 Yn ymlaen, dyna'n gweld i ofyn. Yn ymlaen gwaith fawr hon Caerdydd yn ni'n iawn, mae'r bwysig yn bwaith am Yn Ddylch wrth y Prifys Llywodraeth, a i ddweud y ddin i gynrych ar ôl gwant seith ynddyn nhw. Fy llyw iddynt i gweithwll? Dyma'r ddysgu'n gwybodaeth arall. Mae gweithio yna'n ei wneud eich mae'r bwysig yn chi'n gwneud. Peitr hefyd yn ystafell yn gwneud ar hwnna. ac mae'n mynd i'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r llyfr yng Nghymru. Mae'r ffordd yma yn ysgrifennu Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, ac mae'n gwybod, mae'n ffordd am ystod, yma'r amser yma'r amser, ac mae'n ddweud, mae'n profesor Richard Black. Mae'n rôl i'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno ac yn ymdweud i'r Pita. Felly, yna, profesor Ben Crowe yn ymdweud i'r Pita'n gweithio. Ben yn ymdweud i'r profesor o'r cyflwyno, os ymdweud i'n cyflwyno'r cyflwyno cyflwyno'r Cymru Cysiwyr Cylwbverfynuol Cymru. Felly, yma, mae'n gweithio yn ymdweud. Mae'n meddwl i'r colluminad i'ch meddwl i pob tyfn o'r cyflwyno, o'r llyfr yng Nghymiad, rhannu a'r rhoi gyfan, yn ymdweud i'r Gan Gyll, yng Nghymru Gweithol Cymru, yng Nghymru Chlywau, ac ynghylch Gweithiau Gymdeinhael. Ynod eich reall, mae'n gwybod a'r dynnu a wnaeth gyda'r cyfnodd cyfnodd maen nhw i gwybod yn gweithio fewn iawn i gael gweithio ffyrdd yma. Rwy'n oed o'i amser y universitylig, Danford ac UC Berkeley i gyda'r UC Santa Cruz, ac rwy'n gofio i'r pethau pobl ymlaenus yn Bwysig-Pakistan, Bangla Desch, dyfu'r llunyddion i London a'r enghreifft i'r Cynu, iddyn nhw i ddweud i'r bwysig. Felly, yw Peter yn ymdillogu'n ymdillogu, profesián Francis Cleaver yn ymdillogu'r ddondigol. Francis's work focuses on the governance of water and other natural resources and the delivery of services at the local level, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. She's interested in how institutions work and has developed the concept of institutional bricolage to explain this. Francis started her professional life in health service management in Britain and in Zimbabwe. During her academic career, she has worked at Bradford, SOAS, King's and is currently a professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield. It's a great pleasure to welcome you back, Francis. We're very grateful to both Ben and Francis for being part of this evening's event. After the event, please join us for the drinks reception upstairs in the Brunei suite. Two final points. First of all, I'm asked to remind you where the fire exits are on either side in case the alarm sounds. If it does sound, please leave the building calmly. It will not be a practice. And finally, I'm sure I hope that many of you will wish to tweet during the lecture, but just so it's not too annoying for those who are not in the Twitter sphere, please could you make sure that your mobile phone is on silent? So now to introduce Professor Malinga, I will pass over to Professor Crane. Thank you. Good evening. It's an honour to introduce Peter Malinga and his work. His contributions to knowledge and a changing social order are wide-ranging, carefully considered and profound. Peter, as most of you know, studies water and development. Access to water enables life and livelihood. In large parts of the world, inequalities in access to water can be as important as inequalities in income, wealth and land. Those with irrigation water, for example, may prosper. Those without may be set on a path toward deprivation and dispossession. And water management may play a formative role in development or social change. But one of the things Peter has done is contribute to a growing recognition of the importance, the political centrality, the contestation around water. So, not long ago, in the academy as well as in technical and policy circles, water was seen as simply a technical issue. Peter has been part of a movement which, at least in the academy, has changed that so that there's a recognition that water resources have profound consequences for the shape of society and the lives of its citizens. In a frequently noted image, water flows uphill to money. So Peter's work pushes forward from this shift from technical to political to pioneer interdisciplinary approaches attentive to the consequences for different classes, women and men and ethnicity. He is working with others to build a field and a community of critical water studies that recognises and acts with knowledge of the mutual shaping of water and society. I want to divide, I think it's helpful for this unusual character to divide his work into two modes. So, and he's very effective in both. The first mode is institution building. Wherever he goes, and perhaps I shouldn't say this at size, he builds institutions and initiates change. In the second mode, Peter turns his considerable intellectual energy to bring the work of several disciplines and professions into conversation and to build theoretical frameworks toward a field of critical water studies. I will seek to talk in this introduction about both modes, but I will say a little more about the first. Before doing that, I want to sketch Peter's educational pathway, as is traditional in such talks, and the places where he has been employed. So, as you heard, his most recent educational attainment was a habilitation in 2009 in Bonn University in Germany. I was unsure what a habilitation was, so I consulted Wikipedia, a level of scholarship considerably higher than that required for a research PhD. So, I think that's pretty good. Prior to that, Peter earned a PhD in 1998 from Wageningen University in the Netherlands on the political economy of canal irrigation management and a masters and bachelors in tropical land and water engineering also at Wageningen. And his employment. Before becoming in 2010, Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, he worked for six years as a senior researcher at the Centre for Development Research at Bonn Germany, ten years as assistant then associate professor at Wageningen University, three years doing his PhD research at Wageningen, and the bit where I meet him, he spent a year in 1988 to 89 as a visiting researcher at the Open University. And at least three people here, Professor Weald, Professor Bernstein and myself, knew him at that time as an energetic researcher eager to study new fields of political economy and philosophy. So, let me talk about the first mode of his work, which I call institution building. Peter is somewhat distinguished amongst academics, though he wouldn't like me to say this. Many of us have dreams of making the world a better place. Peter is in that small and distinguished group that manages to make elements of such dreams become reality. He first brought about reform at Wageningen University. He worked with others to reform water engineering curricula across four countries in South Asia. And he built a collaborative online journal aiming to create a global knowledge community crossing the divides of academia and the professional and policy words. Let me say a word or two about the work, the changes he brought at Wageningen. And for an overview of what Peter achieved, I turn to Professor Lyndon Vincent, who I believe is also here. And she tells me that Peter helped develop new lines of interdisciplinary study and helped reshape the irrigation group from a practical technical group into a research group and helped to get that accepted into new university research structures. And his old professor likes to acknowledge that Peter played a significant role in what has become known as the Wageningen approach to irrigation studies. In retrospect, Peter recognises that the reform of irrigation