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Interweaving the human aspects of river control with analysis of hydro-physical data, including historical data over the last few centuries, this monograph is a comprehensive evaluation of the Damodar’s lower reaches. While the Damodar River isn’t an exceptional tropical river, nor does it feature classic examples of river control structures, it is unusual and worthy of study due to the fact that nowhere else in the tropical world have riverine sandbars been used as a resource base as well as for permanent settlements. Based on their knowledge of river stages, the inhabitants have fine-tuned their land use to flood events, applying a concept of flood zoning to the riverbed. Every available space has been utilized rationally and judiciously. This rare human-environmental study analyzes the remarkable way in which immigrants unfamiliar with the riverine environment have adapted to the altered hydrologic regime of the river. In doing so they have demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the flood regime and the vagaries of an unpromising environment in their land use, cropping and settlement patterns. Spurred on by restricted social and economic mobility and sometimes political constraints, these self-settled refugees have learned to adapt to their environment and live with the floods. Bhattacharyya’s text is particularly timely, as anthropogenic processes of this kind have not been adequately studied by geographers.
Food was a critical front in the Cold War battle for Asia. “Where Communism goes, hunger follows” was the slogan of American nation builders who fanned out into the countryside to divert rivers, remodel villages, and introduce tractors, chemicals, and genes to multiply the crops consumed by millions. This “green revolution” has been credited with averting Malthusian famines, saving billions of lives, and jump-starting Asia’s economic revival. Bono and Bill Gates hail it as a model for revitalizing Africa’s economy. But this tale of science triumphant conceals a half century of political struggle from the Afghan highlands to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, a campaign to transform rural societies by changing the way people eat and grow food. The ambition to lead Asia into an age of plenty grew alongside development theories that targeted hunger as a root cause of war. Scientific agriculture was an instrument for molding peasants into citizens with modern attitudes, loyalties, and reproductive habits. But food policies were as contested then as they are today. While Kennedy and Johnson envisioned Kansas-style agribusiness guarded by strategic hamlets, Indira Gandhi, Marcos, and Suharto inscribed their own visions of progress onto the land. Out of this campaign, the costliest and most sustained effort for development ever undertaken, emerged the struggles for resources and identity that define the region today. As Obama revives the lost arts of Keynesianism and counter-insurgency, the history of these colossal projects reveals bitter and important lessons for today’s missions to feed a hungry world.
Across the South Asian region, water determines livelihoods and in some cases even survival. However, water also creates exclusions. Access to water, and its social organisation, are intimately tied up with power relations. This book provides an overview of gender, equity and water issues relevant to South Asia. The essays empirically illustrate and theoretically argue how gender intersects with other axes of social difference such as class, caste, ethnicity, age and religion to shape water access, use and management practices. Divided into six thematic sections, each of which starts with an introduction of relevant concepts, debates and theories, the book looks at laws and rights; policies; technologies and intervention strategies. In all, the book clearly shows how understanding and changing the use, distribution and management of water is conditional upon understanding and accommodating gender relations. Published by Zubaan.
Fresh water is one of man's most vital needs. The distribution of water within river basins has a direct bearing on the organization of water resources development to meet this ever-expanding need. River basins, despite their very great diversity in other respects, have one physical characteristic in common: each is a more or less self-contained unit within whose bounds all the surface and part or all of the ground waters form an interconnected, interdependent system. This inter dependence has such far-reaching implications - for pollution and flood control, apportionment of supply, relations between upstream and downstream riparians, to mention only a few examples - that the river basin has become almost universally accepted (within the past 20 or 30 years at least) as the unit of optimal water resources de velopment. Professor Teclaff's work (which was originally submitted to the New York University School of Law as a doctoral dissertation) is the first fully developed response to the important resolution passed by the International Law Association at its New York meeting in I958 recognizing the legal nature of the international river basin. His study quite properly, therefore, poses the question whether the adoption of the river basin unit is a temporary phenomenon, reflecting the current stage of technology and of administrative, economic, and legal thought on water resources development, or whether the de terminative influence of the river basin's physical unity which has always operated in the past will continue to operate in the future.
