Revitalization of Rivers in India Draft Policy - Isha Guru Jaggi Vasudev

Revitalization of Rivers In India
Draft Policy Recommendation
The introduction of property rights by the British colonial regime
did the most irreversible damage to the ethos and the consciousness of
the Indian people. The property rights of land introduced by the British
have triggered a set of consequences to agriculture, the brunt of which
is still palpable and borne by the small and marginalized farmers. The
agriculture practices that farmers follow today are to facilitate trade of
goods rather than to meet their subsistence needs first.
In the case of water, the regime made all the water bodies the
state’s property. That is the rivers, lakes and ponds which were common
property before now no more belonged to the village or its people who
inhabited their banks. When rivers, lakes and ponds were common
property, the villages used to maintain these assets by coming together as
a community and taking turns to maintain them. This community effort
established an intrinsic connection between a river and its people. But
once their rights on these water bodies were snatched, the connection was
severed, and hence the efforts to maintain the rivers were also forgotten.
Even today, post-independence, the rivers still belong to the state. The
states carry the legacy of the British perception that rivers are physical
resources that have to be exploited for human use alone.
The second damage inflicted on the rivers by the British was the
technical approach adopted to manage our rivers, which was a direct
transplant from Europe. The idea to build barrages to control floods and
canals to divert water was structuralist in tradition and reductionist in
nature 40 . This direct transplantation of European knowledge of water
engineering based on European rivers was inappropriate for Indian rivers.
The hydrographs of most European rivers are flat, with very little seasonal
flows seen. The flow of Indian rivers changed seasonally, submerging
the floodplains in the monsoon and draining off in the summers. This
was no aberration to us, but it was to the British. They did not have an
understanding of sediment or how to manage it, nor did they consider
the flooding and draining of rivers as a natural process. Most of the
interventions were to divert the water for irrigation or to generate hydropower.
There was little consideration about the ecology of the river
systems or ecological flows of the river.
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