teaching and research at Wageningen was the beginning of a larger project that is now coming to fruition. In an email to me, he noted that helping to build an epistemic community for critical water studies started for me in the early 1980s with the transformation of the Wageningen engineering department to something else. First through changing the curriculum, then by new research. So, as an undergraduate student, part of a student group or several student groups rethinking the goals of education and society, Peter laid the seeds of a collaborative community reformulating research teaching and practice on water. Then in the early 1990s, as he was completing field research for his PhD, Peter started to build a South Asian organisation to expand interdisciplinary research and teaching on water resources management with a particular focus on gender. At this time, as elsewhere, engineering and water resource management were the domain particularly of men and their training was focused on technical questions. The South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resource Studies known as Sacky Waters that Peter started aimed to change that. It was a consortium of scholars and universities collaborating to reform water study programmes. I turned for more information about Sacky Waters to Professor Janakarajan of the Madras Institute of Development Studies. He is now the president of the governing board of Sacky Waters, an institution that is still growing several years after Peter left the organisation. Janakarajan says Peter Mollinger possesses certain extraordinary abilities including those of an institution builder. He converted his PhD project field office in Hyderabad into an organisation with a huge vision that none of us could see at that time. Sacky Waters' focus was to bring about structural change and a paradigm shift in South Asia's water resources management and strategies. One of the BRICA projects of Sacky Waters aimed to rebuild regional capacities on integrated water resources management in South Asia with agenda focus. This project was a big success. This is still Janakarajan talking with impact in all the partner countries in South Asia. Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and India. That project is now entering a third phase. Janakarajan says thanks to the seeds sown by Peter the organisation has grown much bigger and has been carrying out research, teaching and advocacy with more confidence now. Our funding partners include DFID, IDRC, the World Bank, Argym, India, WaterAid, SCAN and so forth. I also asked a distinguished professor of agricultural engineering in Sri Lanka, Professor Nimal Gunawadana. He too added to this story of really quite impressive change. The programme trained, for example, 184 master students and 15 PhD students in the four countries. More than 80% of graduating students were female. Research conducted by these South Asia water fellows has contributed to the resolution of many water sectors issues in their countries. The four universities in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka recognise the significance of the postgraduate programme that had been built and have all incorporated it into their curriculum. So Peter has made a lasting contribution to higher education in our four universities. Okay, I want to reflect or ask you to reflect for a moment. This work was beginning as Peter was finishing his PhD. Not bad, huh? A graduate student shifting to use lessons from his research immediately into effective institution building. I think it's impressive, but I want to ask a question. How much of this work depended upon being a foreigner with support from the aid and development machine? I think this probably matters, but as a famous social theorist once said or almost said, we make history not in circumstances of our own choosing. Then Peter went on from this to build what has become an established reputable online journal. Ten years later he gathered a triad of academics from Europe and the US to start Water Alternatives. Since 2008 it's published 24 issues. In its nine years Water Alternatives articles have been downloaded two million times. I've not found comparators for this metric of uptake from another journal, but my guess is that this bears comparison with some well established journals. The manifesto in the first issue says it's meant to provide space for creative and free thinking on water, fostering debate, elisting in innovative alternatives, promoting original analysis and constructive critiques. One of Peter's co-editors, Professor Ruth Meinzen-Dick, wrote in an email that she was impressed by Peter's insightful reading of papers, always looking to push the frontiers of insights, but also promoting carefully grounded empirical work from all over the world. In fact, the reach of the journal is very considerable. Papers have been contributed for many countries in the world, and on its website you can see a fascinating interactive map which shows the geographic focus of journal articles, they're grouped into different headings and exactly where they happen. So let me move into the second mode of Peter's work, scholarly work. He's published at least five co-authored books, 29 book chapters, 25 articles and 23 monographs. The great majority of these publications break conceptual ground with a clarity and rigor that few social scientists match. For brevity I focus briefly on three papers in two fields. I will not talk about his very interesting methodological innovations, his work in Uzbekistan, nor his influence on large bodies of very smart students, including those at SOAS. So the first field was framing a field of critical water studies in the context of the idea that water is political. I have noted Peter's advocacy for and work on this slogan, and I will focus on one very widely cited 2008 paper. In this, Peter identified five domains of water contestation as part of a political sociology of water resources management. There are four existing domains of scholarship, each with its own scales of space and time, each populated with different configurations of actors, different types of issues, modes of contestation and occurring in the context of different institutional arrangements. The four domains he thought he identified of existing of water scholarship, everyday water politics, national policy, interstate conflicts and the rise of global institutions and processes concerning water. Then a fifth domain that Peter effectively identified with this paper, one of how the previous four domains are linked. We can get a glimpse of the uptake of ideas across the disciplines from this paper with the range of journals citing the paper. Ecology and society, global policy, European environment, physics and chemistry of the earth, journal of political studies, journal of hydro informatics, journal of political ecology, several geographic journals and of course the mainstream journals of water research and policy. Then a second field of Peter's work, connections among social material questions, technology and management practices and the mutual constitution of infrastructure and rule. Peter was amongst the first to apply ideas from the emerging fields of sociology and history of science and technology to illuminate irrigation and water management. Combining this with insights from the philosophical approach of critical realism, his work has led into papers on how governance and class struggle are pursued through the construction and contestation of the technologies of canal irrigation and he's gone on to write very interesting papers on boundary concepts enabling reading across