Exportable engineering expertise for ‘Development’: a story of large dams in post independence India

Abstract

Unlike any other technological artifact, large dams are unique stamps of human technological superiority over nature. Large dams however, have been analysed and critiqued in detail from various angles. Despite their seemingly apolitical nature, large dams are wired politically. Investigating the process of their assembly reveals a whole gamut of ideas—modern water, expert control and national space—that are stitched together to yield a hydraulic bureaucracy. In my paper, I draw upon engineering narratives to understand the rationale for technology-transfer in an overtly apolitical fashion. Ideas about ‘modern water’ and technology formed a template through which the hydrocracy—which in India took the form of the Central Water Commission—thought through, discussed and justified technological interventions. This seemingly stable template became a kind of bedrock for post independence engineering narratives for greater, scaled up technological interventions on riverine landscapes. By fixing the nation state as the object of development, the contours of the nation state were established whilst simultaneously casting it as an independent, self-sufficient unit. By portraying the nation state as one distinct freestanding unit, India could be represented as an empirical object. Its socio-political and economic processes could be represented as internal functions that were far removed from other socio-political forces outside the system. Listening closely to engineers, this paper will seek to bring to the fore the ways and means through institutional power is made and realised.