Silencing the Opposition: The State v. Civil Society in India's Ganges River Basin

Abstract

India's Ganges River has suffered from massive amounts of pollution for decades, and despite numerous attempts, the Indian government has failed to clean up this historic water resource. This governance failure prompted the growth of civil society groups whose stated purposes included the mitigation of Ganges pollution and the empowerment of community‐based solutions. These types of groups, however, have not found sustained success in alleviating Ganges pollution, despite their compatibility with the constitutional decentralization of Indian water policy. A case study of one of these civil society organizations, the Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF), serves as a first step in assessing the efficacy of this community‐based approach to Ganges pollution mitigation. From a broader perspective, the story of the SMF speaks to the difficulties inherent in environmental policy decentralization and to the struggles of norm creation and diffusion across societies. Indeed, this case is particularly instructive, as it exposes potential vulnerabilities in the literature regarding the role of civil society groups as norm entrepreneurs. Rather than allow for the democratization of water policy, as called for by the Indian constitution, the case of the SMF suggests the Indian government has entrenched centralization to the point of diffusing civil society opposition and ultimately compromising the overall impact of its resistance.

Identifying evolving priorities in national river governance from Parliamentary Questions

“…The debate concerning the interlinking of rivers is likely to continue, at least in the realm of electoral politics. While concerns have been raised regarding economic and technological viability (Jain et al, 2008;Shah & Amarasinghe, 2016) and environmental sustainability (Verdhen, 2016;Higgins et al, 2018), keeping the debate alive in the public memory has political dividends (Bozorg-Haddad et al, 2020) as it can be used as an electoral agenda (Schiff, 2014;Batabyal & Beladi, 2020), both for and against the linking of rivers depending on who benefits from such mega projects.…”

“…The way policy-and lawmakers understand and articulate an issue as complex as river governance (Grabowski et al, 2022) or even use it for their specific political agendas in a democratic society has been rarely explored (Schiff, 2014;Bundi, 2018b;Mourao, 2019), particularly in the context of environmental resources management. However, Parliamentarians have been known to use the privilege of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) to evaluate government policies (Bundi, 2018a), seek accountability (Bundi, 2018b) and bring the attention of the executive to focus on their constituency (Martin, 2011).…”

Water Governance—An Historical Perspective on Current Debates

“…A ''national mission" was declared to address pollution and overuse of the Ganges but has had little impact, due to limited financial resources and a failure to support decentralised approaches (Schiff, 2014). Similar dysfunction is evident in unsustainable groundwater use by agriculture where water governance has been characterised as "anarchy" (Shah, 2010).…”

Resolving the Ganges pollution paradox: A policy‐centric systematic review

“…Traditional reviews of the Ganges have focused either broadly on pollution (see, Roy & Shamim, 2020; Sinha & Loganathan, 2015) or on particular pollutants such as plastic pollutions (see Roman et al, 2022) or heavy metal pollutions (see Paul, 2017; Sankhla et al, 2018). Other authors (i.e., Schiff, 2014) have overviewed some of the policy and community‐based actions of regional and national actors to regulate and improve water quality on the Ganges and to rectify the political mechanisms and histories at play in the area. What is missing in the literature is a clear and authoritative bridge documenting how scientific studies about Ganges water pollution and quality can be used to inform policy decisions; this is a noted area for improvement across the environmental sciences (Pullin & Knight, 2012), but it is especially important in the Ganges which is a large river basin that supports significant populations that need better access to clean waters.…”