by Sunil Amrith
In the broad sweep of history, China and India have undergone comparable shifts in their economic geography—in both cases, groundwater and other sources of irrigation were the driving force of change. Historian David Pietz points out that China, in the second half of the twentieth century, underwent a “reversal of food production patterns that pertained for most of the imperial period.” The dry North China Plain now produces 60 percent of China’s wheat and 40 percent of its corn on 22 percent of its land, and just 4 percent of its water resources. This has led to the transfer of what hydrologists call “virtual water”; that is to say the water that is embedded in crops, from water-scarce to water-abundant areas.17 This is a story that parallels, in nature and in timing, the emergence of arid Punjab as India’s agricultural powerhouse. As the economist Harry Oshima noted in the 1980s, even before the scale of China’s and India’s transformation was evident, the old geography of monsoon Asia had been shattered. It had been shattered, above all, by new sources of water. At any point until the late nineteenth century, it would have been self-evident that agrarian wealth in Asia lay in areas of abundant rain—the essence of monsoon Asia was the intensity of cultivation, especially rice cultivation, that the monsoon climate allowed. In a remarkably short space of time—the forty or fifty years after 1960—this pattern had been reversed by technology, and by fossil fuels.
The terrible paradox is that this stunning expansion in food production was achieved in a way that cannot be sustained. Groundwater resources are under acute strain in the regions of Asia that most depend on them. A study using data from the NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites showed that, between 2002 and 2008, groundwater depletion in northwestern India—the heartland of the Green Revolution—amounted to 109 cubic kilometers of water, an amount that exceeds the storage capacity of India’s largest reservoir. Freshwater availability per capita in India is projected to fall to 1,335 cubic meters by 2025, in comparison with a global average of 6,000 cubic meters. Groundwater has been the cornerstone of India’s and China’s food security since the 1970s—but for how long?18
THE SUSTAINABILITY OF INDIA’S GROUNDWATER BOOM IS ONLY ONE aspect of a deeper crisis of water. It was clear from the earliest years of the Green Revolution that one consequence of the new approach to agriculture was deepening rural inequality. In his commentary on the Maharashtra drought of 1970 to 1973, economist Wolf Ladejinsky had seen how sharp the contrast was between irrigated and nonirrigated lands. Long-standing fault lines between wet and dry, rain-fed and groundwater-supplied lands grew deeper. Access to water was both a cause and a symptom of inequality.
In the 1980s, recognition of the extent of water inequality energized an intellectual and political movement that called into question the fundamental pillars of India’s development strategy. Disagreements over economic policy were common enough in the 1950s and 1960s. India’s policymakers included committed planners as well as those in favor of free markets. But they disagreed about the means, and not the ends of development. By the end of the 1960s, India faced a radical alternative, in the shape of a Maoist insurgency that began in West Bengal and soon spread to other parts of the country. The insurgents, led by an urban elite committed to the romance of revolution, believed that only the violent dispossession of India’s landowning class could bring about substantive change. Paradoxically, they drew inspiration from China at just the moment when Chinese agriculture changed course, embracing its own version of the Green Revolution. Others looked to India’s past, to the history of water, for inspiration as they considered alternative economic models.
Mahatma Gandhi was a clear source of inspiration for many of those who, in the 1980s, challenged the assumptions of the Indian state. Though their influence on economic policy was muted, Gandhians continued after independence to urge upon India a different model of development—more rooted in rural communities, less wedded to monumental technology. They called for a holistic approach to development that emphasized both social and ecological equilibrium. The essence of their philosophy was encapsulated in Gandhi’s 1946 pronouncement that “the blood of the villages is the cement with which the edifice of the cities is built. I want the blood that is today inflating the arteries of the cities to run once again in the blood vessels of the villagers.” The 1970s saw the rise of the Chipko movement that brought together concerns with environmental degradation in Himalayan forests with the assertion of forest peoples’ rights to the resources on which their livelihoods depended. The movement was explicitly Gandhian in inspiration, and women played a leading role within it.19
That spirit infused a new approach to India’s water problems in the 1980s, an approach that looked back to a golden age of local, sustainable water management, embedded in the ancient practices of rural India. Just as Gandhi evoked a largely mythic notion of India as a collection of village republics—an idea that he drew primarily from Western writers—environmental activists in the 1980s harked back to an ecologically responsible, traditional India. It mattered little that this vision bore little resemblance to the picture that was emerging from historical and archaeological research. Archaeologist Kathleen Morrison puts it this way: “nostalgic” environmentalists evoked “a mode of life that I have simply been unable to reconstruct even as my work has expanded to incorporate three thousand years of agrarian history.”20
In those same decades, research on the history and diversity of India’s water practices painted a more complex picture. Water management was often tied to the exercise of royal power. Irrigation works depended on coerced labor. Access to common property was governed by the exclusions of caste—and those commons were under pressure even before the nineteenth century. The valorization of communitarian solutions could often serve to legitimize inequality and oppression. Many of the architects of independent India, including Jawaharlal Nehru, had seen this clearly. B. R. Ambedkar, leader of India’s Dalits and architect of the Indian constitution, was no rural romantic: “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and communalism,” he had asked in the Constituent Assembly in 1948. The divergence between these different visions of India’s past reminds us that water has a public as well as a scholarly history—throughout the 1980s, idealized narratives about water management in the past had rhetorical and strategic value for the debates of the present, and they informed contending visions of the future.21
