Seeing like a Hydrocrat: A critical institutional ethnography of India's hydraulic state

Abstract

Globally and historically, top-down and technical solutions to water problems have considered the flow of river water to the sea as a waste that must be harnessed to meet society’s needs. Solutions involve the construction of large dams for redistributing water and wealth, displacing people and destroying ecology by altering entire waterscapes. Tied to aspirations of modernity and nationalism, this hydraulic mission is led by the State, and within it steered by, towering water bureaucracies or hydrocracies, manned by hydrocrats— government functionaries with technical expertise on water—entrusted with this mission. Water crisis in India is worsening with climate change. Drawing on preliminary qualitative research, this project proposal aims to contribute to a major theoretical gap on India’s hydrocracy.

Critics of this mission’s socio-environmental impacts have instigated institutional reform policy of hydrocracies to incorporate diverse perspectives on water governance. In response, hydrocracies have remained intransigent to maintain their authority. Attentive to these challenges, I ask: How did the mandate of India's central hydrocracy change with the country's evolving water challenges since its establishment 1945? How does its institutional structure and power relations shape hydrocrats’ practices? Why have hydrocrats been able to resist attempts towards deep institutional reform of the hydrocracy and how have they been able to do it? This project is novel and important in its direct engagement with hydrocrats at the highest level of India’s national water decision making and proposes a critical institutional ethnography of the Central Water Commission to address a long-standing impasse in India’s water discourse.