Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 61, May 2015, Pages 111-121
Geoforum

Like water for justice

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.02.020Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Complex realities blur enduring water supply injustices in the Darjeeling region.

  • Contestation of new hydropower projects here ignores entrenched old injustices.

  • The paper illustrates the politics of how injustices are defined, by whom and why.

  • The findings situate water injustices as deeply entwined in complex local realities.

  • The paper questions if justice can be framed and voiced only in relation to water.

Abstract

The narrative of environmental justice is powerfully and passionately advocated by researchers, practitioners and activists across scale and space. Yet, because these struggles are multifaceted and pluralistic, rooted in complex, evolving “socio-material-political interminglings” the concept is difficult to grasp, and even harder to realise. Recent literature raises concerns as to what makes for environmental injustices, how injustices are defined, classified as urgent and/or critical, by whom and why, how they gain political attention, etc. This paper draws attention to these issues by contrasting the largely untold, nonetheless entrenched and enduring “old” water supply injustices in the Darjeeling region of the Eastern Himalaya in India with articulate contestations relating to the speedy advancement of “new” hydropower projects here. Water supply problems in the Darjeeling region are particularly wicked – nested in fractious ethnicity–identity political conflicts. These complex local realities tend to obscure the everyday challenges relating to water as well as render these problems spatially anecdotal. What happens – or does not – around water here is certainly unique, yet comparison to other struggles in other settings show that locational and environmental politics provide critical evidence to question the several implicit universalisms in relation to water justice.

Introduction

Water and justice are thoroughly entangled and for very good reasons. Boelens (2014, p. 234) points out how ‘worldviews, water flows and water control practices are interwoven’ and ‘since ancient times… [demonstrate an] elite subjugation’. Farias (2011, p. 371) similarly notes that the social, economic and environmental ills relating to water are rooted in history, but argues that these injustices are essentially diverse, reflecting complex evolving ‘socio-material-political interminglings’. Sikor and Newell (2014) draw attention to the universal core issues of justice inherent in diverse environmental struggles, which, as they point out are nonetheless difficult to define in narrow terms and frameworks because of their temporal, spatial and other contextual specificities. This paper relates to the need to ‘critically interrogate the universalizing and globalizing tendencies in asserting and invocating environmental justice’ in the face of great plurality in perspectives, theories and practice (Sikor and Newell, 2014, p. 155).

This paper reflects on these contradictions taking the case of latent old and blatant new water injustices in Darjeeling district in the lower Teesta basin of the Eastern Himalaya. In conclusion, the paper analyses whether and how water injustices can be defined and pursued within narrow domains relating only to water, or even to certain sectors of water, when water wrongs are essentially complex and riveted in nested political, social, economic injustices (see Map 1).

Darjeeling district, which is located in the State of West Bengal in India has been embroiled in over four decades of a contentious conflict for a political separation from West Bengal through the creation of a new state, Gorkhaland. Wenner (2013) articulately describes the multiple dimensions of the conflict as a strategic construction of an “imaginative geography”. Ethnic tensions are claimed between a minority Nepali community in a majority Bengali populace of the State of West Bengal. The Nepalis of Darjeeling (incidentally a majority community within the district) express a commonly-held perception that they are stigmatized by the rest of India as being from Nepal, not fully Indian citizens (Wenner, 2013). There is also antagonism relating to an economic and development neglect by the West Bengal administration, post-independence. The conflict is popularly presented by local politicians as a ‘“mato ka prashna” (the land/identity question)’, an outcome of a tyrannical control of local land, water, forest resources by an outsider alien Bengali dominated State of West Bengal (Sarkar, 2010, p. 114). A separate state of Gorkhaland is thus presented as a panacea to all forms of wrongs and injustice prevalent in the region. However, as I will describe below, while a tyrannical “alien” State is readily blamed, the Gorkhaland conflict appears to reproduce principles of the coercive State in a region that is criss-crossed by historical and ethno-political injustices (Wenner, 2013, Chettri, 2013).