disciplines and professions. Peter sees this work informing the vexing question of how to influence the thinking of irrigation and water professionals. Facilitated by his coming to SOAS, Peter is now working on a third field, the cultural political economy of water. This field I hope will be illustrated at least partly by the talk he will give in a moment. These theoretical contributions build on case studies. I will mention two. One concerns the obstacles to equalising reform under capitalism. Through several papers, Peter has explored the realities of protective irrigation. From colonial rule to the present, governments of India have sought to spread irrigation to poor peasants as well as large farmers in order to prevent drought becoming famine. What Peter's empirical work shows, in practice these efforts have been overtaken by the accumulation of large farmers using lots of water to cultivate sugar, crane and other water intensive crops. In other words, the logics of capitalism are difficult to redirect. A second strand of empirical work illustrates Peter's fifth domain integrating the four prior domains of water studies. In a paper published in 2010 in the Journal of Agrarian Change, called Material Conditions of a Polarised Discourse, Clammers and Silences in Critical Analysis of Agricultural Water Use in India, he presents an extraordinary analysis, situating the failures of public debate and public policy and of mainstream and left wing analysis of irrigation governments. In the technologies arising from beginning with colonial rule and the simplicity is the reductionism of academic practice and public policy. This type of analysis would not have been possible without his prior field research and his synthesis of technical and social science understanding. So, I introduce an exemplary scholar and institutional builder for these times when water and society constitute growing elements of existential, economic, popular and governmental discussions. Many universities would be proud to have such a creative scholar. It reflects rather well on so has that it captured this significant scholar. So, I'm looking forward to, and I've missed out some critical comments. Never mind. Looking forward to his upcoming talk on a great topic, Peter is turning his analytic attention to social movements around the building of a contested canal and dam system in Western India. So, I introduce Peter. Thank you very much, Ben, Professor Crowe, for that. And I'm not totally... I look forward to hearing the critical questions later at the reception. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming. And it's a great honour to be here and talk to you. On the invitation for this event, it says that an inaugural is an occasion for a young professor to showcase his research. Well, I try to stay young at heart, but I'm neither young in age nor new at saw us. This is, in fact, my sixth year here. So, I thought I'd turn the invitation around and make this a lecture of an old professor on new research that he is planning to undertake. My inaugural lecture was originally scheduled three years ago, but had to be cancelled for tragic family reasons. I dedicate this lecture to Josmoy, a better field worker than I will ever be. May her name and her work be remembered. An inaugural is a good occasion for acknowledging intellectual debts. Here are my thank yous. I thank saw us not only for the privilege of working in this institution, but specifically for letting me enjoy the first sabbatical ever in my career last year in 2015. It brought me back to doing field work in India. I thank Ben Crowe, Henry Bernstein and Dave Weald for their incredible intellectual and personal generosity associated with the Development Policy and Practice Research Group at the Open University, a long time back in 88-89. Ben already mentioned it. I lived in North London at the time and wrote my PhD proposal largely here in the saw us library. And I thank them also for the intellectual and personal exchanges that followed. They shaped my career in a very profound way. I thank my colleagues at Wageningen University for the collective work and the politics of irrigation. Very happy Lynn and Vincent is here. I thank my former colleagues at ZEF, the Centre for Development Research in Bourne, for providing an environment that pushed my thinking on interdisciplinarity. My colleagues in the Development Studies Department here at saw us for inducing me to adopt a more explicit development studies framing of my research on water and my Centre for Water and Development colleagues for providing a forum at saw us to discuss and teach water issues. Ben Crow and Francis Cleaver, I thank for the willingness to be part of this event. I feel honoured by it. I hope our professional interaction and friendship will continue for many years. Most of all, however, I owe a debt to the almost 30 PhD students that I have had the privilege to supervise and co-supervise since the late 1990s. The interactions with them have undoubtedly been the strongest force in the development of my thinking. Two business now. I'll now say something about water and development in general first and then briefly discuss the Sardar Sarawadam as an introduction to a longer story on what's happening downstream of the dam. And I'll conclude with two broader issues. One reason that water is such a fascinating topic is that we all have a very personal relationship with it. Water is life's mater and matrix, mother and medium. One's very beautifully wrote a Hungarian biochemist. The metaphor that water is life is used widely in advocacy against the privatisation of water in the formal public water provision sector and it is also documented through academic work as a field level farmer perception. However, given what the world is like we should perhaps not be surprised to find the ANC advocating water privatisation in South Africa to discover pharmaceuticals in Washington D.C.'s public water supply and to realise that the water is life farmers from coreism live right next to what remains of the RLC in Central Asia. There is also a lot of dramatic if not alarmist discourse. On the economic front we have declarations that there may not be enough water to feed the planet while on the political front we have the regularly reported mantra of the threat of 24th century water wars. Even a news agency like the BBC puts on its web page that the world will run out of water. I hope you're not disappointed to hear that the world will not run out of water. In fact the amount of fresh water on the planet is very constant and as long as the sun keeps shining it will go round and round and round in every yearly hydrological cycle. Nations do not go to war over water there is really no evidence for that and there is enough water to feed the planet particularly if we would all become vegetarians which would probably be a good thing anyway. What such sweeping, evocative and emotive statements do is to distract our attention and analytical gaze away from the complexities and contradictions associated with fresh water use, management and governance. There is of course plenty of damaging conflict, deprivation, climatic disturbance, disease, degradation and let's not forget it, development associated with the way we use water in modern society. For me it is part of our task as academics to critique the simplifying and essentialising statements that are so pervasive in public discourse and political practice and avoid that they become analytical reductionisms. As a student of south and central Asian large canal irrigation there are a few pertinent essentialisms to deal with. On the