Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  Tubewells are a humble technology, unlikely harbingers of a hydrological revolution. A tubewell is a well driven by an electric pump, consisting of a long stainless steel tube that is bored into an underground aquifer. Historian and architect Anthony Acciavatti argues that they represent an “inversion” of the monumental water technologies: dams and canals. In contrast with dams, the tubewell has a “minimal footprint and maximum draft of water, it creates undreamed of independence and three-dimensional chaos.”53

  An electric tubewell, of the kind that proliferated in India in the 1960s. CREDIT: Illustration by Matilde Grimaldi

  The Indian government encouraged the adoption of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice by subsidizing the capital costs of infrastructure for the intensive exploitation of groundwater. State electricity boards reduced the cost of electricity. By the 1970s, unable to bear the cost of monitoring energy use by millions of farmers across widely dispersed areas, state electricity boards opted for flat tariffs. This gave large farmers an incentive to use as much energy as possible to extract water from underground. As a result, agriculture’s share of total energy use in India grew from 10 percent in 1970–1971 to 30 percent by 1995, even as state electricity boards accumulated huge losses. By 2009, groundwater accounted for 60 percent of India’s irrigated area, and surface irrigation for only 30 percent.54 Just as they shared the waters of the Indus, India and Pakistan came to share a new dependence on groundwater. Embracing the same package of hybrid seeds and intensive fertilizer use, Pakistan’s food security became even more reliant on irrigation than India’s. All the while, and despite the declining importance of surface irrigation, the profusion of large dams continued. Dam construction was unstoppable, even as underground water now supplied the greater share of water for irrigation. Large dams had acquired enormous symbolic power, to the point where they epitomized the conquest of nature by technology. Three decades after India’s independence there were also many vested interests in the engineering and construction industries committed to the continued proliferation of dams. Their social and ecological costs multiplied through the 1970s; as we shall see in the next chapter, their costs provoked widespread resistance in the 1980s.

  Utopian technological schemes for the capture of India’s waters flourished in the 1970s, alongside—and as though unaware of—growing understanding of the scale, power, and unpredictability of climate. Although Roger Revelle was a pioneer of oceanography and an architect of the 1960s’ Indian Ocean Expedition, he turned in the 1970s to more practical matters. Revelle moved from Scripps to Harvard to found the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. In 1975 he wrote an essay with his Indian colleague V. Lakshminarayana on what they called the “Ganges Water Machine.” They expressed concern that “deeply embedded cultural, social, and economic problems inhibit modernization of agriculture and fuller utilization of water resources” in India. They envisaged that “the introduction of technological changes on the required scale might break the chains of tradition and injustice that now bind the people in misery and poverty.” They had in mind a technological mirroring of the vast, interconnected hydraulic system that linked the monsoon rains, the Himalayan rivers, and the waters underground—an expanded network of bunds, dams, and, above all, the massive expansion of groundwater pumps. The same year, K. L. Rao, a veteran of Indian irrigation, published an even grander plan. He returned to the dream of Sir Arthur Cotton, irrigation pioneer of the nineteenth century, in proposing a large scheme to transfer water—through a network of canals—from the wettest to the driest parts of India.55

  India’s experience of water-driven growth in the 1970s found echoes across Asia. The 1970s also saw rapid growth in Chinese agriculture, as China developed its own path toward a green revolution. The unprecedented expansion in food production in China in the 1970s built upon the extension of agricultural research stations right down to the level of local communes. Like the Indian government, the Chinese state viewed the rapid growth in population and the pressure on arable land with alarm, reversing the pronatalism that characterized the first two decades after the revolution. As in India, Chinese farmers’ adoption of high-yielding seed varieties depended on large quantities of chemical fertilizer. In the 1970s, the Chinese fertilizer industry expanded through a dispersed network of small-scale factories. High-yield dwarf rice varieties spread especially rapidly in China in the 1970s, boosting harvests. And in China, as in India, the agricultural growth of the 1970s depended on mining underground water. Electric pumps played almost as significant a role in expanding irrigation in China as they did in India. In 1965, there were approximately half a million mechanized irrigation and drainage devices in China; by 1978, there were more than 5 million.56 But in other ways, the Chinese approach to growing more food diverged from India’s. In keeping with the Maoist emphasis on mass political mobilization, China’s agricultural strategy was more broadly based than India’s. Historian Sigrid Schmalzer describes it as a “patchwork of methodologies,” in which mechanization coexisted with labor-intensive terracing, chemical fertilizer with traditional practices of night-soil collection and the application of pig manure.57 The water- and fertilizer-fueled growth of the 1970s laid the groundwork for China’s further agricultural expansion in the 1980s; but with the end of agrarian collectivization and the arrival of market reforms, rural inequalities, too, grew wider.