Local politicians point to the enduring water supply crisis as a key marker of the politico-spatial injustice: ‘… in terms of infrastructure, …nothing has been added to… the water supply…[to] whatever the British had planned [then] for 3,000 people in Darjeeling town, [even though the population] is over 3 lakhs [300,000]’ (Wenner, 2013, p. 209). The under-investment in the region by the West Bengal administration is aggravated by the fact that, ‘although the Himalayan region is a source of countless perennial rivers, paradoxically the mountain people depend largely on [groundwater] springs for their sustenance’ (Tambe et al., 2012, 62). Access to groundwater is not easy in these hard rock mountain aquifers. Water supply governance here contradicts popular ‘“fixed-position, theoretically normative claims” of justice and solidarity as being synonymous with certain specific institutional models’ (Castree, 2011, p. 45). In the Darjeeling region, community, state and market-based approaches to manage water operate as hybrid systems. These hybrid arrangements of water delivery are nested in entrenched political, social, economic injustices and symptomatic of a democracy deficit evident in the wider political, social and economic setting. Not only is it impossible to identify “a certain, right institutional approach” to managing water, water supply injustices are also obscured by other competing political priorities.

But not all water injustices remain unnoticed. Since the early 2000s, the Teesta basin in the Eastern Himalaya has been the target of ambitious hydropower development plans. These developments are fuelled in part by the global re-positioning of large dams producing hydropower as climate mitigating green development; as well as by national interests relating to energy needs for economic growth (Ahlers et al., 2015). The hydropower projects have drawn attention of national and regional environmental activists, who question dam construction activities in the climate-vulnerable Eastern Himalaya waterscape; as well as skewed human-environment implications as a consequence of dam construction. Several reports highlight the procedural and distributional aspects of injustice: the institutional modalities through which environmental clearances and contracts have been awarded to private and public sector hydro-power entrepreneurs with scarce local community consultation; as well as the short- and long-term livelihood risks and challenges for marginal project-affected communities (Dubey et al., 2005, Bhattacharya et al., 2012, The Asia Foundation, 2013, Huber and Joshi, 2013).

What I discuss here is the fact that the contestations against dam building in the lower Teesta region of Darjeeling district are largely led by scientists, researchers and activists, who Holifield et al. (2009, p. 364) would describe as being ‘independent, “placeless”’ in the sense of not being from the area, and therefore likely lacking a certain intimate familiarity and [situated] attachment’ with the socio-political history of the region. Locally, there is an intriguing silence and inaction, both in relation to the enduring water supply crisis, as well as over recent contentious development of mega hydropower projects. The silence makes for an interesting contrast on the one hand with the articulate “outsider-led” contestations of hydropower projects as well with four decades of an intense internal political conflict for a separate state of Gorkhaland, a conflict essentially positioned as an “ethnoenvironmental injustice” (Anthias and Radcliffe, in press). What are the reasons for this silence? Why do recent contestations against dam building miss out on noticing the enduring old water supply injustices? In asking these questions it is interesting to reflect on Forsyth’s (2014, p. 230) analysis that, ‘So far, environmental politics does not consider deeply enough how or with whose concerns, justice is… [framed and] applied’.

In sum, water problems in the Darjeeling region appear embedded in ‘historically entrenched configurations of unequal spatial developments and legacies of socio-political contestations’ (McFarlane, 2011, p. 380). At a workshop organised locally in 2012, a participant expressed, ‘The problem is not waterwater is only one manifest of everything else that is wrong here. Solutions need to emerge here locally and they need to go beyond water’. This makes for a valid point to review the tenacious links between justice, locational and environmental politics which are often overlooked in a narrow conceptualisation of water governance or injustice.

Section snippets

Methodology

Having spent my childhood and young adult life in the region, water as well as political problems here are not new to me. I recall how the toilets at school were flushed only once in a while, a few times in a week. At home, I remember bathing over a large water tub, reusing the water to wash clothes and then re-using that water to flush the toilets. The possibility to bathe only once a week posed serious practical and social handicaps to me as a young adult. However, I was sufficiently

Water justice essentialisms

Environmental justice (EJ) means different things to different people. There are differences in opinion on the origins of the concept of environmental justice, what constitutes EJ, and where and how it might be applied. The issues I note here are those that best relate to the context of this paper.

