Large Dams and Changes in an Agrarian Society: Gendering the Impacts of Damodar Valley Corporation in Eastern India

Abstract

This paper traces the gendered changes in agrarian livelihoods in the lower Damodar valley of eastern India and connects these changes to the large dam project of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC). The DVC, established in 1948, was one of the earliest dam projects in India. Although it was not fully completed, the DVC project has initiated unforeseen changes in the farming economy. The floods for which the Damodar river was notorious were not fully controlled, and the suffering of people living in the lower reaches of the valley never really diminished. This paper gives a brief description of the river and its history of water management practices and the roles of women and men in these practices. It traces the resultant impacts on gender roles, and outlines the new kinds of water management that emerged in response to the DVC's failure to provide irrigation water when demanded. More specifically, the paper explores the changes in floods, changes in the farming economy, and the impacts of temporary sand dams or boro bandhs on the livelihoods of women and men from farming families in the Lower Damodar Valley. It observes that even over a longer temporal scale, the changes unleashed by large water control projects have significant and gendered impacts on agrarian societies.

Full text

www.water-alternatives.org Volume 5 | Issue 2
Lahiri-Dutt, K. 2012. Large dams and changes in an agrarian society:
Gendering the impacts of Damodar Valley Corporation in eastern India.
Water Alternatives 5(2): 529-542
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Large Dams and Changes in an Agrarian Society: Gendering the
Impacts of Damodar Valley Corporation in Eastern India
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt
Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program, Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific,
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; kuntala.lahiri-dutt@anu.edu.au
ABSTRACT: This paper traces the gendered changes in agrarian livelihoods in the lower Damodar valley of eastern
India and connects these changes to the large dam project of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC). The DVC,
established in 1948, was one of the earliest dam projects in India. Although it was not fully completed, the DVC
project has initiated unforeseen changes in the farming economy. The floods for which the Damodar river was
notorious were not fully controlled, and the suffering of people living in the lower reaches of the valley never
really diminished. This paper gives a brief description of the river and its history of water management practices
and the roles of women and men in these practices. It traces the resultant impacts on gender roles, and outlines
the new kinds of water management that emerged in response to the DVC’s failure to provide irrigation water
when demanded. More specifically, the paper explores the changes in floods, changes in the farming economy,
and the impacts of temporary sand dams or boro bandhs on the livelihoods of women and men from farming
families in the Lower Damodar Valley. It observes that even over a longer temporal scale, the changes unleashed
by large water control projects have significant and gendered impacts on agrarian societies.
KEYWORDS: Gender impacts, canal irrigation, Damodar Valley Corporation, floods, large dams, West Bengal, India
IMPACTS OF LARGE DAMS ON WOMEN AND MEN
A growing body of literature has recently explored the impacts of large and centralised water control
projects on the livelihoods of poor people, especially the more vulnerable communities that are
susceptible to livelihood shocks from deteriorating environmental resource bases. Evidence is
accumulating that women and men are not affected in the same way by large-scale resource
development projects (see Ahmad and Lahiri-Dutt, 2006; Mehta, 2009) or large-scale land deals
(Behrman, et al., 2011). Lahiri-Dutt and Ahmad (2012) argue that differences in gender roles account
for the differential impacts on women and men. Evidence also suggests that women and men
commonly adopt multiple livelihood strategies according to geographical scales and climatic season
(Cleaver, 1998; Valdivia and Gilles, 2001). Yet many water engineers, administrators, and policy-makers
continue to see 'the community' or 'the family' as a homogeneous unit, and neglect the intricate
complexities of gender roles, tasks, and power relations residing within these units. Critiquing such
purely technocentric views, Jones (2006) observed:
[l]arge dams are more than just concrete and water. They have huge environmental and social impacts,
and are often political strategies in disguise… Analysis of dam projects still often describes affected peoples
as genderless, focusing on homogeneous 'households' and disregarding communities and family units as
sites of gendered interaction. The reality is, however, that women’s relationship with water is different to
that of men’s, which should be taken into account in all planning phases of dam development.
Drawing on this comment, I explore a grey area in the existing literature: the gender differentiated
impacts of older large dam projects. 'Older' or established projects have been in existence for some