  IV

  The water inequalities that India has always faced deepened in the 1960s and 1970s; they were accentuated by the uneven spread of tubewells. From the late 1960s, as the Green Revolution took off, the drier regions of India’s northwest and southeast emerged as the centers of agricultural growth—a result of groundwater exploitation, fueled by electrification to allow the use of high-yielding seeds. The water-rich areas of India’s northeast, by contrast, continued to rely on rainfall, utilizing relatively inefficient diesel pumps for shallow groundwater irrigation; they remained at risk of regular waterlogging, but lacked the infrastructure to use the surplus water for storage or groundwater recharge.58 Where large dams promised to create energy through hydroelectric power, pumps used it in large quantities to mine water.

  These inequalities were manifest between 1970 and 1973, when parts of western and central India experienced three successive years of drought. The western state of Maharashtra was worst affected. In the World Bank’s archives in Washington is a fifty-page typescript account of the Maharashtra drought; scrawled at the top is a handwritten instruction: “Circulate.” The author was agricultural economist Wolf Ladejinsky (1899–1975). He was born to a Ukrainian Jewish family who fled the Russian civil war to the United States in 1922. Ladejinsky studied at Columbia University and joined the US Department of Agriculture’s foreign service, coming to specialize in Asia’s agrarian problems. He served in the American occupation of Japan, where he played a key role in overseeing land reform, as he then did in Taiwan. Ladejinsky came under suspicion in the McCarthy era, but President Eisenhower defended him and appointed him to direct land reform in South Vietnam in the late 1950s, just as American involvement there was deepening. Through the 1960s, Ladejinsky continued to focus on the problems of rural Asia, working with the World Bank. He was anti-communist but saw the importance of land reform in societies where landholdings were highly concentrated in a few hands.59

  Ladejinsky had worked in India on numerous occasions, and the World Bank sent him back in 1972 to investigate a drought that threatened hunger in Maharashtra. “This is an occasion when the writer intends to keep his emotions in leash,” he promised at the outset of his note, fearing that his “credibility may suffer from dramatizing the incontrovertible cruelty of nature—no rain and no crops.” He observed that “historically the struggle of the Maharashtra farmer has been one of quest for water.” In an echo of British commentary in the late nineteenth century, he personified the monsoon as a force, as when he referred to “the monsoon playing truant.” He described his journey out to the countryside from Poona; it was n
ot long before he found himself traveling through a landscape that “leaves one shaken about the perversity of nature.” Lack of drinking water was a problem everywhere. More than shortages of food, it was a lack of water that, Ladejinsky saw, led farmers to uproot themselves and migrate in search of work. He described the sight of water tankers surrounded by people at famine relief camps—tankers that had been donated by oil companies as an act of charity. Words mattered, Ladejinsky argued: neither the state nor the central government wished to invoke the term “famine”—seen as a relic of a dark colonial past—but their use of the mild term “scarcity” masked the severity of the crisis.60

  The drought in Maharashtra showed how little the hydrologic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s had touched many parts of rural India. In his detailed study of the drought, economist Jean Drèze noted that only 8 percent of land in the region was irrigated. For those on rain-fed lands, Drèze wrote, “the meagre harvest of coarse grains remain a gamble on the monsoon and the land offers a spectacle of desolation and dust during the slack season.” The drought led to a 14 percent drop in food availability; the threat of starvation was very real. It was averted by concerted government response, arguably one of the most effective in the history of independent India. The Food Corporation of India organized the transportation of wheat from other parts of the country. It was sold at subsidized prices through thirty thousand fair-price shops distributed across the state. At the same time, a large program of public works generated employment; up to 2 million people a day attended these works, building roads and bridges and digging wells. This boosted local incomes and in turn pushed up food prices in Maharashtra, attracting supplies from beyond the state—often illegally, since the government had barred the interstate trade in grain during the crisis. Those illicit supplies, even at inflated prices, helped to compensate for the shortfall.61

  In the end it was not big technology but rather the unheralded public distribution system of India that averted catastrophe in Maharashtra. The drought showed how patchy and uneven the reach of water engineering was. It showed the importance of public policy and prompt intervention. But these were not the lessons learned. The drought did nothing to dent confidence in the idea that all India needed was irrigation, now from deeper and deeper underground.

  V

  Scientists’ understanding of the monsoon advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, spurred by the data collected by the Indian Ocean Expedition and by the International Geophysical Year that had preceded it, in 1957–1958. At the heart of monsoon science now were two phenomena. The first was “moist processes”—most simply, the release of latent heat and the effect of clouds on radiation. The second was the coupling of ocean and atmosphere. There was a new awareness that the monsoon system formed, as one meteorologist put it, a “complex of seemingly disparate parts: two fluids, the mobile air and the changing ocean below.” Increasingly sophisticated computer models could turn each of these processes on and off in an attempt to isolate and investigate different variables.62

  The most important breakthrough came with the work of Jacob Bjerknes, a Norwegian meteorologist at UCLA—son of Vilhelm Bjerknes. Father and son were both part of the team that had, in the 1910s, discovered and named the phenomenon of polar fronts from their observatory in Bergen. Now, using data generated by the expeditions of the International Geophysical Year, Jacob Bjerknes determined the mechanism driving a phenomenon that Gilbert Walker had first observed in the 1920s, during and just after his time as director of the Indian meteorological service. Walker had called it the Southern Oscillation, an oscillating contrast in atmospheric pressure across the Pacific Ocean, as measured in Darwin and Tahiti. But Walker had been unable to determine the cause of this swing in pressure; Bjerknes discovered that the answer lay in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

