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Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches the water crisis in the rural Himalayan region by linking human and water sociality to examine the undignified development narrative of mountains and rivers.

Paper long abstract:

For mountain dwellers living in remote places, most of them used to own a cycle of food and waste before being connected to capitalist market-driven food imports. After the dependence on food imports was established, either through markets or government rations, the packages, containers, and mostly plastics became the major source of water and soil contamination. Addressing waste issues in rural areas, especially mountainous regions, is a hard task for governance and local society. Himalayan mountains, which have been popular tourist destinations, are facing environmental stress due to the rapidly increasing waste issues. The problems within the food-environment-waste nexus in the East Himalayan borderland face exacerbation due to the proximity of waste and farms, as well as the strategic settlement increase caused by China-India border tension.

In the small village cluster near Jang in Arunachal Pradesh, India, the animation of, function from, and sociality with water has transitioned from a deity-control micro-climate system, the expected source for substance agriculture, the flowing common that brings together the villagers daily, to the drive for micro-scale electricity source, leisure scenery location and fear of widening contamination pointing to global climate change. The local Indigenous group believes that water has a source of its being, which supports the local mountain dwellers’ pro-environment behaviours regardless of the knowledge paradigm shift. This short paper aims to tell the story of the water sociality of the people in Jang to build a dialogue with the conceptualisation of modern crisis – who is altering nature?