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time, allowing for adequate manifestation of resultant agrarian and societal changes in a number of
areas of the regional economy. Existing literature points to the negative impacts of new or large water
projects under construction on women – physical displacement and consequent loss of culture – but
the longer-term impacts of centralised large-scale water management projects can be a lot more
complex. For example, new water supply regimes set off a radical process of agrarian change that
includes altered processes and technologies of production, different crops, transformed human-water-
land interactions, and different expectations. Land and water systems are at the heart of many social
norms, including gender relations, in farming communities. Interventions on land and water change
production relations and exacerbate power inequalities between women and men; thus they 'engineer'
not only a physical infrastructure, but also a masculine social order. Often the full extent or the depth of
the interdependence of the two is not immediately apparent and being connected with a multitude of
related factors, the full consequences for gender relations may take years or even decades to be
manifested.
One can start by looking at history for an example. Talwar-Oldenburg (2010) has shown how
changes in the land revenue system in rural Punjab during the colonial period, that purported to
modernise the world of peasants, severely enhanced the masculinity of the farming communities who
had used land and water resources for generations. As land became owned by men, such ownership of
land became equated with social prestige, and the multitude of tasks that rural women performed on
the land lost their importance to society (Talwar-Oldenburg, 2010). This created a fierce desire in
parents for sons and reduced the value of girls in Punjab. Today’s rural Punjab, whilst known for its
agro-based prosperity, continues to bear this patriarchal burden in its low sex ratio, daughter
abhorrence and disposability of women.
Clearly, the investigation of gendered impacts of long-in-existence large dam projects demands a
new and interdisciplinary epistemology, as suggested by Whitehead (2002). In this paper, an
environmental and historical understanding of the regional context, and the role of the Damodar river
in sustaining rural life before and after the engineering intervention, provide the canvas on which to
trace changes in social relations and scrutinise them through a gender lens. Doing so involves examining
the changes that have occurred in gender roles and status as a result of altered water management
regimes and the transformation of the farming economy under the sheer weight of the project. To
explore how changing gender relations have altered power relations, I also examine who bears the
brunt of negative changes at present and who gains from them.
WHY GENDER?
I argue that the differences in impacts of developmental projects arise primarily from a sexually-based
division of labour, along with local and cultural discourses on gender roles. These discourses produce
and reinforce specific constructions of gender ideals and create norms for women and men. The roles
and tasks may be formally accepted as laws or informally understood as cultural ideals, but they are
invariably connected to power relations and women and men’s social and economic positioning within
societies and families. This argument is different from either the ecofeminist position (of equating
women with nature) or the anthropological position that illuminates the aesthetic relationships
between women and water (see Naguib, Forthcoming). Consequently, it becomes an important task to
understand why changes do not always affect women and men in similar ways. Women in poor
communities generally constitute the poorest or weakest group, bearing the burden of care for children
and family, while performing productive tasks that are often less visible or less recognised. Indeed, in
her studies of rural economies of Africa undergoing transition initiated by economic policies,
Whitehead (2009) has shown that different gender roles lead to different impacts on women and men.
In poor farming households of rural Bengal, an important aspect of women’s lives is the
disproportionately high work burdens at home as well as on farms. This burden is heavier for women in
landless families, who commonly belong to scheduled or lower castes. In rural Bengal, the public and

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private spheres continue to be seen as largely separate. Consequent to the dominant perception that
women belong to the reproductive domain, the relentless work performed by most women on farms
remains invisible to experts.
Large dams or statist water management mechanisms – synonymous with development and
progress – are expected to reduce the vulnerabilities of poor farming families from floods and water
scarcities. The utilitarian and Benthamian logic of 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number'
allows total control over land and water resources by the state, which then becomes the eminent
domain, enshrining the welfare principle of 'greater common good' (Rayner, 2003). Like other
infrastructural projects, large dams have immense social consequences. It is possible that in a society
differentiated on the basis of class, caste, ethnicity and religion, some people will benefit more than
others from these projects. It has been demonstrated that powerless, voiceless, weak, and poorer
people are subject to the worst impacts, especially with respect to involuntary displacement (Cernea
and Guggenheim, 1993; World Commission on Dams, 2002). Mehta and Srinivasan (1999) note that in
such projects development is often equated with economic growth, and that this assures livelihoods
and promises to reduce poverty, but in reality the benefits produced, such as improved livelihoods,
economic resources, and power are not evenly distributed. Furthermore, as Cernea (2000) notes: "the
principle of the 'greater good for the larger numbers' routinely invoked to rationalise forced
displacement is, in fact, often abused.… Some people enjoy the gains of development, while others
bear its pain". For example, studies of large dam impacts by Parasuram (1993) and Ganguly-Thukral
(1996) have clearly shown that women and children are more vulnerable to the negative impacts of
large water management projects. That ethnic or indigenous minorities are negatively affected by many
large water projects is now more or less recognised, but Mehta and Srinivasan (1999) lamented that
little literature is available on how the impacts are gendered. In their work on gender and displacement
by large dam projects, Mehta and Srinivasan (1999) argued that
large dams have far-reaching consequences on the economic, social and cultural contexts within which
men and women live their lives. Largely, the spread of pains and gains has not been equal. To some extent,
this is because of gender biases, ignorance and reductionist modes of operating in dam-building activities.
More recently, Mehta (forthcoming) observes that large dams alter women’s access to and control over
water resources, and destroy the autonomy that women enjoy in collecting water. Instead, they are
dependent on the government, host villagers and other people for their daily supply. She suggests that
in resettlement villages around the Sardar Sarovar project on the Narmada river, women express the
sentiment that they prefer the 'drudgery' of their submergence village to counter 'official' views of
drudgery.
The impact of a large dam project on livelihoods, through new modes of irrigation, may take
decades to become apparent. Examples of livelihood impacts of changed water management and
resultant gendered and, often unplanned, outcomes can be drawn, however, from the works of
Zwarteveen and Neupane (1995), Meinzen-Dick et al. (1997), Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen (1998), and
von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann (1998). Zwarteveen’s (1994) work emphasises that
farm households are not just recipients of irrigation, but are 'transformers' of this water into
agricultural products by skilfully coordinating their labour, knowledge and other resources, and since
these labour processes, knowledges and assets are gender-differentiated, their needs and interests
would also be gender-specific.
This paper follows this literature to show the multifaceted changes in gender and livelihood in a
small part of rural Bengal, the lower Damodar valley, comprising the three districts of Burdwan,
Hooghly, and Howrah in West Bengal, India.
1
Except the western part of Burdwan district, the many old
1
These are old spellings of these place-names. The names of these districts are now officially spelt as Bardhhaman, Hugli, and
Haora. Also, the western part of Burdwan district is more accurately a transitional zone between lower and upper parts of the
Damodar valley.

