Between visible and invisible: pluralising groundwater knowledges of Maharashtra, India

Groundwater plays an important role in India’s water story as it supports millions of smallholder farmers for their agriculture-based livelihoods, ensures access to domestic water and safeguards a range of ecosystem services like sustaining river flows. These are all threatened by groundwater depletion, which has triggered a series of state-led responses in the form of policies and programmes. While recognising the role of knowledge in shaping these responses, scholars and practitioners have questioned the pre-eminence of techno-managerial approach for understanding groundwater that has led to a ‘prescriptive paradigm’ of governance that promotes certain ways of knowing groundwater over other ways of knowing ‘invisible’ water. This thesis develops a research approach to pluralise ways of knowing groundwater with an intent to contribute towards efforts to seek just governance transformations. It brings together work in Critical Political Ecology on politics environmental knowledge, and Science and Technology Studies work on practices of mapping and monitoring the subsurface, to explore the politics and processes of groundwater knowledge production, application, and (re)circulation in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. The thesis is based on a 9 month long multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted with farming communities of rural Maharashtra and officials, practitioners, scientists, and consultants involved in the state’s groundwater agency, NGOs and international organisations. The thesis enhances understanding of groundwater governance in three ways: first, it unpacks scalar politics of mobilising watersheds as sites of groundwater management and knowledge production and how particular international discourses shape national and regional strategies of governance; second, it reveals socially situated practices of groundwater monitoring by state officials and how it moves beyond hydrogeology to integrate bureaucratic, programmatic and other concerns to inform everyday governance; third, it shows how predominant narratives of water scarcity and drought overlook the politics of ‘excess water’ by attending farmer’s practices of managing waterlogged lands that came to be problematised through an irrigation ontology of Green Revolution coupled with discourse of wastelands and land development. Together, these three insights advance the critique of techno-managerial water management paradigms and open new areas of inquiry at the intersection of groundwater governance, droughts, and politics of excess and waste amid scarcity. It troubles the radical separations of scientific-unscientific, local-expert, excess-scarcity, and surface-subsurface and contributes towards recent calls for critically examining and challenging forms of segregation and hierarchy in knowing groundwater, thus making a case for pluralising knowledges, a key step in efforts seeking just governance transformations.