Few studies of resource management have paid as much attention or intelligently surveyed the operational aspects of Water User Associations (WUAs) as Institutions, Technology and Water Control. The implementation of WUAs policies, argues this pioneering study, is shaped by the aspirations of its users and participants. Such an insight makes for a trenchant study of the implementation process of the WUAs.
Relying on ethnographic research methods, Narain takes an inter-disciplinary approach to examine how institutions are shaped by technology. Calling attention to the internal organizational dynamics of the WUAs, the author argues that the emergence of institutions for collective action is shaped by technology and social relationships. The book makes a case for mainstream discussions of technology, the design of canal irrigation, and open discussions of irrigation management reform. The warabandi system of irrigation prevalent in northwestern India has a different potential for reform than does the shejpali system prevalent in western India.
Vishal Narain’s account of this highly topical subject should be of interest to researcher’s and academics, NGOs, multilateral organisations and donors interested in irrigation management reform, collective action and community-based management.
  

Tank Irrigation of South India is largely considered “traditional”, “alternative”, or “appropriate” form of irrigation in the current academic and policy circles. Policy reforms have been underway in South India to rehabilitate tanks and hand them over to communities for management and maintenance. These efforts are guided by a premise that communities are better managers of natural resources. However, these efforts are not based on a careful inquiry about how internal power dynamics in the community results in inequitable distribution of the resource.

Social Designs is based on a central argument that tank irrigation technology is shaped as a result of power relations in a particular historical, agrarian and social context. This technology as a matter of fact institutionalizes a particular pattern of resource utilization that favors only some users, and discriminates against some others.

This book proposes that technological designs are socially shaped, and that through the means of technological designs society orders itself. By means of shaping and reproducing technology, a certain form of social organization or social arrangement is also reproduced.

Extensive social anthropological research on tank irrigation technology and agrarian practices in Karnataka enriches this book. Shah has also drawn upon rich empirical material on the social and agrarian context of tank irrigation technology.

This book analyses the struggle over water in a large-scale irrigation system in Raichur District, Karnataka, South India. It looks at water control as a simultaneously technical, managerial and socio-political process. The triangle of accommodation of different categories of farmers (head-enders and tail-enders), irrigation department officials and local politicians, involving water, votes, money, employment, credit and harassment, is documented. The book shows that the physical infrastructure, notably the division structures, are signposts of struggle, expressing the balance of power between farmers and the irrigation department, and that between head- and tail-end farmers. It concludes with a discussion of irrigation reform efforts in India: reasons for the very slow transformation of the sector, and how a more integrated perspective on irrigation could provide directions for the way forward.

On the Waterfront employs an interdisciplinary approach to the study of irrigation management of a specific region and irrigations system. The book would be of interest to government and non-government organizations in the water sector, researchers of technology and institutions, and academics working on natural resources and development.
 

DEMOCRATISING MICRO-HYDEL by Amreeta Regmi
Published by Orient Longman. ISBN 81 250 2677 0

Micro-hydel technology is often perceived as “community-oriented” alternative system of rural electrification. This book documents micro-hydel technology realities and hydropower policy by mapping an interdisciplinary technography of four hydel systems from the Central Hills of Nepal. It examines how these socio-technical systems have been constructed within and by the community during a period when the research area exploded into local action generated by the Maoist movement.

Democratising Micro-hydel shows that hydel technology inNepal illustrates significant characteristics of authorization in design. It further reveals that society and humans shape “technological democracy”. The adaptive micro-hydel not only represents illumination and development but also identity, conflict, power, violence, control and democracy.

Against the backdrop of a myriad of design networks influenced by doors, manufacturers and embedded symbolism, Regmi asserts that the spread of democratic institutions does not ecessarily signify the spread of democratic technology. This book suggests that democratizing micro-hydel is the respectful and rightful accommodation of diversity, opposition ad desire to collectively build upon socio-technical consensus.

The key messages and contribution of this research should be of interest to policy makers, engineers, external agencies and researchers.