www.water-alternatives.org Volume 10 | Issue 2 Luxion, M. 2017. Nation-building, industrialisation, and spectacle: Political functions of Gujarat’s Narmada Pipeline Project. Water Alternatives 10(2): 208-232 Nation-Building, Industrialisation, and Spectacle: Political Functions of Gujarat’s Narmada Pipeline Project Mona Luxion School of Urban Planning, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada; [email protected] ABSTRACT: Since 2000 the Indian state of Gujarat has been working to construct a state-wide water grid to connect 75% of its approximately 60 million urban and rural residents to drinking water sourced from the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River. This project represents a massive undertaking – it is billed as the largest drinking water project in the world – and is part of a broader predilection toward large, concrete-heavy supply-side solutions to water insecurity across present-day India. This paper tracks the claims and narratives used to promote the project, the political context in which it has emerged, the purposes it serves and, following Ferguson (1990), the functioning of the discursive-bureaucratic 'machine' of which it is a product. The dam’s reinvention as the solution to Gujarat’s drinking water shortfall – increasingly for cities and Special Industrial Regions – reflects a concern with attracting and retaining foreign investment through the creation of so- called 'world-class' infrastructure. At the same time, this reinvention has contributed to a project of nation- building, while remaining cloaked in a discourse of technological neutrality. The heavy infrastructure renders visible Gujarat’s commitment to 'development' even when that promise has yet to be realised for many, while the promise of Narmada water gives Gujarat’s leaders political capital with favoured investors and political supporters. In conclusion, I suggest that the success of infrastructure mega-projects as a political tool is not intrinsically tied to their ability to achieve their technical and social objectives. Instead, the 'spectacle' of ambitious infrastructural development projects may well yield political gains that outweigh, for a time, the real- world costs of their inequity and unsustainability. KEYWORDS: Development, Sardar Sarovar Dam, Narmada pipeline project, anti-politics, Gujarat INTRODUCTION In 2000, the Government of Gujarat (GoG) set out to construct a state-wide water grid to connect 75% of the state’s approximately 60 million urban and rural residents to drinking water sourced from the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River (SSNNL, n.d.). This has been the Government of Gujarat’s primary response to the issue of water scarcity for domestic and industrial use, replacing local dam- and groundwater-based schemes across the state (Hirway and Goswami, 2008; GIDB 2009; interview with Nafisa Barot, 14 May 2013). Known as the Sardar Sarovar Canal Based Drinking Water Supply Project, or more colloquially as the Narmada Pipeline Project, the water grid represents a massive undertaking in its own right – it is billed as the largest drinking water project in the world – and is an expansion of the original plan for the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam, which primarily serves irrigation and hydroelectric purposes (Fisher, 1995; Vyas, 2001; Aandahl, 2010; SSNNL, n.d.). It comes at a time when large infrastructure solutions to water shortages seem to be gaining renewed attention across India – including revived discussion of a nation-wide river-linking scheme (Bagla, 2014) – and has led to copy- cat projects in Telangana and Maharashtra (The Hindu, 2015; Vyas, 2016). While the Sardar Sarovar Dam is sometimes called the most studied dam in the world (Patel, 1995), the majority of that research has focused on justifying the dam (Pathak, 1991; Narayan, 2001; Vyas, 2001), the upstream human and environmental impacts of the dam (Baviskar, 1999; Morse and Berger, Luxion: Political functions of Gujarat’s Narmada Pipeline Project Page | 208 Water Alternatives - 2017 Volume 10 | Issue 2 1992), the flawed resettlement process (Kothari, 1996; Drèze, et al., 1997; Dwivedi, 1999; D’Souza, 2002), and the anti-dam movement and legal battle surrounding its construction (Fisher, 1995; Jain, 2001; Dwivedi, 2006; Cullet, 2007; Parasuraman, et al., 2010). Aandahl (2010) has looked at the justification, design, and implementation of the irrigation component, while Mehta (2001, 2005) looks at the discourses of scarcity used to justify the dam. This paper – part of a larger research project on low-income people’s access to water in urban Gujarat – looks at the way the Narmada Pipeline Project has been presented by state officials and discussed in media coverage to understand the way that it functions discursively and politically. The