels by diversion or lifting. The general point for hydrosocial
analysis is that conceptualising hydrosocial relations not only
involves the materialities of water as substance and of the
24
The ratio is the balance between net labour hired in (labour hired in minus labour
hired out) and family in self-employment (see Patnaik, 1987, chapter 3)
11
landscapes that water flows through, but significantly also the
technical infrastructure that facilitates flow, in all its technical
specificity. Approaches that theorise the social dimensions of technology can usefully be added to and integrated with the political
ecology inspired hydrosocial conceptual repertoire.
Secondly, it has been shown that the process of the transformation of these hydrosocial relations is a process of cyclical (in the
sense of episodic) structural elaboration in Archer’s (1995) sense:
structure-agency dynamics is animating the hydrosocial irrigation
cycle as a morphogenetic cycle. Notwithstanding the detailed articulation and legalisation of a form of land-use planning and water
rationing called localisation, the effort at state rule to ‘discipline
its subjects’ into irrigation practices that maximise the common
good, was unsuccessful. It failed because it contradicted individual
farmers’ intensification and maximisation strategies on given sizes
of farm land, because in the 1960s government allowed intensification under the ‘grow more food’ logic in an incompletely developed
irrigation system, and because under competitive populism the larger farmers appropriating excess water are the local leaders that
control the ‘vote banks’ of a parliamentarian’s constituency. Given
the technical design characteristics of protective irrigation, appropriation of water for intensive rice production, as happened in the
Tungabhadra LBC, led to a dramatically skewed pattern of distribution, with the ‘favoured area’ of intensive water use slowly concentrating in the geographical ‘head ends’ of the different canal system
levels, a clear example, in Archer’s (1995) terms, of the structural
elaboration that is part of morphogenesis. However, the rise of a
powerful class of larger farmers colluding with Irrigation Department managers and local politicians, has not meant the end of government efforts at ‘irrigation reform’. These may even intensify
under neoliberal policy conditions. In the context of this paper’s
theoretical argument, this suggests that the structural elaboration
of the institutional arrangements of the hydrosocial cycle is never
completed. Hydrosocial relations of power within irrigation remain
contested, more so than critical analysis of large-scale irrigation as
the abode of green revolution capitalist farming tends to suggest.
Though there is no reason for excessive optimism as regards irrigation reform leading to more equitable water distribution, there are
definitely entry points for enhancing such efforts.
This analysis, finally, suggests the limitations of general, encompassing concepts like ‘hydrosocial relations’, ‘socio-technical systems’, and for that matter, ‘waterscapes’ (cf. Budds and Hinojosa,
2012). These conceptual hybrids do well to establish the point of
the need to look at the material and human aspect of natural resource management as the co-evolution of a single object, and to
‘reposition water as inherently political’ (Linton and Budds, this issue). Though neither of these insights is new, they definitely bear
repeating and elaboration. Once these points are accepted, need
arises for more specific conceptualisation to capture the different
hydrosocial mechanisms at work as emergent properties in complex systems like irrigation.
The different forms of queuing that are socio-technically/hydrosocially established as rotation schedules in ongoing, seasonal and
yearly negotiation (structural elaboration) processes, are the key
emergent property in explaining the inequality of water distribution. Other emergent properties ‘at work’ include the capacity to
produce high irrigated rice (and cotton) yields on vertisols – not
only requiring the establishment of economic incentives and networks, labour markets and other ‘social’ structures, but also the
structural elaboration of the landscape, soil and crop itself, by
knowledgeable, skilled and entrepreneurial agents. Additional
emergent properties are the spatially specific mechanism of social
differentiation of agricultural producers, the mechanisms for
reproducing political legitimacy/credibility of elected politicians
as shaped by the intersection of political constituencies and
hydraulic units, the interplay of caste hierarchy and local/migrant
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distinctions in cultural notions of dominance, the (poorly documented and understood) new ecological dynamics constituted by
the embedding of the irrigation system in the river basin and ecosystem, and many more.
Understanding complexity and emergence requires a conceptual vocabulary that captures specific instances of hydrosociality,
or, in an older vocabulary, that captures the ‘concentration of the
many determinations’ of the concrete (Marx, 1973). Without this,
analysis will not be able to move beyond the important but basic
point of showing that hydrosociality exists. It has been argued that
a combination of the emerging hydrosocial relations perspective
with Archer’s (1995) theorisation of structural elaboration in morphogenetic cycles and a social construction of technology approach, can form the basis of such specific and concrete analysis
of the dynamics of the hydrosocial cycle. Emphasis on morphogenesis/structural elaboration and mechanisms/emergent properties
in the theorisation of socio-technical/hydro-social irrigation processes as open, complex systems (or configurations) is a choice
for a critical realist ‘deep ontology’ (cf. Sayer, 1992). Other theorisations of irrigation have chosen, inspired by actor-network theory,
the analysis of hydro-social networks as their entry point (cf.
Wester, 2008). The ANT understanding of network is in my view
a version of a ‘flat’ ontology, and therefore flawed and not taken
up is this paper. However, the proof of such foundational puddings
lies in the practical adequacy of the concrete analyses they are able
to produce as part of the further development of hydrosocial
analysis.
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