Over-disciplined

Following in a long line of analysis, talk shows on television on several occasions over the past summer featured experts who made politically correct statements in favour of a series of upstream dams that would restrict the Yamuna River from any further flooding of New Delhi. As if on cue, over the same months residents of the capital city saw the Yamuna’s waters swell to levels not seen in decades, sending people and the government back to 1978, when the river had inundated large parts of the metropolitan area. But while the floodwaters did eventually subside, as they did in 1978, like a bad dream the suggestion of the possibility of damming the Yamuna’s flow continues to haunt engineers, planners and politicians. But such suggestions ride on constricted public memory, of a type that rarely recalls past misadventures. Nurtured by planning ideology that remains subservient to the political economy of development, engineers have made water management into an exclusive domain reserved solely for themselves. As a consequence, the governance of water systems has remained stagnant as a discipline....more