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and now cut-off tributaries of the Damodar river had at one time formed an unusual inland delta before
merging with the Bhagirathi-Hooghly river east of the Burdwan town. The bowl-like inland delta region
now supports one of the densest populations in the world. This also was one of the earliest parts of
India to experience increases in agricultural production since the late 1960s. The agrarian transition of
the region has been intensively studied by economists to explore the 'institutional versus technological'
or 'state-action versus private incentive' dichotomies (see Harriss, 1993; Sengupta and Gazdar, 1997;
Bose, 1999). The post-land reforms rural growth of the 1980s in the area was spectacular, intensive and
noticeable enough to attract such scholarly attention. Yet gender inequalities in farming families have
received comparatively less attention. Exacerbated by the new mode of water management, such
inequalities have strengthened against a context of lack of recognition of rights, lower education and
formal work participation, and many social prejudices that bear evidence of the unequal status of
women and men.
Formal water control mechanisms, such as embankments and canals, have been long established in
the lower Damodar region to provide flood and irrigation water security. However, the introduction of
the large-scale multi-purpose river valley project, Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) into this system
had far-reaching impacts on the agrarian economy. In response, gender relations in farming families
also changed significantly. The changed river regime has remarkably altered livelihoods and has created
the expectation of greater security from floods but has increased vulnerabilities from unpredictable
inundations. The introduction of capital-intensive rice-farming for cash has also increased demands for
irrigation water in winter. As the DVC heralded the intensification of irrigated agriculture and raised the
farmers’ expectations of water security, changes in the river’s ecology and natural water regimes made
floods more difficult to cope with than before.
Not all of these impacts are perceived and experienced in the same way by women and men. Some
of these perceptions, as well as the coping strategies of women and men that I have outlined in the
following section, draw attention to the complexity of gendered livelihoods and concerns.
This paper is based on my long-term research on the DVC and the lower Damodar valley,
2
as well as
on close engagement since the late 1990s with three local community groups working on
environmental issues in the region. Over the years, I have undertaken several projects in the region,
including livelihood surveys of women and men; perception surveys of flood vulnerabilities; and a study
of locally based water management practices. Material from these surveys is used in the paper, which
uses some narratives from interviews to illustrate the livelihoods, vulnerabilities, and perceptual
differences between women and men. The names of the respondents have been changed to protect
their identities.
FLOODS OF THE DAMODAR RIVER AND CONTROL MEASURES
The seasonal flows of Damodar river, flowing through the eastern Indian states of Bihar and West
Bengal to eventually meet the Hooghly river near Falta point in Howrah district, are notorious. The
upper and lower reaches of the Damodar – with a transitional part in the middle – have contrasting
ecological characteristics causing the lower one-third of its 23,931 km2 basin to be characteristically
flood-prone. The hydraulic regime is highly sensitive to the rainfall pattern and the specific nature of
the river’s outlet (Bagchi, 1944, 1977; Bhattacharyya, 1998). During the monsoons, the run-off from the
hills of upper catchment area descends quickly from the uplands carrying huge amounts of silt. On
reaching the flat land, the silty waters find the river already inflated. The Hooghly river, into which the
Damodar flows, is also inflated at this time, preventing outflow (Saha, 1938). The extremely low
2
My doctoral research was on the lower Damodar valley but it explored primarily the urbanisation process in the region based
mainly on census data (see Lahiri-Dutt, 1985). Since the latter part of the 1990s I became closely associated with some locally
based civil society groups and individuals who encouraged further and ongoing interest on the impacts of floods and boro
bandhs.

