Some 350 people must have been packed into every crevice of the auditorium at Goa University last week. The occasion, the launch of the anthology The River Mhadei: The Science and Politics of Diversion and a screening of an accompanying documentary, might have been “academic”, but the gathering decidedly wasn’t. Aside from the usual suspects of journalists, activists, and civil society groups, you could see urban professionals standing next to women from riverine communities. The turnout gestures at the depth of feeling the River Mhadei or Mahadayi—called the Mandovi in its lower reaches—inspires within Goan society.
A tripartite water-sharing dispute around the Mhadei has been simmering since the 1970s. The river originates at the Bhimgad Wildlife Sanctuary in the Western Ghats in Karnataka. From there, joined by several tributaries, it flows westward through Goa before its terminus in the Arabian Sea.
Karnataka has sought to divert water from tributaries of the Mhadei to supply its drought-prone northern districts. In 1985, the state also proposed a 35MW hydroelectric project. Goa, however, insists that any diversion would devastate the ecosystems and communities that depend on this “lifeline”. Though initially shelved after Goan protests, the issue resurfaced in 2002 with the Kalasa-Banduri Nala project, Karnataka’s plan to divert 7.56 thousand million cubic feet (TMC) from two tributaries to supply water to Belgaum, Gadag, and Dharwad. Meanwhile, in 2006, Maharashtra entered the dispute by building a dam at Virdi without clearances. Goa’s renewed objections led to the establishment of the Mahadayi Water Disputes Tribunal in 2010, which eight years later awarded Karnataka 13.4 TMC, Goa 24 TMC, and Maharashtra 1.33 TMC. Still, the matter remains tied up in the Supreme Court, and under the tribunal’s award the next review is only in 2048, a quarter-century away.
The book, published by Goa 1556, is Goa’s contribution to the discourse, but it represents something unprecedented in India’s water-dispute literature. Funded by the British Academy, it brings together an “epistemic collective”— contributors ranging from political scientists and oceanographers to naturalists, cultural theorists, educationists, and constitutional lawyers. Tribunal proceedings typically tend to be dominated by complex, technical reports, but the anthology attempts to understand the river through a variety of lenses: geological, ecological, cultural, legal, and economic.
Its underlying premise is radical: rivers cannot be conceived of purely through the narrow expertise of irrigation engineers and hydrologists, but require the full spectrum of human knowledge about how these systems actually function in the world.
But during the discussion that followed the formal launch, this multidisciplinary approach was challenged by a deceptively simple question from the audience: why can’t Goa share its water when 96 per cent of it is allocated to the state anyway? It cuts to the heart of this decades-long dispute.
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Costs of the ‘common good’
It’s a fair question. On the face of it, asking a state to give up less than 4 per cent of a river’s flow to help parched districts seems not just reasonable, but moral.
But as Peter Ronald deSouza, one of the book’s three editors (with Solano Da Silva and Lakshmi Subramanian), explained to me during an interview, there is no straightforward answer. It masks a deeper ethical problem about who bears the burden when we invoke the “greater common good”.
“The greater common good tells you that you, who are going to be affected by something, should bear the burden so that someone else will get the benefit — very often a vaguely defined concept of ‘the nation,’” deSouza said. The political scientist has served as the director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and was the co-director of the Lokniti Programme of Comparative Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
Referring to India’s landmark water disputes, deSouza pointed out that a “proximate community” is often asked to suffer for a “distant community”. “But how much burden should you bear before it becomes unbearable?” he asked.
The book’s contributors grapple seriously with this moral complexity, but they also challenge the zero-sum premise itself. What if the real problem isn’t how to divide the river fairly, but the assumption that rivers can be divided at all?
Several essays in the book reflect this position.
Environmentalist Rajendra P Kerkar’s entry, ‘Conserving the Mahadayi: Biodiversity, Water, and Cultural Resources’, takes an expansive look at what stands to be lost if the Mhadei is diverted.
“The Mahadayi basin is a tiger corridor, a bison resort, a bear habitat, a king cobra host and the only home in the world to Wroughton’s freetailed bat (Otomops wroughtoni),” Kerkar writes. The region supports an extraordinary range of wildlife that includes 25 mammal species, 120 bird species, and more than 170 medicinal plants. But perhaps most striking is its botanical richness: the Western Ghats harbour 27 per cent of India’s flowering plants, including 84 orchid species with high levels of endemism.
