Towards Water Democracy
By Vandana Shiva

» Rivers are central to the prosperity and survival of Indian civilization. While our cultural heritage perceives water as the basis of all life, the contemporary approach treats water as raw material input for agriculture and industry commodity production. It generates a misconception that large manmade structures can augment water resources. The engineering bias in water supply decisions results in large projects that produce serious social and ecological instability and generate conflict.

The water cycle is the basic metaphor for ecological balance and maintaining the water cycle is a precondition for a just economic order in which neither marginal communities nor future generations are denied their right to water. Water conflicts provide an opportunity to reassess water use strategies so that our actions are in harmony with rivers. According to Aldo Leopold, the elementary step in learning how to use water effectively is to learn the logic of the river. Respecting the integrity of the river amounts to respecting all life that the river supports. Violence to the river is violence to the communities inhabiting a river basin. The resolution of conflicts over river water requires an ecological reorientation in water use which combines justice with sustainability.

Large Dams as Instruments of Hydro-Dictatorship
Rivers flowing freely distribute life-giving waters across regions and to all species, plants and animals, humans and microbes. Rivers locked in dams centralize power and control over water.

The capacity to divert rivers from their natural course increased dramatically in the post-colonial period with the transfer of large dam technology and a new culture of gigantism, financed by public funds from the U.S. With the technological euphoria of dam building came ecological disruption and social conflicts. These problems are aggravated in India because we are a riparian civilization which evolved in a monsoon climate. Most of India’s river valleys are highly populated and rivers provide the primary life-support systems for our riparian settlements.

Large dams, intensive irrigation and water diversions undermine stability creating ecological refugees, ecological destruction and political conflict. Human and cultural rights issues are intimately linked with the ecological destruction of large water infrastructure projects. Displaced people are, of course, in direct conflict with those who benefit from large dams and massive irrigation systems. And when dams and canals ultimately increase water loss (through evaporation and seepage) and destroy farmland, even the ‘beneficiaries’ of dams join the fight against state-planned water infrastructure projects. Changes in water flows also generate potentially deadly conflicts between the people and the state, and also between states.

World Bank’s Role in Financing Large Dams
The World Bank is the world’s leading driver of large dams. Millions of people have been displaced and millions of acres of farmland wasted due to water logging and salinization by World Bank water projects. World Bank projects have left India with nearly $5 billion dollars of water related loans. On this huge sum, at the rate of 11 percent per year, India must pay around $530 million dollars annual interest to the World Bank.

The World Bank uses its loans as leverage to force water privatization. Privatization converts the universal water access of public utilities to privileged access for industry and guaranteed supply for rich urban areas. The World Bank forces governments and public utilities to increase water tariffs and to commodify water, undermining people’s fundamental right to water as part of the right to life. World Bank loans fail to bring water to people — despite these projects India faces a severe water crisis. They do, however, successfully guarantee contracts and profits for international water corporations like Suez, Vivendi and Bechtel.

The Indian government’s proposed $200 billion River Linking Project is a prime, and unfortunate, demonstration that we have not yet learned the lessons of mega-diversions and mega-dams. The first step in this nationwide (World Bank financed) water project is the construction of a 73-meter-high (240 foot or 24 story) dam on the Ken River in Bundelkhand and a 231-kilometer-long (1,423 mile) canal connecting the Ken and Betwa Rivers. Seventy-five percent of the project’s cost (estimated at 20 billion rupees or $500 million) will be extracted from the local peasants from various taxes imposed over the next 25 years. To ensure locals can pay the tax hike, the government is pressuring farms to switch from traditional crops to water-intensive commodity crops.

The project has severe ecological and cultural consequences. Fifty square kilometers of Panna Tiger National Park, the natural homeland of 10 endangered species listed under India’s Wildlife Protection Act, would be submerged and hundreds of thousands of trees would be cut. The project’s total of five dams would displace around 18 villages. The Ken-Betwa Link Canal would go through places where traditional irrigation has been practiced successfully for the last 500 years.

But the people of the region are determined to resist the river-linking project. As a result of the growing Water Democracy Movement the state government of Uttar Pradesh has refused to transfer the water of the Ken. Every village in the basin has passed a resolution declaring that water is a commons and that community rights have to be the basis of any water plan or project. As a local organizer said to me, “They destroyed Iraq with bombs. But patents on seeds and diversion of rivers are also bombs that will destroy us. That is why we must resist them.” Far away from the glare of global media, ordinary people are making history, not by organizing arms to fight a brutal empire but by self-organizing their lives — their resources, their cultures, their economies — to defeat the empire by turning their back to it, rejecting its tools and its logic, refusing its chains and its dictatorship.

Waterkeepers in India
Waterkeepers in India are working to protect the integrity of rivers and the rights of riparian communities. We have taken up four rivers — the Ganga, the Yamuna, the Ken and the Betwa, all of which are part of the larger Ganges system.

One of our creative approaches is to organize River Pilgrimages (Jal Yatras) such as Ganga Yatras, Yamuna Yatras and Ken Yatras. In our organizing we have realized that we need to build on the concept and cultural experience of rivers as sacred. We need to combine the rights of people (justice) with the rights of the river (sustainability). On August 15, 2007, India’s Independence Day, as part of the Yamuna Satyagraha, we put a flag of India in the Yamuna River, declaring that the freedom of the country was based on the freedom of our rivers to flow free.

Our most significant new dimension of organizing is linking climate change to the issue of rivers and dams. Scientific research shows that glaciers are rapidly receding as a result of global warming. The glacial melt will initially lead to floods by increasing river flows by 90 percent. Dams will fail both during the flooding phase and when water flows decrease. Large Dams are dinosaurs in an era of climate change — too big, too clumsy, too inflexible to survive a period of uncertainty and change. And this is our challenge — to make them dinosaurs in the public imagination with only one future: extinction.

The alternative for the future is water democracy (Jal Swaraj). If large dams are obsolete in a period of climate change and rapid changes in water regimes, then we need alternatives — alternatives that can survive climate chaos and help mitigate and adapt to an unpredictable climate. Decentralization and democracy are keys to adaption. Centralized undemocratic systems collapse under stress, under uncertainty. Decentralized and democratic systems can adapt because of flexibility and participation.