drinking water component of the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) has been understudied so far, and presents some interesting features due to being a type of heavy infrastructure that is rarely seen on this scale, and coinciding with governance reforms in Gujarat at the turn of the millennium. Situating the conception and construction of the drinking water grid within a context of economic liberalisation, governance reform, and state-level nation-building, I examine what the concepts of the developmental state (Johnson, 1982) and the anti-politics machine (Ferguson, 1990) can contribute to understanding the recurring appeal of such concrete-heavy, supply-side responses to drinking water scarcity. In order to fulfil these objectives, I read Government of Gujarat (GoG) publications on water policy and the pipeline project, scholarly publications by state officials involved in the project, and English- language local newspaper coverage of the project between 2000 and 2015. Interviews with six civil society observers (academics and activists) and three state bureaucrats also helped guide my thinking. Unfortunately, due perhaps to the controversies which have dogged the SSP since its inception, the few state bureaucrats who did agree to meet me were reluctant to discuss decision-making processes or share master planning documents, leaving me reliant on secondary sources to understand the ways the project has evolved over time and the motivations for various decisions. In that regard academic publications by (former) state officials, as well as Aandahl’s (2010) extensive interviews with decision- makers involved in earlier master-planning processes, proved very useful. The Government of Gujarat publications consulted include Gujarat Jal-Disha 2010 (GSDWICL), Blueprint for Infrastructure Gujarat 2020 (GIDB), Building Partnerships and Working Together (WASMO), as well as the contents of the websites of the Gujarat Infrastructure Development Board (GIDB), Gujarat Water Infrastructure Limited (GWIL), Gujarat Water Service and Sanitation Board (GWSSB), Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd. (SSNNL), and Water and Sanitation Management Organisation (WASMO). Academic publications by government officials include articles by Andrea Biswas-Tortajada (WASMO), Jay Narayan Vyas (Minister for Narmada and Major Irrigation Projects), and Rajiv K Gupta (SSNNL). Finally, I conducted a search of the online archives of Ahmedabad editions of the Times of India, Economic Times, DNA India, and the Indian Express for articles containing the terms Narmada or Sardar Sarovar between January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2015. HISTORY AND CONTEXT Before we look at the Narmada pipeline project itself, some historical background will prove useful. Located along the coast and adjacent to modern-day Pakistan, the area of present-day Gujarat has a long tradition of trade and migration and has long had not only Hindu, Muslim and Jain communities but also Jewish and Parsi (Zoroastrian) ones (Ibrahim, 2007). Over time, different regions have come under the rule of various local rulers or invading forces, creating a complex historical/cultural patchwork of political power. After the British East India Company conquered the Maratha empire in the early 19th century, the region was broken down into a mix of princely states and areas under the direct administration of the British Bombay Presidency, most of which were merged into Bombay State at India’s independence. Luxion: Political functions of Gujarat’s Narmada Pipeline Project Page | 209 Water Alternatives - 2017 Volume 10 | Issue 2 Independence and the creation of Gujarat Post-independence, the rise of movements for ethno-linguistically defined states highlighted tensions between Marathi-speakers in the southern part of Bombay State and Gujarati-speakers in the north (Yagnik and Sheth, 2005). The Mahagujarat (literally, great Gujarat) movement for the creation of a Gujarati state grew throughout the 1950s, culminating with the separation of Bombay State into Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960. An important part of the Mahagujarat movement was the construction, at least on paper, of a unified Gujarat out of four distinct regions which have little historical or cultural basis of unity (Simpson and Kapadia, 2010). This construction was largely an endeavour of middle- and upper-class Hindus and Jains in the south/central cities of Ahmedabad, Vadodara (Baroda), and Surat, whose strong labour unions were the backbone of the movement, and the image of essential Gujarati identity that they fashioned was unsurprisingly in their image (Bobbio, 2012; Simpson, 2013). The placement of the state’s new capital, Gandhinagar, has only reinforced the role of south Gujarat as the state’s cultural and political heartland.