Technically you could pick up a lightweight plexiglass boat, with detachable battery driven motors, from somewhere northwest of Jaisalmer, say Ramgarh, and journey upstream the Nachna-Mohangarh feeder to meet the IGNP at zero head and then literally lift your boat into IGNP and travel upstream through other ‘heads’ till you reach ‘Masitalwali Head’; after that you would meet up with the RCP which would take you upstream all the way to the barrage, situated precisely at the confluence of Sutlej and Beas. From Harikke Barrage or Headworks you could optionally travel upstream along steeper gradients along Su
tlej or Beas, both of which would anyway end up in gigantic dams, Pong or Bhakhra, in the middle Himalayas. If you still want to go upstream it is advised that you travel with a back pack, preferably along the Sutlej because that would lead you to the highest freshwater lake in the world, the Mansarovar. For such has become the pattern of water courses in modern India; such has been the scale and magnitude of river course re-direction in the modern including the colonial and post colonial times.
We went by jeep, keeping saner counsels in mind, and tracked the main course of the IGNP in the command area towards the naali and Stage I area, coinciding with significant transhumant trails, then through Bhakra minors and the 75 year old Gang canal with its degraded command and minors into the Eastern canal, Sirhind, and the RCP surrounded by lush greenery, before reaching the barrage that get its name from the Harikke patan in Punjab. Whether or not you marvel at the amazing architectural layout on pure deset areas running on hydraulic principles, the reasons for the construction are pretty straightforward. The Harikke Barrage was mainly conceived in the 1940s in the Rorkee School of Civil Engineering by the then Chief Engineer of the erstwhile Bikaner state, Kanwar Sain. He was also involved in the construction of the Gang Canal which flowed from the pre- Harikke time from the Husainiwala Barrage in Ferozpur, Punjab, constructed in the early 1920;’;s across the Sutlej. The main reason for the need for the construction of the Harikke Barrage, as he proffered to Nehru, was that since the Indo-Pak boundary / frontier line cut longitudinally cut through the river Sutlej, this provided scope for the Pakistan for cutting canals from their end of the river bank, thereby reducing the water level discharge and depriving the Gang Canal of much needed water. Apart from this pure geo political consideration he add
ed a good deal of moral missionary zeal to ‘green the desert’ without taking into consideration any of its possible impacts and its ecological assessments. ‘Greening the desert’ was a moral missionary slogan, under the guise of which systematic and irreversible assaults on various ecosystems were carried out. Nehru, to be fair, was skeptical of the RCP project. But when World Bank pressure was brought to bear on his government, he yielded and then eventually joined the moral missionary bandwagon, bombastically talking about ‘temples of modern India’.
As India and Pakistan started developing new uses of waters of the Indus river basins tensions mounted between the two countries. The matter was discussed at various levels and it was in March, 1952 that Indian and Pakistan finally agreed to accept the good offices of the World Bank for resolution of the dispute on sharing the Indus waters. The World Bank while considering distribution took into account the various possibilities of uses of this water in India and Paksitan. While the work on the project was in progress, thanks to the good offices of the World Bank, the Indus Water Treaty was signed at Karachi on September 19, 1960, between India and Pakistan, after eight years of torturous negotiations. All through the deleibeartions , the rajasthan canakl was the kingpin of India’s case. Emphasizing the crucial importance of the rajasthan Canal in India’s economy….Nehru wrote to the president of the World bank in a letter dated July 11, 1960 that:
“Rajasthan canal is of vital importance to us and that our planning is based on it (italics mine). There is a yearning all over the area served by the rajasthan Canal for water and any delay in providing adequate supplies of water to this canal would create very difficult political social and economic problems for us…”
Viewing the canal as the kingpin of state planning was an ideological difference Nehru wanted to posit against the colonial / WB gaze. Nehru did not live long enough to do a reality check. In fact, more than 40 years after, even the World Bank has not bothered to carry out any reality check of its own either, their main interests having withered by the end of eighties when the writing got too big o the wall to be ignored.
We are not here to lament or indulge in counter sloganeering against big dams, barrages, etc. For the World Bank, what is clear is the incredible size of the increasing ‘wastelands’, measurable in terms of degraded commons, produced as a consequence of its own interventions; but what is astounding, for any branch of disinterested scholarship is the rapidity of degradation, in this case a real tragedy of the commons, through large scale privatization, the sheer speed of eco-catastrophies and the resulting chaos that has already occurred. This can only be seen once we are in the intricate canal network, the delivery points of the main canal, or the end use hardware points so to speak. Other than private transformation of public resources (mostly in concrete and cement), everything else, minors, sub minors the end use channels many lie in ruins. But besides the ruination that it has produced upon itself, through methodologies designed for yielding, escalating yet exact calculations in the beautiful language of mathematics, wha
t 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. Increasing desertification is not the nightmare; it is the increasing laying waste of nature that is.