  In the 1960s, Jacob Bjerknes discovered the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)—the illustrations show its “warm” (El Niño) and “cool” (La Niña) phases. CREDIT: Illustration by Matilde Grimaldi

  Bjerknes found that the key to the southern oscillation lay in the periodic warming of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and he dubbed it El Niño in keeping with the term that fishers had given the phenomenon. This warming reverberates throughout the world’s climate. Most of the time, the waters of the western Pacific, off Indonesia, are warmer than in the eastern Pacific—this drives the easterly “trade winds,” but Bjerknes saw that these were a surface manifestation of an overturning circulation in the upper atmosphere at higher latitudes. He named this the Walker Circulation in honor of Sir Gilbert. During an El Niño episode the contrast narrows as the waters of the eastern Pacific warm up; in response, the Walker Circulation weakens, since it is driven by that difference in temperature and pressure. Less intensive surface winds reduce the ocean’s churn, leading to less of the colder water from the depths welling up to the surface; this sustains the abnormal warmth in the eastern Pacific, and so flattens the usual temperature contrast across the ocean—attenuating further the Walker Circulation.63

  This disruption in circulation has consequences for rainfall in the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean—and even the North Atlantic. El Niño years tend to be associated with weak monsoons in Asia, and with excessive rainfall in South America. Bjerknes dubbed the overall oceanic-atmospheric system the El Niño Southern Oscillation (known as ENSO), of which El Niño was the phase of ocean surface warming and La Niña (girl child) of cooling; years that exhibit neither extreme are known as “neutral.” La Niña has the opposite effect of El Niño, strengthening the temperature contrast between the eastern and western Pacific, strengthening the Walker Circulation, and bringing more rain than usual to Asian shores.

  The discovery of ENSO marked a breakthrough for understanding the Asian monsoon. Once it had been identified, historical climatologists showed that many of the worst droughts in Asian history—including the droughts that brought famine in the 1870s and the 1890s, and also the Maharashtra drought of 1972–1973, discussed earlier in this chapter—coincided with El Niño events. But the causal relationship between ENSO and the monsoon is complex. There is some evidence to suggest that an especially strong or weak monsoon might foreshadow rather than follow the corresponding phase in the ENSO cycle. Tropical meteorologist Peter Webster argues that there may be truth in Charles Normand’s suggestion—made in the 1950s after his retirement as head of India’s meteorological service and before Bjerknes had discovered El Niño—that India’s weather was more use in predicting what was in store for other parts of the world than it was itself amenable to prediction.64

  Knowledge of ENSO raised new questions about the periodicity of drought in Asia—a question that, as we have seen, had provoked much discussion in the 1870s. It reinforced the sense, drawn from the Indian Ocean Expedition, that Asia’s climate was fiendishly complex, associated with many other parts of the planet’s climate. ENSO is quasiperiodic; it recurs but the intervals between events vary and are not easy to predict. The early 1970s also brought new knowledge of internal climatic variability on shorter timescales. In 1971, Roland Madden and Paul Julian, based at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, discovered what came to be known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO): an oscillation in surface pressure and wind direction over large areas, with consequences on a planetary scale.65 The MJO has a clear periodicity; it is, as meteorologist Adam Sobel has put it, “a signal that emerges above the meteorological noise.” Migrating from west to east, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, the MJO lasts between thirty and sixty days, and its intensity varies from year to year. In its “active” phase, the MJO brings heavy rain, and a heightened chance of tropical cyclones; in its “suppressed” phase, it interrupts the monsoon flow, even reversing the wind direction, bringing clear skies. The MJO is associated particularly with the northern winter; but scientists also discovered another intraseasonal oscillation in the northern summer months, which propagates northward rather than eastward. Known as the Boreal Summer
Intraseasonal Oscillation, its connection with or independence from the MJO has been the subject of debate, but it, too, is thought to play a vital role in the fluctuations of rainfall over Asia each summer.66 In the 1980s further research was done to uncover the mechanisms at work behind these intraseasonal oscillations, though some uncertainty remains.67 These intraseasonal oscillations might well explain the alternation between active and break periods in any monsoon season, which has such vital and direct effects on agriculture.

  Advances in technology and understanding did little to revise Colin Ramage’s verdict, at the end of the Indian Ocean Expedition, that little headway had been made in forecasting the monsoon in a practical sense. Progress had been made in understanding the system on a large scale. But what mattered most to Asian farmers were the rhythms of rainfall within a given monsoon season—the relationship between what meteorologists call “active” and “break” periods of the monsoon. So finely attuned is Asian agriculture to the monsoon that the most devastating effects on cultivation often come from unexpected breaks in the midst of the summer rains, even when rainfall overall is plentiful—the skies brighten suddenly, and crops do not receive the water they need to thrive at a critical phase in their life cycle.