Conflict and co-operation over water across three canals of Peri-Urban Gurgaon
Student name: Mr Pratik Mishra
Guide: Dr Smriti Das
Year of completion: 2015
Host Organisation: Management Development Institute
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr Vishal Narain
Abstract: This dissertation brings out the findings of a study done on the social dynamics related with wateruse in the transitory and dynamic setting of periurban Gurgaon. The context of research is three canals; the GWS canal and NCR channel that transport water to water treatment plants to supply water to the city, passing through the country side, and the GJ (Gurgaon Jhajjar Canal) that carries wastewater from the city to the countryside, which is widely used for irrigation. These canals represent the flows of water between the rural and the urban, and explore patterns of social interaction around these flows of water, patterns of water insecurity and vulnerability and emerging forms of conflict and cooperation in a context of climatic variability and change. The approach taken is ethnographic, and frameworks such as ‘sociotechnical regimes’ and ‘symbolic discourses’ around land and water give importance to integrating technological instruments and artefacts into social research, and explore cultural meanings attached to economic resources respectively. The research looks at institutions that emerge informally in mediating access to resources and the overtandcovert forms of conflict embedded within them, as well as their role in facilitating cooperation in the absence of statutory law. In doing so, it uncovers a diversity of interestpositions among actors determined by their class and caste, but more so by their cropping choice, topography of land holding and means for irrigation.