mainstream side of public debate and government practice there is the absolute conviction that harnessing of rivers for high external input agriculture is the quintessence of nation building, modernisation and development. On the critical side of public discourse and political practice the dams built to harness the rivers are considered a curse of our time. Green revolution, agriculture, a threat to the world's ecology and large-scale infrastructure a pernicious form of domination. Near-roof versus Gandhi the state versus the community modernity versus tradition big is beautiful versus small is beautiful. I tend to side with Donald Atwood a scholar of Maharashtra's colonial irrigation history. He provocatively suggests that big is wasteful and small is deadly meaning that we are all well advised to think beyond the comfort zone of a binary world view. I believe and that's my take-home message I guess of today I believe that conducting debate and analysis in binary terms deprives us of the possibility of breaking political deadlocks and finding useful practical and transformative ways forward. To explore the veracity of that belief the Sardarsarava project provides an excellent case. Before coming to the Sardarsarava project in detail let me say something about canal irrigation studies more generally given that it is not very much in the academic limelight at present. Irrigation has sparked the imagination of many a social scientist not in the least because it has been an infrastructural technology that has supported whole societies and nations from Mesopotamia to the present and has found place and popularity under very different political regimes including the capitalist America and West and Communist Central Asia. It has been associated with colonial commercial estate agriculture different forms of bureaucratic governance as well as theocratic governance be it by Mormons in Utah or Hindu priests in Bali. Here are three examples. The Japanese economist Shigeru Ishikawa developed the theory of irrigation as a leading input in Asian rice agriculture extended later by James Boyce to water control as a leading input. Ishikawa suggests that the long-term historical evolution of the productivity of rice has moved in steps or phases marked by qualitative jumps in water control technology. The full water control that is part of the green revolution is the pinnacle of this development after which irrigation in Ishikawa stopped being a technological constraint. That is somewhat too optimistic I would say but the historical analysis shows how irrigation can reduce agricultural risk associated with monsoon rainfall regimes allows area extension through double cropping and facilitates intensification of agriculture and thus can be key to agricultural growth. Political economists have added to this the typical development studies questions of benefits distribution. Who gets how much, how, when and where? The issues of uneven development and unequal distribution of resources in this case water and the related social differentiation. Carl Wittvogel is best known for his sweeping theory about Oriental despotism, a state form that in his view is premised on the centralized building and control of irrigation infrastructure suggesting that the Asiatic mode of production as he says uses it is characterized by hydraulic society. Societies. Wittvogel's thesis was very quickly and very thoroughly criticized. In India it was declared profoundly meaningless by the Marxist historian Kossambi right in 1957, the year of its publication. Notwithstanding this critical reception Wittvogel's book has sparked a lot of research notably in the fields of anthropology and archaeology. More recently Neo Wittvogelian work has emerged in environmental history and political ecology following Daniel Worster's 1985 book Rivers of Empire, Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West which adapts Wittvogel's thesis to capitalist conditions. The reason I continue to go back to Wittvogel is that his basic intuition rings true. There is something about power, politics and large scale infrastructure. Infrastructure is a form of logistical power as Chandramukraji puts it. Thirdly the anthropologist Clifford Geerts has famously analyzed the Balinese state and irrigation society, organized around the Subak. It was later extended by Stephen Lansing. From an irrigation perspective what is interesting is that in Bali the temple priests are the main water managers and that the coherence of the water management system and agroecological management more generally is reproduced through religious ritual. It is a powerful reminder that the political economy is always also a cultural political economy. One of the wonderful things about studying canal irrigation is that it is so researchable. Its everyday politics happens outdoors in the public sphere and is easily accessible. The basic methodological rule for irrigation research is find a canal, follow the water upstream and downstream in daytime and in nighttime and follow the actors that you meet. Be they farmers, laborers, government officials, politicians or traders and commission agents. All quite feasible and you get a lot of healthy exercise in the process. Let me move to the third part. Some of you may have come to this lecture because of the Sardosarawar name in the title. The Sardosarawar Dam in the Narmada River in West India has been a very important dam in the large dams debate both nationally in India and internationally. The Sardosarawar Dam is located at the border of the states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The dam itself is within Gujarat. The upstream lake and valley is mostly in Madhya Pradesh. The Sardosarawar Dam is just one of the many dams that is planned in the Narmada village to be built by Madhya Pradesh state. When you look at the map, you can see what the Gujarat government wants to do with the dam. The Narmada River, the map on the top left. The Narmada River enters Gujarat in the south of the state. There is only a short distance between that entry point and the sea. In the eyes of planners and engineers, a lot of water was going waste to the sea. Idea, when we build a dam and make it as high as possible, we can divert the river north and provide a large part of Gujarat with water and even a small part of Rajasthan to have some more agriculture and people at the border with Pakistan. When you go from east to west and south to north in Gujarat, rainfall reduces. One moves from relatively high rainfall areas to the semi-arid and finally arid areas of North Gujarat, Sarashtra, Kach and Rajasthan. The higher the dam, the further you can push the water into Gujarat by gravity flow. It took decades to negotiate the allocation of water across the states involved. After agreement on interstate allocation in 1979, a final design of the downstream system of canals in Gujarat was made in the early 1980s. The 1989 book in which the planning philosophy and design was published was called Planning for Prosperity. While in the early period after independence dams had been built largely unopposed by the early 1980s an environmental movement had grown, the plans for dam building does received opposition, first primarily concerned with the ecological consequences forest and river hydrology and with the displacement of people living in villages in the upstream submerged area, among which were many tribal groups. While initially the movement was mainly about getting good resettiment and rehabilitation packages, it soon acquired a much broader scope and agenda. The dam became an example and symbol of modern industrial development