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This article provides information about the historical background of dams:
Water, as the saying goes, is life itself. It is historical fact that our human civilisation has grown on the banks of rivers. Dams are as old as human civilisation and have been considered as one of the oldest techniques of storing and channelling water. Patrick McCully presents a succinct history of dams. According to him, the earliest dam in the world was built in Jawa town, presently in Jordan, around 3000 BC.
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It was a system of ten reservoirs made of rock and earth that collected the water from a fall, which was channelled through a canal. The largest dam was more than 4 metres high. Egypt’s ‘Dam of the Pagan’ across a seasonal stream near Cairo was known to be 14 metres high and 113 metres long, but was washed away after a decade of its construction. Spain is home to a surviving Roman dam, built in the late first millennium B.C.
A number of dams were built during this period all over the world, in the Middle East, China, and Central America and around the Mediterranean. The King of Sri Lanka, Parakrama Babu, also known for his despotic rule, built a 14 kilometres long dam. No other dam in the region could equal its volume.
The king was supposed to have restored and built more than 4000 dams. McCully quotes the famous anthropologist, Edward Leach, on the large dams in Sri Lanka, stating that these dams ‘are monuments and not utilitarian structures’. The Sri Lankan villagers depended more on artificial ponds called ‘tanks’ than on dams for irrigation.
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In fact, this is true for most of south Asia. Irrigation in India was largely dependent on traditional hydraulic infrastructure built and maintained locally, which included wells, ditches and tanks. Given the local caste- based social set up, it was difficult for the state to intervene in local customs. Nonetheless, the state did provide tax subsidies to promote water conservation.
For example, in Gujarat, local officials had the authority to revise taxes and grant tax concessions. There were instances when tax on crops grown through irrigation from a recently constructed well was reduced till the cost of constructing the well was recovered. Both the Mughals and the Marathas assessed tax on the basis of the ecological conditions of the region and climatic fluctuations. Local traditional elites were obliged by custom to regularly invest in public resources such as water.
They were expected to build tanks, repair wells, etc. from time to time. China unlike India relied on an integrated hydraulic system for irrigation. Village level farming in north China depended on the local level drainage, which in turn was connected to the regional networks of dikes, levees and master canals.
This system was closely interlinked to the massive central public works project. Flood control, canal management and local irrigation formed an integrated whole and the collapse of one could lead to the collapse of the entire system. Local irrigation was therefore state sponsored, with many of the wells and ditches built under the supervision of state officials.
Clearly, the role of the state, however minimal, was crucial in establishing and maintaining a hydraulic system. Water was an important resource and its management was not left to chance and a good monsoon alone. Colonialism however played havoc with the local system of water management. Colonialism brought with it a stringent system of revenue assessment, which was unsympathetic to local social and political dynamics and to climatic fluctuations.
Likewise, the priorities of the colonial government were markedly different from the previous rulers. In India, expenditure on public works took a backseat with the British trying to consolidate its position after the bloody 1857 mutiny. The post-mutiny period was characterised by greater investiture in military installations and the railways. Of the expenditure that was set aside for irrigation, 90% was spent on major irrigation projects based in Punjab.
The British were keen on encouraging commercial crops such as cotton, opium, sugarcane and wheat. This interest in commercial agriculture was at the expense of subsistence-based agriculture and the small farmers managed irrigation systems of wells, tanks, small channels and dams.
Unlike the Mughals, the British did not subsidise construction of wells and tanks. Moreover, heavy land tax did not leave any surplus to invest in irrigation systems. The new revenue system of the British granted water rights with land titles, thereby legally legitimising private appropriation of water resources. Those without water resources in their lands faced regular water shortage, especially during poor monsoons. Privatisation of water and land cut into the local system of maintaining irrigation systems.
The situation in China was worse with the state withdrawing its role in the maintenance of the centralised hydraulic system. The area under irrigation decreased drastically, to the extent that only 6.8% of cultivated acreage in north China was irrigated in 1932. Between 1876-79, Asia (India, China, Java, Philippines and Korea), South Africa, Brazil, Algeria and Morocco reported recurrent drought and famine conditions. Never in the history of the world had famine and drought been registered simultaneously in so many nations.
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Millions died due to malnutrition and hunger. Evidently, “Climate risk…is not given by nature but…by ‘negotiated settlement’ since each society has institutional, social and technical means for coping with risk-Famines [thus] are social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems”. The occurrence of famines across Asia, Africa and South America at the same time is not only proof of the effects of colonialism in that it created chronic conditions of poverty, hunger and ill-health, but also announced the breakdown of local institution systems that usually rescued people from situations of crises.