Social Designs: Tank Irrigation Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka, South India by Esha Shah; Orient Longman, 2003; pages 288, Rs.295.
OVER the last two decades, with the growth of the movement opposed to large dams, most prominently dams constructed on the Narmada, several people have advocated relying on traditional tanks for irrigation. The arguments advanced in favour of them are that they are small and sustainable, and are managed by the local communities that use the water from them. Some also argue that unlike large dams that are linked to a Western scientific tradition, tanks are culturally embedded and so they are appropriate.
In her book Social Designs: Tank Irrigation Technology and Agrarian Transformation in Karnataka, South India, Esha Shah subjects this vision of tank-fed agriculture to careful scrutiny. She does this not through the lenses of cost, capacity to sustain adequate agricultural productivity or the environmental impact (or lack thereof). Rather, Esha Shah uses the design of tanks as a way to examine the social and political implications of a technology that has emerged and is managed in a society that is ridden with class, caste and gender inequalities. The central question that Esha Shah addresses is this: how does a hierarchically organised and inegalitarian social order distribute its water resources when mediated by tank technology? Another question addressed is how "agrarian transformation impinges upon tank technology and the pattern of water utilisation" (page 6).
Esha Shah uses a combination of detailed empirical material on the social and agrarian context of tank irrigation and extensive social anthropological research in Karnataka to address these questions in a careful fashion. The result is a book that should be useful to people interested in a range of subjects - irrigation and water policy, science and technology studies, anthropology, and issues of democratisation and community.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part surveys the larger political economy as it affects tank irrigation, but through a focus on tank designs, how these are influenced by various interests and how they shape other socio-economic activities. Chapter 2, for example, looks at the close connections between tank designs and paddy cultivation. These tank designs then become an obstacle to farmers who want to shift from paddy to other dryland crops. Another chapter traces in great detail the changes in tank designs in response to changing agrarian patterns.
The second half details research on four tanks located in different areas of Karnataka marked by distinctive agro-climatic backgrounds. These tanks reveal a great diversity of design and management and use patterns. There is, for instance, a tank that first supplies water to farmers with land in the tail-end of the canals in the irrigated area, which goes against the customary norm of supplying water to the head-end of the canals. This reversal is owing to tail-end farmers acquiring new economic might and challenging the historically privileged group who owned land at the head-end. Another case is that of a relatively modern tank in a dry, water-starved area that is underutilised because of mismatches between local farming practices and the assumptions underlying the design of the tank and water distribution.
This examination of tank resources comes to some interesting conclusions that fly in the face of an increasingly widespread view that the crisis in natural resource management, including the management of tanks, is because of State interference and that communities should be left to manage resources by themselves. Instead, Esha Shah locates this crisis in a rural elite that is "increasingly less inclined to invest in tank resources" and changes in rural society that preclude reproducing "social arrangements such as canal cleaning, sluice operation and field-to-field irrigation which had largely been shaped by the hierarchical caste relations". There is also the tension between elite farmers in the vicinity of tanks and the Minor Irrigation Department, because the latter may bring in regulations on what to cultivate in the irrigated area as also "normative models of equality of all irrigators" (page 263).
One can draw out two straightforward conclusions from Shah's analysis. First, tanks are by no means the panacea that alternative or traditional science and technology (never mind the problematic nature of those adjectives) enthusiasts posit. Second, local control of natural resources is also not a panacea unless it is accompanied by wide-ranging social and political transformation aimed at achieving deep democratisation and equity. There should be nothing new about the latter conclusion but for the fact that a rhetorical emphasis on local control has become part of the neo-liberal economic paradigm espoused by the World Bank and other agencies as a way of marginalising the state.
Besides irrigation technologies and policies, Social Designs addresses an old theoretical debate about the political properties of technological artefacts. At the risk of gross simplification, one can identify two broad camps. One argues that the properties of a technological artefact are a direct reflection of the social and political system in which it is embedded. Thus, for example, the development of numerous labour saving machines are argued to be owing to the propensity of capitalism to increase profits and reduce dependency on, thereby lowering the power of, the working class. Often missing in this view is an adequate appreciation of and engagement with the technical object itself and its properties - this is certainly not the case with Social Designs. (If anything, one learns more about the designs of tanks than most average readers would care to know.)
The second and much more commonly encountered argument is that the use of certain technologies produces definite political outcomes in the society that uses them. Thus, the political properties are inherent in the artefacts themselves and independent of the agents in society that produce or deploy them. This line of argument is witnessed in a whole series of technologies that have been described as democratising and empowering the weaker sections of society. The Internet is only the most recent in this list; earlier instances include the radio, newspapers, personal computers, and the television.
As its title announces, Social Designs argues that the design of a technological system - which refers not just to the dimensions and locations of physical structures, but also to the rules and roles that operate, maintain and manage these physical structures - is strongly shaped by social relations of power. Once the technology is designed and deployed in the form of an artefact, it institutionalises, sustains and reproduces the social order and power relations that gave rise to that technological artefact. But by the same token, argues Esha Shah, these technological designs could and do become political "sites where conflicts and contestations are articulated", and are thus "vehicles for democratisation" (pages 275-276).
Langdon Winner's famous survey of the debate on this subject from 1986 entitled "Do Artifacts have Politics?" ends with dividing technologies into two categories. The first "have a range of flexibility in the dimensions of their material form... [and] because they are flexible... their consequences for society must be understood with reference to the social actors able to influence which designs and arrangements are chosen." In particular, "specific features in the design or arrangement of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting."
The second category of technologies have "intractable properties" that are "strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalised patterns of power and authority... There are no alternative physical designs or arrangements that would make a significant difference." The archetypal example is the atom bomb. In Winner's words, "As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralised, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way. The state of affairs stands as a practical necessity independent of any larger political system in which the bomb is embedded, independent of the type of regime or character of its rulers."
Though Esha Shah does not go into this categorisation, tanks come through as being more pliable in their character. Indeed, the example of the "tail enders first" tank is used as an illustration of a case where the water distribution practices seem almost as going against the natural dictates of hydrology and fluid mechanics. The driver for this change is, as mentioned earlier, the increasing economic clout of tail-end farmers. Thus the consequences of tanks for society would depend on the power relations that determine their designs. The larger question, of course, is how these power relations, which are often inegalitarian and undemocratic, can be altered.
One easy criticism of just about any book is to list what is not covered adequately. In that vein, at the top of my wish list is a more substantial conclusion chapter that goes substantially beyond summarising the earlier chapters and fully draws out the implications of the findings of the anthropological research for a whole host of issues. For example, how are we to go about bringing about a more equitable and democratic irrigation policy? What are the implications of the empirical findings about the ways in which social power relations shape technological design for the larger theoretical debate on social shaping of technology? Can one, for example, identify characteristics in various technologies that predispose them to be potential vehicles for democratisation? What are the implications of the study for the whole traditional versus modern technology debate? One hopes that future writings from the author would address such subjects. But clearly, she has made a strong and useful beginning in this regard.
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