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gradient also ensures that waters drain very slowly. Above all, the Hooghly, being a tidal river, only
allows intermittent release of water into the Bay of Bengal each day.
3
The monsoon run-off used to descend down the river channel with great force, giving rise to flash
floods known locally as harka ban (Hunter, 1876).
4
Dramatic shifts in the river’s course accompanied
these monsoonal floods. The annual inundations washed away the drainage congestion and gave rise to
an unusual concentration of agrarian population and settlements in this deltaic stretch of Bengal
(Mukherjee, 1938). Yet, the river came to be known as the 'river of sorrow', or the 'sorrow of Bengal'
during the colonial times, and civilising the river by 'river training', 'river control', 'taming', and
'harnessing' its aberrant and uncivil behaviour became a project of the colonial state (Lahiri-Dutt, 2000).
Frequent 'inundations' and 'subnormal' floods occurring with a certain amount of regularity were
accommodated, like people still do in Bangladesh. The mainstream wisdom, unfortunately, often failed
to recognise the importance of local knowledge that was based on adjustment measures (Bhattacharjee,
1986).
In the past, village communities in the lower Damodar valley had adjusted in various ways to the
excesses of water. Willcocks (1930) described this flood-dependence as 'overflow irrigation' in which
the fine clay and humus-rich crest water reaches the fields through cuts on the banks of the canals –
called kanwas – and spill channels or hanas. The inundation fertilised the soil, checked the spread of
malaria, and helped to turn the lower Damodar valley into a productive area. Indigenous crop varieties
grew ahead of the rising flood waters, and the cropping calendar was suited to the phases of inundation
(Brammer, 1990; Hofer and Messerli, 1997). Even the standing water of the swamplands was used to
ret jute crops (Chapman, 1995). An intricate network of ponds, aqueducts, and water tanks provided
seasonal storage of water as well as drainage. Houses in flood-prone areas were built on raised plinths
to withstand the onslaught of the worst flooding.
Early measures to control the Damodar included embankment construction to contain the
monsoonal flows within the channel (the bandhs or pulbandis, also known as dikes or levees) (O’Malley
and Chakravarti, 1909).
5
Experts on the Damodar valley agree that the embankments "did more harm
than good" (Banerji, 1972). Some villages became physically isolated from the rest of the region. Such
isolation must have had important social effects on the well-being of villagers such as access to
education and health, information, and communication.
Over many years of their existence, these embankments have now become a part of the local
cultural landscape. Women and men from local villages use these spaces for social interactions,
transport routes, and for shelter on higher ground especially during floods.
Total control of the Damodar river was envisaged in 1943, after the river breached its left bank
embankment. Following the proposal of the Damodar Flood Enquiry Committee, to establish a 'multi-
purpose' river valley project modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority, the DVC was set up in 1948,
which involved the construction of dams at Tilaiya, Maithon, Panchet, and Konar with hydroelectric
stations connected to each dam. Thermal power stations and the Durgapur barrage
6
and canals leading
off from it were also built. It was envisaged that the second phase would cover the construction of four
3
The tidal fluctuation at the mouth is as much as 4 metres.
4
Meghnad Saha, the famous Bengali scientist and one of the key architects of the river control plans noted this
'maldistribution' as the 'source of trouble': "the rainfall coming in abrupt surges and lasting only for a short period in the year
during the monsoon months" (Saha and Ray, 1942).
5
As early as 1925, Dr C.A. Bentley advocated the reintroduction of flood waters into the Bhagirathi-Damodar doab as well as in
the trans-Damodar tract in his book Malaria and Agriculture in Bengal. In 1931, Mr C. Adams Williams stated that the silt-laden
waters be used to increase the fertility of the soil and decreasing the ravages of malaria.
6
As the number of dams was reduced, to have better control over the run-off, the Durgapur barrage was constructed in place
of the weir suggested by Voorduin.

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more dams and hydroelectric stations;
7
however, only the first phase was completed by this 'dream-
child of Nehru'.
8
The impact of the DVC on the regional economy has been studied intensively (see, for example,
Chatterjee, 1967), and scholars have been critical of this largely unsuccessful project. The reasons,
besides its lack of completion, include poor governance and technical defects as well as the fact that
the DVC has deviated significantly from its aims of flood control to meet the national priorities and
regional needs for the generation and distribution of electricity (Aich, 1998). The operations of the
Durgapur barrage, the canal networks, and dams are not integrated. Interstate disputes between Bihar
and West Bengal over irrigation allocation and failure to acquire land led to the inability of the dams to
fully control the flood. Allegations of corruption in the internal matters of the DVC have also been
raised. Since the late 1960s, the region also has come under intensive agricultural development
programmes, with the irrigation-seed-fertiliser technology package, resulting in the introduction of
groundwater usage, a late winter/summer crop called boro rice, and extensive urban growth at the
western and eastern edges of the valley. These changes make it difficult to attribute agrarian changes
solely to the DVC.
The changes, understandably, have been of great significance to the regional rural economy. I focus
selectively on four aspects of these changes – floods caused by the DVC, the use of groundwater for
irrigation utilisation leading to changes in cropping patter, boro bandhs, and exploring the resultant
gender-differentiated impacts.
Gender impacts of floods since DVC
Recent floods
There have been three major floods since the DVC dams came into existence: in 1958, 1978, and 1998.
The scrutiny was intense especially after the devastating 1978 flood, "the biggest ever handled by the
DVC" according to one of its reports (DVC, 1980). The 1978 flood occurred because of a combination of
excessive rains from cyclonic cloud-burst of the retreating monsoons in late September and the release
of a large amount of water from the over-filled reservoirs.
9
Similarly, in 1998, another major flood kept
the lower valley under water for nearly a week. However, rainfall and run-off in the catchment below
the dams was a significant contributor to these floods. Again, in 2006, the DVC released excess water
from its dams through the canal system during the peak monsoon to save the dams. This water heavily
inundated villages at the tail end of the canals.
A consistent pattern that downstream villagers have complained about is the release by DVC of
excess water into the canals during late monsoons to protect the dams without adequate warning. The
artificial inundation caused in the lowest end of the river valley, and the associated misery, is seen by
the villagers as largely avoidable. Besides these three major floods, on numerous occasions the DVC
dams have released water exacerbating the usual monsoonal inundations. Given the objective of the
DVC to control the floods, its role in increasing the floods reveals an embedded contradiction.
Short- and long-term impacts on livelihoods
Whether occurring naturally or caused by humans, floods have major and direct impacts on rural
livelihoods. One immediate, physical impact with long-term consequences for the well-being of the
7
The government of Bihar later constructed the fifth dam at Tenughat in place of the Aiyar, funding for which was given as a
loan to the state, and which is not integrated to the DVC system. It supplies water mainly to the Bokaro Steel Plant and the
thermal power station.
8
About 93,000 people were displaced from 27,500 ha of land and 45,000 houses. The policy was to give land for land, only if
the displaced persons indicated their choices by a certain date.
9
The quantity of sand being deposited in the DVC reservoirs has been far greater than that originally envisaged, reducing the
lifespan of the dams. This is due to the accelerated pace of mining-based industrialisation and urbanisation in the upper valley.

