Grounding groundwater: Spatialities of dispossession in the Kaveri Delta, India

Abstract

Abstract Groundwater degradation is commonly understood to exacerbate societal inequities. However, its effects can be more complex, reconfiguring existing patterns of advantage and disadvantage rather than simply intensifying them. This paper applies political ecology and socio-hydrogeology to enquire how groundwater change in India’s Kaveri Delta manifests through the understandings and actions of government officials and farmers, and examine its societal implications. The research is set in a deltaic village dotted with tubewells for year-round paddy cultivation. Here, it combines aquifer mapping and monitoring conducted alongside farmers, with a spatial and qualitative analysis of landholding, water access, cropping patterns and livelihood options, in relation to caste. Aquifer monitoring uncovers recent groundwater salinisation, and the subsequent analysis reveals concomitant water dispossession, where the delta elite have accumulated the benefits of government-incentivised intensive agriculture, to the detriment of other farmers now contending with saline groundwater. However, the spatial heterogeneity of groundwater salinisation falls outside the socio-spatial patterns of caste-based inequity, as some middle caste farmers, in areas with recent groundwater salinisation, face agricultural losses and fare worse than Dalit (marginalised caste) farmers in areas retaining fresh groundwater. The analysis thus reveals 'spatialities of dispossession', where the processes and outcomes of dispossession are mediated by the spatial properties and relations associated with resource change (here spatially uneven groundwater salinisation). This can upend previous societal relations through changing geographies of resource access. Grounding groundwater socio-hydrogeologically, by attending to its dynamic materiality, spatiality and politics, the paper thus unravels its shared agency in shaping relations of inequity.