Finally, let us come to the crux of the matter, the string that holds together all the pieces that is, water. Everything that we have been talking about everything that happens on the region stretching from river valleys of Punjab to the snowlines of Himalayas to the rainshadow area and the extreme arid western zone of Rajasthan is related to a specific spread and districution of ewater. It is more with regard to this resource rather than land that makes the difference between the nature of real capitalist intervention and those undertaken only in the previous historical epochs. Because water canniot be produced and like fossil fuel is a finite resource, it is at the point of its origins and crucial conduits- such as the Sutlej-beas confluence- that capital takes control.
In the 1990’s a period characterized by an exponential rise increase in the commodification of water and the emergence of water markets, we witness a dramatic shift in water distribution patterns globally. Nowhere was any other decade comparable to this in terms of prevailing water scarcities and pure thirst driving human beings like cattle. As capitalism further takes over managing the scarcities in terms of commodity values, what is referred to as ‘Conquest of Water’ (J Goubert) will remain a recurring them nightmare shaking human societies to their roots.
Our visit to Harikke made us acknowledge and understand the significance and importance of the singular position of water, the power vested in its control and ownership in the irrigated green revolution tracts of the ‘canal colonies’ of Punjab and the IGNP command areas of Rajasthan. It made us understand the growing importance of water, per se, in the shaping the strategies for interventions from above; its determining and defining nature vis-à-vis land and crops and it role in managing the economies of scarcity and waste. It is therefore in the interests of the producers and cultivators in these areas that alternative strategies that reduce dependence and overuse
of this critical resource be devised. For that is the only way to keep the struggles being fought at meaningful levels as well as continue with the resistance through democratic formats. Otherwise, to pre-empt democratic debates and formats or not attempt to produce rival future scenarios would contribute to leave things the workings of the market (which reflects the needs of those living but not the future generations) a suicidal prospect which many already face.
By Dr. Debabrata Banerjee
This article first appeared in Bulletin, July 2001, Vol 1. Bulletin was a newsletter of Chak Samities of the IGNP Stage II supported by AZERC, URMUL Trust and Oxfam
tlej or Beas, both of which would anyway end up in gigantic dams, Pong or Bhakhra, in the middle Himalayas. If you still want to go upstream it is advised that you travel with a back pack, preferably along the Sutlej because that would lead you to the highest freshwater lake in the world, the Mansarovar. For such has become the pattern of water courses in modern India; such has been the scale and magnitude of river course re-direction in the modern including the colonial and post colonial times.We went by jeep, keeping saner counsels in mind, and tracked the main course of the IGNP in the command area towards the naali and Stage I area, coinciding with significant transhumant trails, then through Bhakra minors and the 75 year old Gang canal with its degraded command and minors into the Eastern canal, Sirhind, and the RCP surrounded by lush greenery, before reaching the barrage that get its name from the Harikke patan in Punjab. Whether or not you marvel at the amazing architectural layout on pure deset areas running on hydraulic principles, the reasons for the construction are pretty straightforward. The Harikke Barrage was mainly conceived in the 1940s in the Rorkee School of Civil Engineering by the then Chief Engineer of the erstwhile Bikaner state, Kanwar Sain. He was also involved in the construction of the Gang Canal which flowed from the pre- Harikke time from the Husainiwala Barrage in Ferozpur, Punjab, constructed in the early 1920;’;s across the Sutlej. The main reason for the need for the construction of the Harikke Barrage, as he proffered to Nehru, was that since the Indo-Pak boundary / frontier line cut longitudinally cut through the river Sutlej, this provided scope for the Pakistan for cutting canals from their end of the river bank, thereby reducing the water level discharge and depriving the Gang Canal of much needed water. Apart from this pure geo political consideration he add
ed a good deal of moral missionary zeal to ‘green the desert’ without taking into consideration any of its possible impacts and its ecological assessments. ‘Greening the desert’ was a moral missionary slogan, under the guise of which systematic and irreversible assaults on various ecosystems were carried out. Nehru, to be fair, was skeptical of the RCP project. But when World Bank pressure was brought to bear on his government, he yielded and then eventually joined the moral missionary bandwagon, bombastically talking about ‘temples of modern India’.As India and Pakistan started developing new uses of waters of the Indus river basins tensions mounted between the two countries. The matter was discussed at various levels and it was in March, 1952 that Indian and Pakistan finally agreed to accept the good offices of the World Bank for resolution of the dispute on sharing the Indus waters. The World Bank while considering distribution took into account the various possibilities of uses of this water in India and Paksitan. While the work on the project was in progress, thanks to the good offices of the World Bank, the Indus Water Treaty was signed at Karachi on September 19, 1960, between India and Pakistan, after eight years of torturous negotiations. All through the deleibeartions , the rajasthan canakl was the kingpin of India’s case. Emphasizing the crucial importance of the rajasthan Canal in India’s economy….Nehru wrote to the president of the World bank in a letter dated July 11, 1960 that:
“Rajasthan canal is of vital importance to us and that our planning is based on it (italics mine). There is a yearning all over the area served by the rajasthan Canal for water and any delay in providing adequate supplies of water to this canal would create very difficult political social and economic problems for us…”
Viewing the canal as the kingpin of state planning was an ideological difference Nehru wanted to posit against the colonial / WB gaze. Nehru did not live long enough to do a reality check. In fact, more than 40 years after, even the World Bank has not bothered to carry out any reality check of its own either, their main interests having withered by the end of eighties when the writing got too big o the wall to be ignored.
We are not here to lament or indulge in counter sloganeering against big dams, barrages, etc. For the World Bank, what is clear is the incredible size of the increasing ‘wastelands’, measurable in terms of degraded commons, produced as a consequence of its own interventions; but what is astounding, for any branch of disinterested scholarship is the rapidity of degradation, in this case a real tragedy of the commons, through large scale privatization, the sheer speed of eco-catastrophies and the resulting chaos that has already occurred. This can only be seen once we are in the intricate canal network, the delivery points of the main canal, or the end use hardware points so to speak. Other than private transformation of public resources (mostly in concrete and cement), everything else, minors, sub minors the end use channels many lie in ruins. But besides the ruination that it has produced upon itself, through methodologies designed for yielding, escalating yet exact calculations in the beautiful language of mathematics, wha
t 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. Increasing desertification is not the nightmare; it is the increasing laying waste of nature that is.Finally, let us come to the crux of the matter, the string that holds together all the pieces that is, water. Everything that we have been talking about everything that happens on the region stretching from river valleys of Punjab to the snowlines of Himalayas to the rainshadow area and the extreme arid western zone of Rajasthan is related to a specific spread and districution of ewater. It is more with regard to this resource rather than land that makes the difference between the nature of real capitalist intervention and those undertaken only in the previous historical epochs. Because water canniot be produced and like fossil fuel is a finite resource, it is at the point of its origins and crucial conduits- such as the Sutlej-beas confluence- that capital takes control.
In the 1990’s a period characterized by an exponential rise increase in the commodification of water and the emergence of water markets, we witness a dramatic shift in water distribution patterns globally. Nowhere was any other decade comparable to this in terms of prevailing water scarcities and pure thirst driving human beings like cattle. As capitalism further takes over managing the scarcities in terms of commodity values, what is referred to as ‘Conquest of Water’ (J Goubert) will remain a recurring them nightmare shaking human societies to their roots.
Our visit to Harikke made us acknowledge and understand the significance and importance of the singular position of water, the power vested in its control and ownership in the irrigated green revolution tracts of the ‘canal colonies’ of Punjab and the IGNP command areas of Rajasthan. It made us understand the growing importance of water, per se, in the shaping the strategies for interventions from above; its determining and defining nature vis-à-vis land and crops and it role in managing the economies of scarcity and waste. It is therefore in the interests of the producers and cultivators in these areas that alternative strategies that reduce dependence and overuse
of this critical resource be devised. For that is the only way to keep the struggles being fought at meaningful levels as well as continue with the resistance through democratic formats. Otherwise, to pre-empt democratic debates and formats or not attempt to produce rival future scenarios would contribute to leave things the workings of the market (which reflects the needs of those living but not the future generations) a suicidal prospect which many already face.By Dr. Debabrata Banerjee
This article first appeared in Bulletin, July 2001, Vol 1. Bulletin was a newsletter of Chak Samities of the IGNP Stage II supported by AZERC, URMUL Trust and Oxfam
No comments:
Post a Comment