There are two main EJ perspectives – distributive and procedural, the former focusing on fair, rightful or equitable distribution and the latter, referring to rights of participation, of inclusion, of

The socio-political context of Darjeeling district

Darjeeling district is currently located in the State of West Bengal and consists of Kalimpong, Kurseong and Darjeeling sub-divisions in the hills and a plains sub-division of Siliguri. The political demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland corresponds only to the three hill sub-divisions, which are currently governed by the newly created [2011] Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA) (see Map 2).

Darjeeling district was once part of the Kingdom of Sikkim, Bhutan and the Gorkha Kingdom (current

Wicked water problems in Kalimpong

Kalimpong town spreads geographically along a mountain ridge overlooking the river Teesta. The diverse ethnic make-up of the town reveals the region’s convoluted political history discussed above. This small, hitherto ‘water un-researched’ town with a population of 74,746 residents (2011 Census, Government of India) makes for an intriguing case to analyse the intersections of justice and water. Firstly, a silence and inaction around an enduring domestic water scarcity in the town contrast with

Water, the good and the bad ‘State’

The effectiveness and appropriateness of the state’s role in just water management is a topic of much dispute. On the one hand, neo-liberal prescriptions that call for a State withdrawal from public services have been identified as a dramatic loss of the welfare (Indian) state and its official intent to address the fundamental right to water (Cullet, 2009). And yet, the official intent to basic rights to water is often described as no more than a ‘mere declaration on paper’ (Iyer, 2007, p. 23).

The community, the collective, and public access to water

In Kalimpong whether one is connected or not to the official water supply system, one must pay to have access to water. This is the reality, unless one is a VIP (Very Important Person) living in or around the locations which house senior government officials, where the official infrastructure is best maintained; or endowed with water resources, i.e. natural springs located in one’s private lands. In the deeply feudal agrarian social structure of Kalimpong, such privileges are not available for

Neoliberalism and the commodification of water

As discussed above, an illegal water market functions within the dis-functional state and illegal payments are sourced to the official and political hierarchies. In addition, a formal water market, registered as the Kalimpong Water Supply Drivers’ Welfare Association is the lifeline of most residents and businesses in the town. Such a local market is obviously quite different to water markets described in the context of neo-liberalism (Bakker, 2007). However, the monopolistic ways in which it

Emerging new water injustices – the hydropower projects

In the introduction section, I discussed how the recent hydropower development in the Teesta basin as in the Eastern Himalayan region in general are fuelled by claims of renewable energy (hydropower) to mitigate climate change. ‘[B]ut, it is unclear how these projects will risk being skewed for marginal mountain communities in a region that is not only geologically and ecologically unique, but also politically fragile. Further, the seismic activity in the region makes it disproportionally

Conclusion

How anecdotal is this story of uneven, complex challenges around water in the Darjeeling district and, what relevance does the story hold for contemporary thinking around water and justice? I have tried to analyse these issues in the light of normative claims of justice identified as synonymous with certain institutional models of water governance (Castree, 2011) as well as in relation to the epistemic separation of justice as related only to ‘water’.

In the Darjeeling region, the silence

Acknowledgements

This study was facilitated initially by a co-funded grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Project reference: W.07.04.030.225 and currently through a Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) CoCooN – Conflict and Cooperation in the Management of Climate Change – Integrated Project, Project reference: W.07.68.413. Special thanks are due to Roshan P Rai, Shikha Rai, Kavisha Dixit, Radha Mohini

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    I am interested in analysing the drivers and processes of policy reforms, understanding how policies evolve within different institutional cultures and the structures and power hierarchies which shape practice. I have researched the gendered impacts of development interventions and have conducted water-equity policy research. I am also involved in education and research capacity building initiatives in South and South East and Africa on the above issues. My current research looks at how climate change discourse reshapes environmental policy and interventions, and thereby justice. An ongoing research looks at the re-emergence of large dams as climate-mitigating “clean energy” hydropower projects in the climate-vulnerable Eastern Himalaya. The research focuses on how these developments overlay with complex, contextual dimensions of ethnicity, gender and democracy.

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