Presentation short abstract

Through an attention to knowledge practices of state and international agencies in mobilising watersheds and aquifers for governing groundwater in Indian state of Maharashtra, the paper explores the scalar politics of groundwater development and management to reveal obscure processes and discourses.

Presentation long abstract

This paper traces the scalar politics of mobilising watersheds and aquifers as sites of groundwater 'potential', 'exploitation' and 'management' in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Since the 1970s, when the state groundwater agency first identified and delineated them, watersheds have been the basis for groundwater knowledge production, knowledge that informs and circulates through policies and programmes rooted in an irrigational framing of groundwater resources. In early 2000s, the introduction of aquifers as units of groundwater management has led to tensions of mobilising scalar relations between the surface (watersheds) and the sub-surface (aquifers) into governance responses like defining ‘project units,’ ‘aquifer federations’ and ‘groundwater user groups’.

Through discourse analysis of the evolution of groundwater knowledge practices and associated policies led by state and international donor initiatives, coupled with in-depth interviews with state groundwater officials, consultants and civil society practitioners, I illustrate scale as ‘work’ rather than a pre-fixed entity. Drawing from the critical work on the Green Revolution, which paved the way for paradigm of agricultural intensification and associated ontologies of irrigation and resource 'potential', I reveal the emergence of new scalar categories of knowing and governing groundwater. I unpack how state officials and practitioners navigate scalar mis-matches while implementing a shift from watershed-based to aquifer-based groundwater management within a governance framework tightly linked and mobilised through administrative units like village, blocks and districts. By deploying scale as an analytical category, this paper presents an opportunity to reveal obscure processes and discourses associated with groundwater development and management in Maharashtra.