Even if it was little more than a useful fiction, the idea of a return to a more ecologically harmonious past motivated many strands of the Indian environmental movement, which emerged in earnest in the early 1980s. The movement’s foundational text was the First Citizen’s Report on the State of India’s Environment, written by Anil Agarwal and his colleagues at Delhi’s Centre for Science and Environment, which Agarwal had founded in 1980. Agarwal was by then one of India’s most influential environmentalists. Born in the northern industrial city of Kanpur in 1947, to a landowning family, Agarwal studied mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology there. His work as the science correspondent of the Hindustan Times in the 1970s brought his writing to international attention. The citizen’s report paid close attention to the water crisis facing rural India. A few years later, in 1985, a report by the center urged the importance of recovering and repairing India’s ancient practices of harvesting the waters of the monsoon. The report’s authors, Agarwal and his protégé Sunita Narain, went further; in their view, nothing less than a revitalization of rural India would reverse India’s slide toward ecological degradation and social crisis. They described India’s traditional villages as “integrated agro-sylvo-pastoral entities,” dependent on common property resources: the rivers and the lakes and the forests. They claimed that the Indian state’s approach to development—top-down, reliant on big technology—had “torn asunder this integrated character of the villages.” In this was more than a trace of the holistic “rural sociology” of Radhakamal Mukerjee in the 1920s. Agarwal and Narain argued that “the p
rocess of state control over natural resources that started with colonialism must be rolled back.” Their prescribed solution was the final decolonization of rural India, a reversal of the process that began in the mid-nineteenth century with the British search for India’s water wealth.22
A similar commitment to elevating traditional practices and indigenous knowledge underpins the most wide-ranging and influential condemnation of the Green Revolution, written by environmental activist Vandana Shiva. Shiva emerged as a distinctive voice in Indian debates in the 1980s, and in the 1990s she would go on to become internationally influential within the antiglobalization movement. Trained as both a physicist and a philosopher, Shiva started the Research Foundation in Science, Technology and Ecology in the Himalayan town of Dehra Dun in 1982. In the opening pages of her book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, published in 1991, Shiva looked back on the 1980s, and described that as the decade when Asian societies came under the grip of what she described as “an ecological crisis and the threat to life support systems posed by the destruction of natural resources.” Taking aim at the idea that the Green Revolution had brought about an agricultural “miracle,” Shiva highlighted its costs. Many of these were well known, but Shiva’s forceful prose gave them new prominence. She called Punjab a “tragedy,” a cautionary tale of the folly of “breaking out of nature’s limits and variabilities.” She argued that the use of high-yielding seeds, pesticides, and ever-more water had left Punjab with “diseased soils, pest-infested crops, water-logged deserts, and indebted and discontented farmers.” She challenged the Indian state’s obsession with technological solutions to social and ecological problems; echoing Agarwal and Narain, she implied that India had not rid itself of its colonial legacy. Juxtaposing the quest for water with her emphasis on conservation, she posed it as a struggle between “diversity, decentralization and democracy,” on one side, against “uniformity, centralization, and militarization” on the other.23
Shiva’s book epitomized a new sort of environmental thinking in India. But it also reflected a new set of intellectual and political connections that crossed Asia’s borders in the 1980s. Her book was published by the Third World Network, which was based in Penang, Malaysia. Formed in 1984, the Third World Network was an offshoot of the Consumers’ Association of Penang—which, founded in 1970, was one of Asia’s earliest pressure groups devoted to a broad range of causes ranging from fair prices and housing to food safety. It was the group’s report on the State of Malaysia’s Environment that had inspired Anil Agarwal to undertake a similar exercise in India after attending a conference in Penang. The Third World Network marked the incorporation of environmental concerns fully under the umbrella of issues on which Asian activists made common cause. The network—which reached beyond Asia to encompass groups in Africa and Latin America, with many allies among activists and nongovernmental organizations in Europe and North America—brought together a commitment to social and economic justice with a new concern about sustainability. The Third World Network helped to bring Shiva’s work to a wide audience among activists in Asia and beyond. For her part, Shiva applied her analysis to Asian societies writ large, and not just to Punjab. Even if the 1970s’ movement for a New International Economic Order at the United Nations had proved short-lived, marginalized by the Anglo-American turn toward privatization in the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher, ethical claims on behalf of what we now call the Global South lived on. The sense of a unified Third World fighting against the legacies of colonialism as well as new forms of imperial power began to crumble as parts of Asia began to experience very rapid economic growth, but it continued to influence movements for environmental justice that focused on the ways poverty heightened environmental vulnerability and inequality worsened environmental harm.24
