A sexy title or the concept of global relevance?
Beyond the dense urbanism of Mumbai (Bombay) or the IT centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad lies the Ganges River basin—today home to over one-quarter of India's billion-plus population—a space historically defined by a mythological constellation of terrestrial sites imbued with celestial significance. Not only is it one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, but it also undergoes dramatic physical changes with the onslaught of the wet monsoon, where over one-meter of rainfall occurs in the span of three months.
This book focuses on the intersection of these two observations. It is an atlas of built and unbuilt projects designed to transform the river into a giant water machine.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this mythical watercourse has functioned as a laboratory to test and build a new civilization around the culture of water. Jointly authored by people and nature, the Ganges River is today a monstrous water machine in which the entire basin became a workshop of human-made experience, defined by a hydrological system best described as a supersurface: a surface engineered from the scale of the soil to the scale of the nation. Everything from diffuse urban projects and green revolutions to colossal public works programs and architectural transformations constitute the genesis of the Ganges Water Machine. Whether to thwart massive peasant uprisings or to redirect monsoonal rains to productive ends, never before has a river that inspired the realization of unbelievable architectural and infrastructural projects received as little scrutiny as the Ganges river basin.
Reaching through the very heart of some of India s most densely populated cities, small towns, industrial zones, sacred sites, and mountainous forests, Ganges Water Machine by Anthony Acciavatti, composed of eight years of field and archival research, explores and theorizes the people and infrastructures that shaped this territory. Ganges Water Machine is an atlas of the enterprise to make the Ganges River basin into a highly engineered landscape: it reveals the narratives and explanations that allowed engineers and planners to realize fantasies previously only imaginable on paper or in myth.
Ganges Water Machine includes many different narrative registers: the autobiographical, the literary, the technical, the poetic and political, just to name a few. These accounts reveal the discovery of this landscape by the west, the inherent spiritual traditions, and the subsequent cultural transformations and appropriations of this geography. Similarly, the book displays a highly curated set of representations that may resonate with the many audiences of the book. The Ganges Basin is mediated through an incisive combination of media: from photography, to paintings, technical drawings, cartography, diagrams, indexes, and sketches.
The relevance of the book goes well beyond the ambition to reunite the disparate realities that shape the Ganges Basin today; it presents a new lens to interrogate urbanization dynamics characterized by dense and diffuse patterns of occupation. Through the delamination of the systems at play, Ganges Water Machine establishes a projective written and visual narrative, a tool to observe, analyze, interrogate and recast new territorial orders.1
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How unique is this idea of the water machine, really? Basically it is all about using underground solutions to manage temporal variability of available water resources. It was quite unique decades ago, when surface storage was thought of as the only solution for flow regulation. Large surface reservoirs are still the dominant thinking worldwide and they indeed have many benefits (and faults).
The World Bank is back with its plans for big dams projects. But why did we not have any major progress with underground solutions so far? Particularly considering that variability increases with changing climate, that rising temperatures increase evaporation losses from surface reservoirs making them progressively less effective, and surface reservoirs are not always “clean” considering the amount of methane they generate – particularly if they are built in tropical forest ecosystems.
Possibly because, amongst other numerous things, nobody ever illustrated – in practice – that underground solution to variability management is competitive, elegant and applicable at the scale of the major river basins of the world. Because, unlike large dams, it is invisible.
But these water machines are effectively operating to this or that extent everywhere in monsoonal climates, but not only in monsoonal ones. IWMI’s recent work in South East Asia (Pavelic et al., 2012) and Central Asia (Karimov et al., 2010) are very clear examples of this. Of course, this is not a silver bullet solution, and there is hardly any such solution in principle. The devil is, as always, in the details. But we should not lose the big picture either. We might start appreciating the idea of managing temporal water resources variability globally through underground solutions, versus, or in addition to surface ones. Whether in the Ganges, or elsewhere. Good ideas, even if they are 40 years old, don’t die. They are sometimes so ahead of their time that they just need time to materialize.2