Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State

The South Asia Center at Syracuse University presents Leela Fernandez. The impact of climate change weaves together structures of inequality, developmental pressures and stresses on water resources. The increasing intensity of cycles of droughts and floods exacerbates the strains on the governance of water.  Water is a resource that involves governmental action across all levels of India’s federal structure and consequently illuminates every facet of the Indian state.  This multifarious nature of water provides the analytical and empirical terrain through which we can disentangle the various facets of the Indian state and its democratic institutions. Governing Water in India illustrates that processes of regulatory reform designed to strengthen democratic institutions through decentralization have in fact intensified state centralization.  These patterns of  centralization are shaped by and in turn reproduce intersecting forms of socio-economic inequality based on divisions of caste, class, gender and rural/urban locality. This book focuses on how such institutional practices structure access to water resources in inequitable ways. An understanding of such institutional practices is a precondition to developing effective solutions to global problems of inequality, development and the environment. Governing Water in India illustrates the gritty, granular and prosaic practices of the state that shape, cripple and enable such solutions.

Leela Fernandes is a political scientist who has written widely about inequality and change. She has published numerous books and articles on inequality and democratic politics in contemporary India and on contemporary feminism in the U.S and internationally. Her latest book is Governing Water in India:  Inequality, Reform and the State (University of Washington Press, 2022 and available as an open access book). She previously taught at the University of Michigan as the Glenda Dickerson Collegiate Professor of Women’s Studies, Rutgers University, The University of Washington and Oberlin College. At Michigan she served as the Director of the Center for South Asian Studies and was a senior fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows and at the University of Washington she served as the Director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.