The networks of activism that linked environmentalists across Asia’s borders turned, in the early 1990s, to the problem of climate change. In a 1991 text that remains influential to this day, one of the earliest and most eloquent expressions of the argument for global environmental justice, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain wrote about the problem of Global Warming in an Unequal World. Their opening sentence is powerful and stark: “The idea that developing countries like India and China must share the blame for heating up the earth and destabilizing its climate… is an excellent example of environmental colonialism.” They pointed out that historical responsibility for the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere lay entirely with the advanced industrial countries of the world; they highlighted the hypocrisy of those countries now telling India and China to cut their emissions, when in per capita terms, India’s or China’s emissions were miniscule. Their conclusion was that “the Third World today needs far-sighted political leadership” to resist the calls by Western political leaders and environmentalists to “manage the world as one entity,” which could only be a mask for exploitation as long as the world remained so unequal and so divided.25
The pamphlet was published just on the eve of India’s economic liberalization: a series of market reforms that followed an emergency IMF loan, secured when India faced a crisis of foreign exchange. In its language, it belongs firmly in the era that was closing, though few saw it at the time. The idea of the Third World, invoked repeatedly, had already started to come unstuck; with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it dissolved. What Agarwal and Narain could not have anticipated was just how rapidly the Indian environment, with the Indian economy, would be transformed by a new openness to global capitalism. China’s own economic transformation was well underway in 1991, but its colossal scale and its colossal implications for the world were only slowly becoming evident. With good reason, the 1991 pamphlet called for a united front against the powerful nations in international negotiations over climate and emissions. But it was blind to the proliferation of cross-border challenges confronting Asia—in the realm of water above all.
THE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS ABOUT SHARED ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS took place alongside a focus on deeply local problems. As the crisis of rural India became more visible, it appeared to be rooted in climatic and social characteristics that were distinctive to the Indian subcontinent, familiar to observers going back to the nineteenth century—the deep and particular unevenness of water’s distribution, and the pervasive social and caste inequalities that limited people’s access to water.
Journalist Palagummi Sainath (b. 1957) spent the 1980s working on the Bombay tabloid Blitz. In 1993, he received a Times of India fellowship that he chose to spend traveling through India’s poorest districts. He traveled one hundred thousand kilometers over a few years, more than five thousand of them on foot. The Times published his dispatches in installments, at a time when ever-less reporting from impoverished rural India reached a metropolitan audience that was now in the grip of economic expansion. Sainath wanted to move beyond what he saw as the media’s focus on “the spectacular” and to highlight “the long-term trends that spell chaos [but that] don’t make good copy.” Sainath’s articles were collected and published as a book in 1996 with the deeply ironic title Everybody Loves a Good Drought. In his many articles on water, Sainath drew attention to the opportunities for profit that water scarcity brought to a new cabal of “water lords.” Sainath observed something familiar from earlier times—absolute scarcity of water was not always the problem, its distribution was. “Simply put,” he wrote, “we have several districts in India that have an abundance of rainfall—but where one section, the poor, can suffer acute drought.” With the insight that came from his immersion in rural India, Sainath distinguished between “agricultural drought” and “meteorological drought,” arguing that the latter was not necessary for the former to bite—there were droughts that were “real,” and droughts that were “rigged.”26
The Indian countryside reeled from a double burden. Many farmers, those inhabiting the 60 percent of India’s farmland without irrigation, suffered under the age-old burden of their dependence on an uncertain monsoon. But high-intensity farming brought its o
wn burdens. When the history of late-twentieth-century India is written from a perspective of greater distance, alongside vertiginous economic transformation there will be a less visible, shameful, story: the story of an epidemic of farmer suicides on a scale that may be without parallel in the world. Sainath was among the first to bring this silent crisis to public attention. Starting in the late 1990s, an estimated seventeen thousand farmers each year have taken their lives—at least two hundred thousand deaths from suicide between 1997 and 2010. At the root of the intolerable pressure that many of India’s farmers labor under are their growing debts—debts for purchases of seed and fertilizer and pesticide and fuel for groundwater pumps.27
Meanwhile access to water continues to be an indicator of the most fundamental social inequalities. In a comprehensive survey of the practice of untouchability in rural India, undertaken at the start of the twenty-first century, Delhi sociologist Gyansham Shah and colleagues found that Dalits in rural India regularly face exclusion from access to basic public services—and of these, the authors found, the most important by far was the denial of access to water. No fewer than 48 percent of villages surveyed reported such denial. Pervasive upper-caste beliefs about the polluting effects of Dalits having contact with water sources leads to systematic discrimination, enforced by violence. The practices that Shah and colleagues documented ranged from absolute exclusion from tubewells and tanks to Dalits being forced to wait until everyone else had taken their water before being allowed limited access. Ninety years after Ambedkar’s march on the tank at Mahad, unequal access to water remains pervasive in India. And caste discrimination explains why such inequalities are sharper in India than anywhere else in Asia.28