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families is sand deposition on the agricultural land. Flood waters these days carry huge quantities of
sand, which are dumped on fertile farming land, destroying the soil quality which takes years to
ameliorate. Shifts in the river course and bank erosion are the most dreaded effects of flood; in one
disastrous flood, families can lose everything. River bank erosion usually increases at times of flood,
affecting especially the poorer families. At times of major inundations, victims are usually chosen by
class; the poorer households living further away from the embankments, where the flood waters stay
longer, remain marooned for days, whereas the better-off families closer to the higher ground along
the embankments are often able to protect themselves. Flooding also causes population displacement;
often, such displacements are gendered rather than class-differentiated (as in the case of Bangladesh;
see Gray and Mueller, 2010 to find that the effects of crop failure and flooding are stronger for women
because they have less secure access to land). Mueller and Quisumbing (2010) have also shown that for
remote villages located away from labour markets, floods have significant short- and long-term impacts
on wages.
Overall, the longer-term physical impacts include the rising of the river bed, the formation and
stabilsation of chars or river islands, and the erratic shifting of the river course due to bank erosion. The
availability of sand has spurred on local panchayats (village councils) to grant licences to extract sand
from the river bed, endangering the embankments in many places. One of the longer-term effects is
indebtedness as the poor tend to borrow cash from local mahajans (money-lenders) to restore their
livelihoods.
Gender and floods
Gender differences in the impacts of flood are most notable in the post-flood stage, when the recovery
and revival of economic activities takes place. It is at this stage that women’s domestic burdens and
hardships mount. In the aftermath of a flood, gender-assigned tasks such as procuring, preparing and
cooking food take considerably longer and involve a greater physical burden. The need for a more
permanent livelihood when the fields are flooded force men from the poorer families to seek waged
jobs outside of the area. Consequently, it is common to see a near-mass exodus of younger men from
flood-affected villages, leaving women, the elderly, and children in temporary shelters to fend for
themselves.
In comparatively better-off farming families the loss of household essentials causes great hardship
to women. Men and women bring different kinds of assets into a household; their assets being different
in quantity, quality and type. Women’s assets are considered less valuable or non-productive, and
drawn upon to reconstitute livelihoods after major shocks such as floods. In Bangladesh, Quisumbing et
al. (2011) have shown that gender-based differences in responsibilities for coping with shocks have a
number of implications for short-term asset accumulation. Women’s responsibilities lie in coping with
quick and unexpected shocks such as the floods, and indeed, in Damodar valley, families tend to
manage short-term financial crises after floods by selling women’s assets such as jewellery and livestock.
Women are forced to fetch water from distant areas as most of the tube wells are contaminated due to
the flood. Reconstruction of the family house is another post-flood job in which women have to add
labour. Floods also undermine some of the women’s well-being because of their dependence on
economic activities linked to the home. Losses of harvest and livestock have a high impact on women,
as nearly 58% of them rely on cattle and chickens for their cash income.
Imprisoned by embankments
An ad-hoc response to rising river beds and persistent floods by the government has been the gradual
raising of the embankments. The embankments have had serious gendered consequences. While they
are used as community spaces, especially by women as spaces for social gatherings, crop drying, and for
animal rearing, the dykes have also caused isolation by separating neighbouring villages. The high walls
of embankments have created complex networks, in places completely surrounding villages. For

