Water and the Environmental History of Modern India - by Velayutham Saravanan

Book Synopsis

This important new study investigates the competing demand for water in the Bhavani and Noyyal River basins of south India from the early 19th century to the early 21st century from a historical perspective. In doing so, the book addresses several important questions:

* Did policy-makers visualise the future demand while diverting water from distant places or other basins?
* Was efficient use ensured when the water was diverted or was it diverted in a manner that resulted in pollution and serious damage to the entire river basin?
* Were natural flows taken care of in order to preserve the ecology and environment?
* What were the factors that aggravated the competing demand for water and what were the consequences for the future?

In the context of the current discourse on the competing demands for water, this book takes the debate forward, expanding the horizon of environmental history in the process. Until now, agriculture, industry and domestic water supply and their consequences for ecology, the environment and livelihoods have been given scant attention. Velayutham Saravanan's comprehensive account of both the colonial and post-colonial periods corrects this shortcoming in the field's literature and gives a holistic understanding of the problem and its full historical roots.

Review Quotes

Melding agrarian history with urban history and situating industrialization within a broader socio-economic context, this sophisticated and sobering study makes water central to the writing of environmental history. Scholars and policy professionals will benefit immensely from reading this work.
Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, Yale University, USA

Through a fascinating series of microstudies, Velayutham Saravanan's scholarship insightfully highlights the vital role of the physical environmental in modern South India. Importantly, this fine book particularly concentrates on the multiple issues of water (supply, distribution, and pollution) during the period from the late British Raj to today's independent Republic of India.
Michael Fisher, Robert S. Danforth Professor of History, Oberlin College, USA

About the Author

Velayutham Saravanan is Professor and Director at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia (Central University), India. He is the author of Environmental History and Tribals in Modern India (2018) and Colonialism, Environment and Tribals in South India, 1792-1947 (2017). He is also the editor of the History and Sociology of South Asia journal.