which was considered highly destructive and undesirable. Stopping dam building became the aim of the movement. The fact that the dam building was financially supported by the World Bank gave the issue an international dimension. International NGOs became involved, the World Bank commissioned an independent review of the ecological and social impacts of the dam which was pretty damaging for the dam. The World Bank felt forced to withdraw from the project in 1993. The resistance against the dam building continued and finally was taken to the Supreme Court in India which decided in 2000 that the dam could continue to be built with the final decision in 2006. Apart from the issue whether to build or not, the conflict over the Saradah Sarawadam has shaped new law and rulemaking over rehabilitation and resettlement as well as land acquisition struggle on which is ongoing. It also did a lot to give visibility to the plight of tribals, adivasis in India. Next to national significance, the anti-dam struggle had great international significance as well. It was the first project from which the World Bank withdrew. It triggered new internal accountability procedures within the bank and it was an important trigger for the establishment of the World Commission on Dams as there was not only opposition to dams in India but in many other places as well. I will return to the politics of dams at the end of the lecture but for now I observe that despite the vehement protest and the institutional changes nationally and internationally that it triggered, the dam got built as planned. Since August 2002, water is flowing in the canals and that's where I move now to downstream of the dam. To understand what's happening downstream of the dam it's useful to look at the 1980s plan. The Saradah Sarawad project was designed at a time that water for agriculture, that is irrigation, was still the dominant policy concern. There was significant hydropower generation part of the project as you would expect with such a huge dam and there was an urban water supply component but it is very clear that agricultural development was the main concern. In its design principle the SSP, Saradah Sarawad project, is a so-called protective irrigation system. Ben already mentioned the word. One of the largest built in India aiming to cover 1.8 million hectares. Protective irrigation is a concept that emerged in the second half of the 19th century as part of colonial irrigation policy. It was the counterpart of productive irrigation. Productive irrigation aimed simply put to maximise revenue collection and cash crop production. Protective irrigation served a different purpose. It was meant to protect farmers against crop failure and thus prevent famine and political unrest. Protection was achieved by spreading water thinly over as large an area as possible. A little bit of water for everyone so that crops would not fail even in years of low rainfall. But not enough water for maximising crop growth. After independence this design principle remained in place and a large number of protective irrigation systems were constructed in independent India. From 9.7 million hectares in 1950 canal irrigation expanded to 25.3 million hectares in 1985. The justifying logic had changed however. Famine protection and avoiding political unrest were replaced by poverty alleviation and rural development. The rate of return on investment in protective irrigation is lower than in productive irrigation as spreading water means longer canals and thus a more expensive system with lower yields per unit area. However, this is seen to be compensated by the larger social value of such a project. In the 1970s and 1980s Indian economists like Bedi Davan and others argued that protective irrigation made a larger contribution to the national economy than productive irrigation through larger total output and more employment generation. This is exactly how the Sardosauva project had been designed, has been designed. Both the government of Gujarat and the World Bank when it was still involved accepted a lower rate of return because of the social value of the project. The social value consideration is the basis on which engineers and planners argue their view that projects like SSP contribute to national unity, growth of the Indian economy and the like. For them, it justifies the sacrifices related to submerged mergins and displacement. In terms of spreading water thinly, the 1980... What is this? It's not correct. In terms of spreading water thinly, the 1980s design provides in my calculation for roughly 400 millimeters, that's about 40 centimeters, of water available for crop growth at the plot level. You will have to believe me that that is not a lot in a tropical climate and a typical protective design parameter. To compare full growth of rice or sugar cane requires, say, three times as much, cotton twice as much and wheat, sorghum and millet one and a half to two times as much. More than the actual numbers, the implications of this are important. The major implication of protective design is that in protective irrigation water needs to be rationed. You concretely, on the canal, every day again have to convince farmers to take less water than would optimize the growth of their crops and convince or force them to let this water flow further down into their fellow farmers. In protective irrigation, day-to-day water distribution thus requires an institutional arrangement for rationing. There is now over 100 years of experience with different types of efforts to accomplish this rationing and thin spreading of water. The upshot is that a working method for it has not been found. It has proven impossible to limit water used by farmers to protective levels. Farmers, when they can, both and thereby income. Not very surprising perhaps. Much more surprising is that still in the late 1980s, when these problems were well known and well documented, the SSP planners seem to have had unquestioned confidence in a scientific approach to rationing. Scientific is the code word that irrigation engineers and planners use when they mean to say politicians should not mingle in water management. Just as experts. And indeed to their credit, that is what many of them try to do much of the time when they manage the canals. Water distribution is in practice indeed subverted by political interference as the planners and engineers would put it all the time. Now let's look at what happened practically after the water started to be released into the Narmada canal in 2002. Many things happened that were not anticipated in the design and planning. Between design and water release, Indian society's priorities have changed and water for agriculture is not the only concern anymore. As I already mentioned, the urban water supply company was barely detailed in the original design. 