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example, Dadpur village, about 20 km east of Burdwan town at the apex of the Damodar delta where
the river turns nearly 90 degrees to swing to the south-southeast, is encircled by at least three
embankments varying in height from 6 to 12 feet. The villagers feel threatened by inundation from
breaches in the levees.
Psychological trauma is experienced by all villagers, but for women the resultant frustration is
harder. Socially, the embankments mean isolation for women, disruption of their contact networks, and
restriction on their physical movements. Many women cite this physical isolation as the main cause for
social exclusion, as expressed by Rasmoni Ghosh, a long-term resident of Dadpur: "[w]e have become
'walled in' (panchile ghera) by the bandhs – it is true that over these we have not much control. As a
result, women like us have lost the ability to direct our lives".
For women and men living in the lower Damodar valley, indeed, the floods have not been fully
controlled; the nature of floods has changed, while building up a false sense of security amongst the
residents of the lower valley (Lahiri-Dutt, 2003). To the disempowered villagers living in the lower
reaches of the valley, however, the DVC is the 'dobano bhasano cal' (the mechanism for inundation and
submergence), a grand design that has failed to keep its grand promises to stop flooding and usher in a
secure agrarian life.
In a study undertaken jointly with a local non-governmental organisation called the Dakshin
Damodar Khara Bonya Pratirodh Samiti, it became clear that a large number of women believed that
while the floods have indeed decreased in frequency and magnitude, they have become more
unpredictable. An unexpected flood can cause more havoc compared to an expected one, especially if
the flood is caused by the very institution that was created to protect the people. Often, the warning
that the DVC Control Room is supposed to provide before releasing the water from the barrage fails to
reach people in the lower valley in time.
Besides unpredictability, floods have also changed in duration since the construction of the DVC. The
inundations stay longer on the ground as the high walls of the embankments prevent flood water from
draining away via the channels. About this, a river expert (Aich, 1998) notes: "[b]efore the construction
of the DVC dams, the flood peaks were high but the duration was small. The construction of dams has
moderated the peaks but increased the duration of floods. This increase in duration has enhanced the
chances of synchronization of floods from the upper and lower valleys as also from the adjoining river
basins". This scholarly observation resonates in the voice of an elderly inhabitant of the Siyali village:
"[p]reviously, we had floods, but we knew how to deal with them. We did not die from floods. Now we
do not have regular floods, but when they come, they take us by surprise".
Many women are mortally scared of the surprise of a sudden onslaught of flood. One of them,
Ranubala, observes that she would prefer that the flood warning system is effective so that she could
choose more secure higher ground to move to before the waters rose. For her, an early warning means
getting more time to consider alternative means of providing security to the children, the elderly, and
the smaller domestic animals and is of the greatest importance; for men, the task is to save seed crops,
large animals like cattle, and make contact with government officials for relief.
With the changing nature of floods, the perception of them has also altered. This is evident from the
fact that simple adjustment measures such as higher plinth levels in rural houses no longer exist; a
sense of false security and complacency have taken over. Another woman, Malati Santra, reported to
us during the field survey:
[o]ur fear of the river has vanished, but at the same time, we have lost respect for the river. Previously, we
used to look up to the river as our deity, part of our lives, but now we treat it as only a sewage channel for
the industries. When the river cannot tolerate this anymore, it inundates its banks to remind us of its
existence.
The perception of floods is not uniform amongst women and men, and is also circumscribed by status
and class position in the rural milieu. When we attempted to create 'social vulnerability maps'
containing basic facts about the magnitude of losses experienced by women and men, women’s

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concerns became apparent from these mapping exercises. Women were eloquent about the need to
prevent: politically motivated relief distribution; provide safe drinking water in adequate quantities;
combat the spread of water-borne diseases; provide fuel for cooking; and provide safe and secure
shelter and private sanitation facilities immediately after the flood. In sharp contrast to these, men
were more concerned with protecting the crops.
Gender roles in water-based economies
Gender roles in the lower Damodar valley have closely followed how rural people used and managed
water. Water control is of utmost importance in such a community, symbolising Wittfogelian social
power. Women in the region have always made significant contributions in managing the household
and securing livelihoods. They have also, for a long time, played an active role in agriculture. They
performed a wide variety of tasks related to farming: preparing the land; irrigating it; weeding;
harvesting; and processing. The older methods of water control hardly impacted on these roles as they
did not essentially change the nature of either farming or the crops. Gender role differentiation within
farming communities created a clear-cut sexual division of labour whether at home or in the farm.
A survey by a local non-governmental organisation, Agragati (2002), found that women who work on
farms outside of home comprised around 28% of the total rural women in this area. However, in the
poorer families – khetmajur (agricultural labourers), bhagchasi (sharecroppers), and scheduled caste
and tribes – this proportion rises to over 95%. The main objective of these women is to generate
additional incomes for their households; often they also take up roles of petty traders selling fish, fruits,
or vegetables besides working as agricultural labourers. Their time-use pattern brought out significant
gender differences: extensive hours of exhaustive manual work in the field as well as domestic chores
for as many as 14 hours in some cases for women, but only 5 hours for men.
However, with modern methods of water control becoming popular, decision-making in agriculture
has tended to become more formalised and centralised among men. This means that women in general,
whether from middle-class or poorer families, have lower voice in decisions relating to agricultural
activities. With modern machines and fertilisers, men make choices of what to buy, how to buy, and
from where to buy or rent these machines. Less decision-making power does not mean that the
numbers of women participating in agriculture have decreased; on the contrary, more women at
present work as landless labourers in the three districts than elsewhere in the state of West Bengal.
Many of the women agricultural labourers belong to scheduled castes and tribes, and have temporarily
migrated from the neighbouring poorer districts as part of family and kin groups to work as itinerant
labourers. However, with the introduction of modern methods of water control, farming practices have
also changed in favour of machines. Whilst they have decreased the manual nature of jobs in the fields,
the mechanised jobs, such as driving tractors, have been taken up by men. This has led to a situation
where those jobs performed by women have consistently remained either manual, or women have
been pushed into unmechanised job areas where under-investment in technology is the hallmark. For
women living in flood-prone villages, life in general has become more burdened with heavy manual jobs
while at the same time they have become marginal in farming. At the same time, social stigma attached
to female work participation still persists or has increased and is considered a sign of the poverty of a
family.
Agriculture, irrigation, and gender since the DVC
Let us now turn to the DVC’s impacts on local agriculture and economy. Lower Damodar valley has
always been a rich farming tract, its swamplands are cultivated with jute and in early winter, farmers
harvest a crop of indigenous rice. Since the advent of the DVC, the cropping pattern has changed; there
has been a decline in the jute industry and boro (summer) rice, and HYV seeds rice have become
popular. This rice cultivation is entirely dependent on irrigation and has opened up new modes of water
control in the region. Boro rice is a water-intensive crop, and farming families suffering from the