Environmental advocate Parineeta Dandekar exposes the utter dysfunction behind India’s water disputes in ‘Abundant Mother Goddess or Scarce, Contested Resource? The Life and Times of the River Mhadei’.
She offers a trenchant critique of the testimony offered by hydrological experts in the tribunal.
“A seemingly simple issue of knowing how much water flows through the Mhadei could not be agreed upon by the three states,” she writes. Even with identical data sources from the Central Water Commission and National Hydrological Institute, the three states presented wildly different flow projections. “[The tribunal] struggled to arrive at a decision, given that ‘one state would contend that the Mahadayi basin is a surplus basin, whereas another state would contend that it is a deficient state.’”
A case for cynicism
This kind of integrative critique was only possible, deSouza acknowledged, because of the British Academy’s hands-off funding approach. “We promised the academy four things and delivered on all counts: a research community, an edited book, a film, and a repository. They gave us full freedom to design and implement,” he said. This also allowed the contributors to follow their analysis wherever it led —including toward some sceptical conclusions.
“In India you have to be very cynical,” deSouza told me bluntly. “Governments will say they want water for consumption, and then divert it to industry. Should I trust the government of Karnataka that this water is for drought-affected areas or for the sugarcane plantations in another part of the state?”
He also questioned whether the Karnataka government had exhausted other possibilities, such as addressing water loss in transmission and the treatment of waste water. “Nagpur does a lot of waste-water recycling. But does Hubli? Does Dharwad? If we attend to these areas, we may not even need the diversion of the river.”
Altogether, the essays make the case for treating the river as an integrated living system, greater than the sum of its parts. Every component — the headwater springs deep in the forest, the sacred pools, the khazan wetlands that protect Goa from flooding — represents an ecological and cultural continuum.
Still, Goa’s passionate defence of this all-encompassing vision sits uncomfortably alongside its own treatment of the river.
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Goa’s own contradictions
A tiny state that’s willing to fight two mighty ones in court simultaneously allows the Mandovi’s degradation. The offshore casinos that dot the river’s promenade don’t just signal an “enclosure of the commons”. Untreated sewage leads to a proliferation of harmful levels of coliform bacteria. Illegal sand mining has caused riverbank collapses in several Goan villages.
Documentary filmmaker Gasper D’Souza, who has directed and edited Maa Dei Mother Goddess, captured this contradiction in a single evening’s journey. While shooting the film, D’Souza and cinematographer Shrinivas Ananathanarayanan travelled to Chorla Ghats to film the source of the Mhadei. “From Chorla, you see these two enchanting waterfalls side by side. It was very loud, and then it got dusky and they looked silver by the light,” D’Souza told me.
Later that evening, when the duo returned to Panjim, they were greeted by the casinos on the riverfront. “It was full of tourist boats and gaudy lights, and it made me think: What have we done to the river?”
I wonder if casinos will remain a concern at the next hearing in 2048. By then, climate change will have made water conflicts even more intense across India. Will we continue to think of rivers as engineering puzzles? I asked deSouza what changes he hopes to see at the next tribunal hearing. “The first thing I would change is that Inter-State Water Tribunals cannot only be state-centric,” he told me. “The experts who are called in must come with greater preparation, and must be subjected to critical interrogation.”
Only governments are formally entitled to make presentations right now, but the forum must be open to other types of knowledge. Future tribunals should hear from cultural theorists alongside irrigation engineers, community organisations as well as legal experts. “We want everyone to see the river as a living entity.”
This article is part of the Goa Life series, which explores the new and the old of Goan culture.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Absolutely! You are spot on.
And yet, India and Pakistan had agreed to divide the Indus river basin waters under the treaty facilitated by the World Bank.
Why did you not come up with this “logic” back then? Or do you subscribe to this “logic” now?
If this is the case, why don’t you champion the case of granting all waters to Pakistan, since, by your own logic “a living river cannot be divided like property”.
As long as things benefit your home state of Punjab, you would not utter a word against it. For others, the yardstick is different, isn’t it?