67% of available water was reserved for it without further discussion. The 1980s and 1990s were however, the period of the groundwater boom, the exhaustion of easily accessible fresh groundwater for drinking water, and in coastal Sarashtra and Cach groundwater salinisation. In the 1990s, a big drinking water pipeline in scheme, the Narmada pipeline project has been designed and accepted using Narmada waters to supply the majority of Gujarat villages and towns with piped water, sorry. It involves about 2,700 km of pipelines, a large part of which has been constructed as you can see emerge on this map. You can see in this slide that the drinking water pipeline scheme is designed in similar fashion as the canal system, starting from a single source supplying all the corners of Gujarat to be centrally managed. Though called the drinking water scheme, the pipeline water is not only for drinking, it is more broadly domestic water with health and productive dimensions as well. Most importantly, it is also for industrial use. But the coastal zone in the south, Sarashtra and Cach after the 2001 earthquake have seen significant industrial development requiring water. Large industry has become an important water stakeholder. Another thing that was not part of the original plan was this. The Sabamati River, which flows past Amdabad, the capsule of Gujarat, had become a waterscares degraded and polluted river declared the third most polluted river in India in 2010. The Narmada canal crosses the Sabamati river just north and upstream of the city. So it was decided to release Narmada canal water into the river to restore it, so called and develop this urban waterfront including marinas for boating as a modern urban middle class ideal. Cultural political economy indeed. This Narmada river water that had become urban and static and recreational water becomes agricultural water again when it is used downstream of Amdabad in two irrigation systems. Now carrying with it washed down pollution. These irrigation systems do not formally come under the Sarasawa project area. And that is another thing that was not planned. As long as there is plenty of water in the early phase of the project for anything. An unnamed top official says here at the time when the Narmada command area is not developed diverting Narmada waters to the non-command areas, the command area is the planned irrigated area and allowing farm sorry, diverting Narmada waters to the non-command areas and allowing farmers to siphon out waters free of cost were the best possible option before the government in the interest of Gujarat. I call this illegal but the farmers are gaining. It is helping agricultural output remains stable. We see nothing wrong in this. Why is there plenty of water at the moment? For two reasons. The first is that Majapredes has not built the upstream dam so there is a lot of water available for the Sarasawa dam and therefore Gujarat. The second reason is that to irrigate the whole 1.8 million hectares 74,000 kilometers of canals larger and smaller canals have to be built to bring water to farmers. It will take in all likelihood several decades before the system is complete. With the main canal completed and in full flow but the command area only partially completed there is plenty of water. Though the top officials are nothing wrong in it, this way of commissioning the system carries some grave dangers. Engineers are in the habit of working from top to bottom. First you complete the dam, then the main canal then the branch canal and so on to the farmer level. This means that those at the top at the top end get water first and those further down have to wait because their part of the canal system is not yet completed. Looking at the map of Gujarat and the alignment of the main canal the red line it can be pointed out that the districts that are getting water first are the most affluent and culturally prosperous districts of Gujarat. The very upstream area Vadodara Baruch Keira district is a relatively high rainfall area that is the home of the Amulderri cooperative headquartered in Anna. The area around Amdabad and Masona district roughly in the middle about the white place in the yellow part so I hope you can see it is the main area of the groundwater irrigation boom of the 1980s and 90s continuing still today with very capital intensive farming and only after that come the drier and poorer areas of the state like Sorastra and Cach. Is this only a temporal or temporary inequity? Probably not. When the experience of other protective irrigation systems is and a guide what is likely to happen is that the upstream areas will appropriate more water than they are entitled to according to the plan to intensify their agriculture and that these appropriation de facto right. Once an intensive use pattern has been established that uses above entitlement water it will be very difficult to reverse that. The protective design characteristic is important here. The establishment of water intensive use patterns directly translates into deprivation of downstream areas which however will only become visible by the time the canals in the downstream areas are getting completed. Then let's zoom in further to the local level of the canals itself and see what is happening there. Farmers are very eager to use the water that is now flowing and are very impatient with the government constructing the canals or not constructing the canals rather. They do not sit and wait for the farmer, for the water to come but actively appropriated by indiscriminate siphoning and pumping from the canals. Most of this is done with diesel pumps a practice that is formally illegal. This is what it looks like. I have never seen so many diesel pumps in a single day as in my field visits last year. What's basically happening here is a scramble for water. Those who have the money buy diesel pumps and lift water from canals sometimes conveying it over several kilometres. On the positive side the urgency of farmers to use the water has also led to the first innovation. The first innovation in field level irrigation delivery technology in India since about 70 or 80 years with research and lobbying support from Tushar Shah's Imitata Group at Anand. Rather than open surface minor canals the lowest level which is the lowest level in the hierarchy of canals experimentation is going on with pipelining as it is called. Instead of an open channel with off takes you have a series of chambers connected by underground pipes. This is what it looks like. This innovation has potential advantages of virtually no land having to be sacrificed unlike in the case of open channels. Lower maintenance cost reduced leakage and seepage and potentially easy operation. There are challenges in socially embedding this technology as always but nevertheless it remains a very interesting innovation. The more important point for this lecture is that when farmers are given the space they will happily co-design the infrastructure and come up with interesting and useful ideas. This pipelining is basically a translation of farmer develop technology for tubal irrigation into canal irrigation. As the last element of my downstream of the dam story I want to look at which farmers are running away with the water so to speak. The left side picture is the whole farm of a farming household owning about half an acre with some irrigation of fodder crops to feed the buffalo that gives milk. The farmer irrigates with canal water which has made farming easier and cheaper for him. Wage labour on other farms and outside agriculture is a necessity for this household. The right picture is an affluent farmer in this region with several acres of open air horticulture irrigated with a tube well and drip installation. The farmer mainly benefits from the rising groundwater table that is the result of the new canal irrigation. In this relatively water ridge you can see it's pretty green there in this relatively water ridge in this relatively water ridge region with on average relatively small land holdings we can expect the new canal irrigation to benefit many or most farmers intensifying already intensive cultivation practices. The groundwater tube well boom area the second area down the line so to speak is a rather different area and one with highly entrepreneurial farmers. Farmers here groundwater mining has gone on for a few decades with wells now at 700 feet or 200 meters. Large deep