IGNP Canal in Rajasthan: Experiences of People

The Indira Gandhi Canal Pariyojna (IGNP) initially known as the Rajasthan Canal Project (RCP) is one of the most significant projects of the modern state in the desert in Rajasthan.  It is one of the biggest canal networks in the world serving one of the least populated and most inhospitable regions. Though covering only 10-15% of the arid area of the       Thar it has been accorded prime importance and is the largest ‘public investment’ by the post-colonial developmental State in the state of Rajasthan having fed on liberal loans by the World Bank and the Japanese government. The IGNP has multiple objectives like “...provision of water for drinking, irrigation and industrial use; develop the vast land resources, settlement of the thinly populated areas; drought proofing; checking the spread of desertification and improvement of the eco-system; and overall development of the area through creation of infrastructure for exploitation of natural resources...”.

The IGNP was conceived in 1948 by the genius Rai Bahadur Kanwar Sain, the then Chief Engineer of the Bikaner State who thought it was feasible to ‘irrigate untold millions of acres in the Rajputana desert from the Punjab rivers’. Ideologically propped up by Jawaharlal Nehru as the 'kingpin' of State planning for developing the desert, the IGNP was started with generous loans from the World Bank and a favourable policy framework enabled by the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 between Indian and Pakistan under the watchful gaze of the World Bank. More than 3,200 million rupees have been spent on the canal network till 2008. The main components that have been accomplished till now are the 445 km long lined canal running parallel to the Indo-Pak  border, nine branches, seven lift schemes and twenty-one direct distributaries apart from 8187 km. of minor canal network. The state claims to have opened more than 9.5 lakh hectares of area for irrigation. Another 2 lakh hectares is being planned to be opened for irrigation in the Barmer district. Apart from this the IGNP provides drinking water to all the major towns and cities of the western Rajasthan, and more than 3500 villages and settlements in the command area as well as outside it. IGNP is a gigantic settlement and irrigation project that is supposed to benefit more than 2 million people. 

Thar and IGNP Stage II

The 256 km long main canal in Stage II starts near Sattasar, (km 189) in Bikaner district and extends all the way to Mohangarh (km 445) in Jaisalmer district. It can be said that in Stage II the interaction between the three meta processes of colonisation and allotment of land; construction of the canal network and development of the command area; and irrigating the command area, that together constitute the basic structure of the IGNP, reached a level of complexity that is not to be seen in Stage I. All through its flow area the canal passes through highly undulating terrain of high and medium sized sand dunes, many of which are shifting, covering regions in Pugal and Kolayat (Bikaner district) and Nachna, Mohangarh, Ramgarh, Jaisalmer (Jaisalmer district) covering an area of 5 lakh ha (CCA). Additional area (2 lakh ha CCA) under Gadra Road extension (Barmer and Jaisalmer) have been recently included. Droughty and calcareous soils having low fertility, negligible farming, low population density, scattered settlements and a pastoral way of life situate the regions in Stage II as markedly different from Stage I. Though the area to be opened for irrigation in Stage II is almost double that of the Stage I it is here that the irrigation potential has been the most difficult to create and utilise problems of which have been compounded by the low rate of settlement of potential farmers.

The coming of the IGNP in these arid and hyper arid regions ushered in processes of radical transformation. For the communities as well as the state the scale and scope of changes entailed has been unprecedented. No other single development project has had so significant an impact on the workings of the state, the destinies of the communities and the fragile ecology of these regions as the IGNP in the last thirty years.

The narratives of the experiences of survival by plebeian settlers offer a different perspective to the ‘greening of the desert’ than the dominant narratives from the top about this mega initiative of ‘making the desert bloom’. These panegyrics, zealously proclaimed from the corridors of power, ivory tower pedestals of politicians, technocrats and canal elites, invoke metaphors of equating Indira Gandhi Canal akin to Saraswati, the mythical river of abundance. Applauding it as the supreme feat of technology and human ingenuity, as the hallmark of modern progress and development in the inhospitable Thar desert has been the dominant narrative of ‘modern development’ in Thar.  

In sharp contrast to these eulogising epithets, the narratives of existence of plebeian settlers reveal quite a different story about these staggering costs and awesome labyrinthine hydraulic spectacle that IGNP has inscribed on the face of the Thar. The canal in transforming the desert that it thought was ‘waste’ has created its own miseries and in fact has not only done irreversible harm to the fragile ecology of the area but has introduced structural inequalities and laid the conditions for a new order of exploitation. What is really tragic is the ‘waste’ that the canal has wrought upon commons, pastures, rangelands, their bio diversity, traditional dry land farming practices combined with intricate use of rain water harvesting structures, and so on.  The coming of the IGNP can be seen as initiating processes that mark a decisive break with the pre modern customary sanctions and practices. The canal command area created by this hydraulic network has set in processes of reshaping the distinct natural resource regimes of the Thar by demarcating and dividing them indiscriminately into slices of private  agricultural land holdings (6.2 hac. each). In doing this, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the IGNP has tampered with the essential integrity of the fragile ecological base of the Thar. It has not only restructured the physical landscape but has put in place a set of attitudes and ambitions which bear a sharp contrast to older way of life in Thar. 

Never has the rhetoric of productivity of land and indeed man as a productive and individuated unit governed the popular psyche so much before in the Thar where communities have long survived through shared communal traditions and have been known for celebrating what is rustic and elemental in life venerating nature as sacred. As many settlers sagaciously point out increasing desertification is not the nightmare; it is the increasing laying waste and rapacious plunder of nature orchestrated by the sway of private capital and maximising greed brought by the canal that is.

But this is not really an ‘ecological critique’ of the canal or a mournful lament at the loss of the pristine desert or counter sloganeering against big canals etc. The ensuing narratives are firmly embedded in the experience of engagement of people with the massive edifice of the canal in this harsh terrain as they battle their lives toiling hard in the changed landscape of the desert.  The ecological sensibility that we wish to recover from the dusty layers of Thar and the intricate network of canals, small and big, is constituted of the experience of the travails of people in the material history of everyday life in the canal command area. This diverse world of the settlers is constituted by both the old natives, those who have come from other parts of Rajasthan as well as the wealthy farmers from the northern state of Punjab. Among them are landless agricultural labour often belonging to low caste, women who toil in the agricultural fields and are dextrous embroiderers as well, erstwhile nomadic pastoralists as well as those who stubbornly continue to be semi nomadic pastoralists against all odds, sedentary husbandsman who has made a successful transition to stall feeding of a few milch animals and sells milk to the dairy, new farmers who have successfully lived up to the ‘individualist-frontierist’ ethic of colonising the perilous desert, poor allotees who could not save their land due to paucity of resources, allotees who have been rehabilitated after being displaced from their generations old ancestral villages because of war or the coming of a firing range, traditional elders as well as PRI / Chak Samiti representative, young teachers who are eager to be seen as more ‘cultured’ than the ordinary mortals, a range of casual workers from the ranks of labouring poor, etc. 

The voices of these different kind of settlers are not 'individual feelings' alone. This polyphony of voices has its own share of rustic reckonings, existential ramblings, joyous expressions of success and represents an echoing of the perceptions and values of a much larger community in telling about the tenacious moral economy of the desert natives helping us understand the story of the peculiar ‘green revolution’ by this desert canal from below. These testimonies while recounting the daunting perseverance of the settlers point to the miserable travesty this piped dream of making the desert bloom has been smothered to, a chimera that continues to produce and reproduce its own mirages.