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deluges caused by the DVC during monsoons are justified in demanding canal water. The unified
development plan for the Damodar valley had the supply of irrigation water as one of its objectives, but
it was not clear exactly when this water would be delivered.
10
Currently, about 1.7 million acre feet (>2
billion cubic metres) of water are earmarked for annual irrigation. The DVC claims that the two canal
systems were supposed to provide irrigation water to the command area only during the kharif
(main/monsoon cropping) season to supplement seasonal fluctuations in natural rains. The DVC
position is evident from Banerjee’s (1991) view that water for boro rice, if supplied at all, is a gesture of
benevolence. The objective of supplying irrigation water to the kharif crop was not very successful;
quite early, Basu and Mukherjee (1963) made an evaluation of the economic benefits of irrigation in the
Damodar region. This study noted that the older canals such as the Eden Canal and the Damodar Canal
– merged later in the DVC irrigation network – are actually more efficient in bringing economic benefits
to the farmers of the region. Many later studies have confirmed that large-scale canal irrigation –
officially held as the most effective means of irrigating the farms – is actually far less cost-effective.
11
This is indeed an irony – boro irrigation is not provided in the original scheme and hence there is no
allocation of water for it – but the areas that need this additional water most are located in the lowest
part of the valley which also suffer during the monsoons from excess water being carried in by these
canals.
Groundwater use
Although not directly connected to DVC, a major contributor to the regional agrarian change has been
groundwater use. The deep tube wells that have taken over the agricultural fields were in fact an
indirect response to the DVC and the incomplete, but capital- and technology-aided agrarian
improvement. The need to irrigate crops has multiplied many times, mainly because of the inability of
the DVC to provide water when needed. The indiscriminate drawing of groundwater has led to the
lowering of the water table; water-intensification of farming; and neglect of surface water sources
being most important amongst them.
Each deep or shallow tube well – usually owned by the bigger farmers – draws upon the
groundwater commons, and interferes with the drinking water tube wells. These are usually shallow
hand pumps, and are more commonly used by women to collect water for household uses. Bela Das, a
mother of three, an agricultural labourer with no farmland, complained that her hand pump dries up by
mid-February. This forces her to steal water at night from the shallow pumps that are primarily meant
for irrigating the fields.
Politics of boro bandhs
To cope with the winter water demand by farmers, gram panchayats and the block offices of Khanakul
1 and 2 located at the lowest end of the DVC irrigation command area locally construct boro bandhs –
seasonal sand barriers across the river bed – to irrigate the rice fields of richer farmers. Every year, the
district government of Hooghly spends over US$400,000 – not an insignificant amount of money for a
small district administration – to construct a series of six or eight aar bandhs (cross-dams) on the river
in January to impound water for the winter (or boro) rice crop. Supported by logs, these bandhs can be
10
Commenting on Voorduin’s Preliminary Memorandum, Mr H.M. Mathews, Chairman of the Central Technical Power Board,
noted in 1947: "under the proposed plan of development it would be possible to undertake the perennial irrigation of about
760,000 acres including the… area covered by the Damodar-Hooghly Flushing and Irrigation Scheme which was approved by
the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1939". To realise this objective, in the early days, in 1956, DVC set up an Experiment-cum-
Demonstration Station at Panagarh just downstream of the Durgapur barrage. This station was meant to exhibit the beneficial
effects of 'modern' irrigation farming for 'optimum production on a sustained basis' (United Nations Economic Commission for
Asia and the Far East, 1960).
11
For example, Dhawan’s 1997 research using National Accounts Statistics data from 1980-81 to 1992-93, shows that canal
irrigation might actually not be considered as an economically viable proposition.