larger farmers have invested their surpluses outside the agricultural sector and in the education of their children. This is an area of heavy migration to the US. The Narmada canal water brings a new impetus to agriculture and accumulation. The picture you see is of an intensive horticultural farm established by someone who returned from the US to this farm and now produces cucumbers for the deli market. It was claimed it was the largest greenhouse in the area. The farmer we see in the top left and then we move to the drier one of the poorer areas. The farmer we see in the top left picture is a farmer in the dry area of Sarashtra. You can see that the landscape is quite barren here. It is an area known for its poverty and exploitative social relations. In fact this farmer told us that there are many relations that resemble bonded labour. Land holdings are generally big here, sometimes huge, as is often the case in low rainfall areas. The farmer was irrigating for the first year and was trying out what irrigation would do to his castor oil crop. Left is with irrigation, right is without. You don't have to be an agronomist to see the difference. An interesting aside is that this farmer insisted he was going to be an organic farmer. He had invested 10 lakh, 1 million rupees in a drip irrigation installation and was pumping water from the canal. His main cash crop is Jira Cumin, the yield of which he expected to triple with irrigation. The bottom farmer is even bigger. He is in fact a businessman also doing agriculture and partly returning to it now there is a new water supply. He invested 35 lakhs, 3.5 million rupees in a drip irrigation installation. The drip irrigation business is booming in this region with the new water coming. In this region, big shot like these two will take the lead in pioneering farming with canal irrigation. When their expectations prove to be correct there will be a quantum jump in their production and incomes at least for some time and huge impact for the regional economy. This catch is obviously realistic and simplified one but it does suggest I hope that the pattern of agrarian development accumulation and differentiation that is starting to happen as a result of canal irrigation will be quite variable from region to region. Depending on existing agrarian relations and agroecological conditions the new water will undoubtedly give a great boost to agriculture production and overall make it more secure but it is likely to be a highly uneven pattern of development. In this last section of the lecture I want to discuss two broader issues. The first broader issue is whether we are forced to choose between being for or against dams, for or against large scale irrigation infrastructure. Is it an either or question or are there other options? Looking at public and scholarly debates about dams and large irrigation systems one might easily think it is either or. There tend to be two sides equally adamant and you are with us or against us. However, there are other positions not only imagined ones but also concretely existing ones. I got interested in the Sardar Sarawar project in the 1990s through this publication by two activist scholars from Maharashtra. This book presents an alternative design for the Sardar Sarawar project. The starting point was if we can't stop the building of a dam would it be possible while spending the same amount of money to redesign the dam and the project in such a way that less damage is done that it brings more benefits particularly to the poorest areas of Sarawar and Cach and does so in a more sustainable manner notably in terms of energy use. What they propose is a lower dam reducing submergence and displacement substantially and to shift the emphasis of the water provision to the dry and poor areas of Sarawar and Cach. The main conceptual change in the design is that the large scale infrastructure is not implanted on the landscape as a new external system of conveyance to be centrally managed but exists to augment local storages to be managed locally and which makes maximum use of local streams and rivers for conveyance of water. I first studied this I thought what a super idea it makes technical sense it makes economic sense it makes social sense or human sense and it makes ecological sense what more do you want plus it is potentially acceptable to an establishment with some interest in ecological modernization I found it quite disturbing to find out subsequently that the proposal had gone nowhere politically speaking it is not interested but also the MBA, the SAVE Narmada movement chose not to take it on board and to continue to pursue the stopping of the dam building all together the orders tried again to put it on the agenda as recently as 2006 through a publication in the economic and political weekly but to no avail it hasn't captured the planning political or even the critical scholarly imagination I want to say two things about this first a point about political strategy in dam activism and development activism activism more generally the proposal by Parangepe and Joy stems from a concrete experience in Maharashtra with a different social movement also focusing on dams and dam evicties this movement takes a rather different position however both as regards dams and as regards political strategy this table is from a recent PhD by an Indian sociologist that compares the two movements as forms of subaltern politics where for the Maharashtrian movement large dams are ominous but maybe necessary in some places and small dams are definitely necessary for the MBA dams are ominous and hence they cannot be allowed one thing that is comparison this shows is that one can take different positions on dams and the related infrastructure also on the critical or radical side of the political spectrum the comparison also suggests that the Maharashtrian movement achieved more in practical material terms while being less successful ideationally meaning having had less plan off in terms of changing laws on rehabilitation and resettlements for instance and in shaping public debate in opinion with the MBA it is the other way around lot of ideational success no very little material success whether ideational gains offset abstaining from material gains is a moot question in any case there is clearly something beyond binary either or framings of dam and canal issues a second thing that can be said is that social science does not suffice to assess a proposal like that of Perangipae and Joy in that 2006 paper in EPW they summarized their proposal in a table you have to understand something about water and energy in technical terms to make sense of this table I suspect this is one of the reasons why proposals like this tend not to capture social science imagination and I think that is a great pretty when someone like me originally trained as an irrigation engineer can become a social scientist it should be possible that social scientists acquire the necessary technical knowledge and skill when that matters and in natural resource management situations it usually matters for thinking beyond biggest beautiful smallest beautiful binaries we need not only a social imagination as conventionally understood but as part of that also a technological and ecological imagination the second broader issue I would like to raise is the importance of agency and opportunity and change you may well have concluded that I have been telling a rather depressing story it all seems to be pretty gloomy on the economic, the political as well as the cultural front with the Sarasawa project one response to this might be yes stories of capitalist development