Part I: State Power, Depoliticization and Watershed Development

Watershed development (WSD) in India has come to embody the dilemmas around state power, decentralization and depoliticization that this book is about. A watershed or catchment is quite simply ‘all the land area from which all water drains to a common point’ (Kerr 2002, 1387). The term ‘watershed’ above any point on a defined drainage channel is used to denote all the land and water areas that drain through that point. In effect, anywhere that one lives is part of a watershed, usually classified as micro, milli or macro in size. The transformation of what was narrowly defined in the past as soil and water conservation all around the world into a comprehensive intervention for rural development (Farrington et al 1999, Hinchcliffe et al 1999) can be clearly observed in India over the recent decades. WSD programmes now encompass core development objectives of the Indian state, most notably agricultural productivity, environmental conservation and poverty reduction. These objectives have been variously important to the state at different points of time, but their convergence as core pursuits has lent WSD an unparalleled significance for the Indian state. The central ministries of rural development and agriculture devote considerable administrative and financial resources to WSD. As a result, WSD programmes are perfectly poised to be intricately bound with the exercise of state power. In other words, WSD constitutes a ‘rational’ development project for the state to follow (Chatterjee 1998).