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up to 12 metres high and 8 metres wide, and are built across the river; they are washed away by the
first flush of the monsoons. Each of these aar bandhs can cost between Rs15 to 25 lakhs depending on
their size. These boro bandhs also increase the environmental risks as they are flimsy and can be
flushed away by a strong current and entirely submerge the crops downstream.
For the farmer families of Khanakul, whose summer crop is destroyed by inundations often caused
by poor drainage in the DVC system, this boro crop is vital in earning the year’s cash, and the demand
for water is a legitimate one that is not fulfilled. If, following Mollinga (2001), we interpret the boro
bandhs as representing the informal embodiment and the realisation of local water rights within the
DVC command area, the bandhs have certainly not been inclusive of both rich and poor, women and
men, in how decisions about their precise location are made or who gets the benefit and who suffers
from them.
For women, the boro bandhs are symbolic of the modern water management system that the DVC
has brought into existence. As such, in the lower Damodar valley women’s legal rights over farming land
do not usually get translated into real control or power, but when a politically motivated system of
irrigation assumes predominance, women are the first to be left behind. The invisibility of women as
farmers is apparent from a participatory appraisal we undertook with the help of Helan Pally Prerana
Samiti in 2006. In the village Tantishal in Khanakul 1 block, 214 farm-holdings were owned by men
whereas only 56 were held in the names of women. However, in the list of those benefiting from boro
bandhs, there was no land owned by a woman. This is not a coincidence; Bela Das’ story elaborates how
women are systematically excluded. Bela, a widow with four children inherited the 3 bighas of land
after her husband’s death. She farmed the land herself with the help of her eldest son. However, the
boro bandh raised by the panchayat near her land regularly floods it in winter, while benefiting other
farmers. For cash-strapped farm families, the winter crop is crucial in staying or rising above the
subsistence level.
As noted by Jha (2004), the freedom to make decisions is central to the idea of participation. If boro
bandhs strip women of informal decision-making powers that they previously enjoyed, then they are
best described as representing oppressive systems of water management. However, these bandhs are
neither constituted in interaction with irrigation department officials, nor acknowledged by the DVC,
and exist in a legal vacuum. There are examples of endogenous water resource management systems
(such as those existing in the haor basins of Sylhet in Bangladesh described by Duyne-Barenstein in
2008). They too inhabit extra-legal spaces, but in replicating statist modes of water governance, the
boro bandhs do not represent socially rooted collective action. Moreover, they neglect to recognise
that the needs of and interests on irrigation water are gender-differentiated, and exclude women from
decision-making. Given the political economy of rural West Bengal, they represent embodied
instruments for local political control over water management. Sarkar (2006) noted that for the rural
economy of West Bengal, the introduction of labour-intensive boro rice cultivation – suited to the
fragmented land of the state – was the most crucial factor in increasing the food production. Thus,
watering the boro crop has proved to be extremely effective as a political measure. The DVC is partly
responsible; because it is frozen in time and unable to meet the contemporary needs of local peasant
communities, leaving local political groups to take advantage of the situation and rise to meet the
growing water needs.
COPING WITH THE DVC
Both the large-scale dams of the DVC and the micro-scale boro bandhs are gendered entities. This is
because in recognising only men as participants in the water management institutions that they
represent, they create and reinforce certain gender norms in farming families. They exclude women
from getting the benefits from them. Gender composition of various committees that decide on water
management at various scales reveals that women are almost always absent. Above all, the DVC,
although it has decreased the predictability of floods it has also increased their destructive power,

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burdening women with the responsibility of finding a means to survive, to procure food for children,
and ensuring physical safety for themselves and their families. In 2002, the World Commission on Dams
observed that "the poor… vulnerable groups and future generations… bear a disproportionate share of
the social and environmental costs of large dam projects without getting a commensurate share of
the… benefits". In the lower Damodar valley, as we can see, women carried the burden of negative
impacts of centralised water management, whereas some men reaped the benefits.
In summary, the river control measures have created a complex web of practical difficulties for rural
inhabitants, endangering the survival of the poorest groups of people, and burdening women with the
responsibility of coping with these difficulties. The changes have been social and economic in terms of
altering the farming economy, but also perceptual and aspirational in the sense which has fostered the
view that floods are undesirable and water supply is unlimited. The system, in putting a new water
control mechanism, has created aspirations and expectations of a steady supply of water to the
agricultural fields that have not been fulfilled. The changes have been accompanied by the introduction
of technology that enabled the withdrawal of large quantities of groundwater at will. Above all, the DVC
has changed the hydrological regime of the river leading to unforeseen impacts such as erosion of the
river bank, and shifting river courses. The floods that occur now are often caused by the release of
water from upstream dams into already inflated rivers with poor drainage, and they disrupt lives and
livelihoods of families.
The water control measures place women at the lowest level of the emerging farming economy with
regard to their decision-making power and voice, and their visibility as productive agents participating
as equals in the new economy. Moreover, while affecting everyone in the region, the changes have
negatively impacted on women’s lives in particular. The physical burden of coping with floods falls
heavily on women as they bear the responsibility of sustaining life in the short term and of restoring the
incomes of their families in the longer term.
In spite of their social constraints, women in the lower Damodar valley have not remained mere
victims of the floods created by the DVC. There are instances of women taking up leadership or showing
astounding courage and strength in the face of adversity. The level of improvisation by women in
dealing with the extreme lack of resources, privacy, and support is extraordinary. Many women in such
distressing situations have, individually and in groups, proven that they have more to them than what is
given by their social milieu. This intangible quality is best described as resilience and spirit, and is
difficult to incorporate in broader terminologies such as 'adaptation'.
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