are generally not very happy stories and that is certainly not untrue but I don't think it should be left at that I do find indeed that an enormous opportunity has been missed in the Sarasawa project as in many other irrigation systems but that does not mean that there are no opportunities left critical scholarship seems to have decided that there is not much of interest to be looked at here while we have bookshelves full of work on the dam conflict there is very little critical scholarship so far on the processes triggered by the water releases from the dam particularly for agriculture and rural issues that's very nice for me in a way because there is a research gap to be filled but it's not so nice when you happen to live in the Sarasawa project and you're trying to make something better out of it in fact there is a lot of space if not opportunity a major reason for that is that there is a management vacuum on the canals meaning that there is very little irrigation agency staff to manage water distribution this is a phenomenon that applies across India irrigation agencies have not been recruiting new staff for a long time and numbers in the field have been steadily and quite dramatically been going down this is exacerbated in because construction is the major preoccupation of the irrigation agency after all they need to construct 74,000 km of canal on the one hand this creates a kind of a wild west situation which I have sketched on the other hand it triggers all kinds of new ideas and initiatives including the technical innovation I mentioned I hope to be part of that process of discovery in the coming years by doing research and I hope the massive nature of the changes that are happening here will attract the interest of more critical scholars to conclude let me end on a lighter note and once again betray my engineering origins this picture was taken early 1983 when I was doing my first field research ever on small scale irrigation in the Senegal river valley combining the measurement of water levels in rice fields with the study of farmer rule making and implementation for water distribution it is still what I like to do most being in the field on the canals talking with farmers and others to round off my presentation I will give you a formula that perhaps summarises some of the work that I have done many if not all of you would know that the chemical formula for water is H2O isn't it well some of my Nepali water colleagues like to suggest that the correct formula of water is not actually H2O but is H2O P5 and what is the P stand for in this formula the P stands for people, profit, politics pollution and participation you can extend the list if you want and with that I rest my case I said it's my job I think to compliment Peter on his speech and to propose a vote of thanks but I'm not going to lose the chance of being up here on the podium to make a few comments you don't have to worry I know that people's thoughts are probably turning to the reception so I won't take long but I just wanted to make a couple of comments about in general about perhaps the usefulness of Peter's talk and his approach I think in the talk he illustrated very well that water is political and although it seems an obvious thing to say, water is political in so many dimensions that it's quite a challenge to investigate and understand that and I know that partly because Peter and I have been trying to put together an edited collection on the politics of water and it's taking us rather longer than it should do not least because of the numerous dimensions of water politics that we need to think about I think if we're critical scholars of water we also have to kind of grapple with the plurality involved in water and again I think Peter shurned that quite well in his talk for example he mentioned the different uses that the canal water could be put to not just the irrigation but the drinking water and the leisure, the waterfront and the industry and so on but of course we also have this multitude of actors and uses to which the water is put and also a variety of regulations and rules and norms and practices applied to the use and distribution of water so I think that sort of well touches on a challenge for critical water scholarship if you like I think Peter's also touched on you know one of our other big problems if you like which is trying to understand and deal with this uneven distribution or the uneven appropriation of water by upstreamers or downstreamers by large or small farmers across different sectors and for different uses and I think that's one thing that many of us working in critical water studies are very interested in and concerned with how these unequal distributions come about and indeed whether they can or cannot be changed there's many other issues I could talk about that have been raised by Peter's talk but what I did want to do was to use or abuse my last word here to take issue with him on a couple of things which I think he's missed out these are my interests I just wonder why Peter hasn't mentioned institutions and the role of institutions in shaping water distribution and management he did mention that there's a dearth of management on the irrigation system because the irrigation department doesn't have enough people in enough capacity but I wonder what other arrangements there are what other if you like cultural or political administrative social arrangements people are drawing on to justify their use of water to embed a new technology or a technological innovation and so on so I hope that some kind of work on the water institutions will also occur in this context and that makes me think of something as well where Peter also said he likes doing or working on canal irrigation is easy because you can walk down the canal and you follow the water you talk to the actors you can see the effects of arrangements on water use and so on I know he and I disagree on this point but I think that there's more to it than that I think actually that not all the processes that are going on are visible and that there's a need to study backstage practices the way decisions are made the way practices are formed most there at the water source or water supply but in households for example and other forum so I know we've talked about that before and that's something perhaps we disagree on but I think that it's an interesting dilemma for those of us working in the field studying water and its distribution is to really find an understanding of how that's come about the final interesting thing I thought Peter touched on but didn't elaborate on was what about households in this whole picture he gave us some examples really interesting examples of different kinds of farmers using water you know the small farmer just using water and growing crops for the buffalo and so on and said well of course this family still has to hire its own labour on the fields of others or hire out its labour and so on and then the wealthier farmers and so on but of course we know that farming practices rely on labour and often family labour we want to know more about who takes the decisions who gets the benefits who owns the land at household level and so on so I think there's indeed a very rich opportunity in this system for studying more in depth about how these distributions of water come about okay well enough of my reflections now I'll turn to what I should really be doing which is thanking Peter for his stimulating speech and so what I'd like to say in admiration and contestation is thank you very much Peter for your interesting speech and I'd like people to show their appreciation by clapping thank you