Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

This was the same canal we saw a few chapters ago, in Shalimar Bagh, where Jimmy’s mastiff ran so exuberantly along its banks.

“The elegance of their system was that the canal entered the walled city from the west and travelled through it to the Red Fort in the east. Ordinary citizens therefore got water from this canal first and the king got it last. Even in democratic societies the president is not usually on the tail end of essential resources. But these people understood the politics of water. Their system guaranteed that water would be clean all along its course because the king was the final user: no one could pollute the water that he would drink. It does not matter that this was not a democracy: they built their system around an understanding of water, and the needs of water are democratic needs. Only if you are democratic in your heart can you sanction this kind of water system. Otherwise you will reject it.”

We begin to walk again. The river bends away from us, and between us and it are the flats of the floodplain where crops are grown at this time of the year. The terrain is difficult and we decide to take the road. We climb on our hands and knees up the steep incline leading up to the highway, holding onto each other for stability. The concrete is burning hot. Finally we get up to the level of the highway, whose black surface is like a radiator. We climb over the barrier and cross eight lanes in front of the speeding traffic.

On the other side is a human-sized road with sidewalks. It leads through another zone of industrial refuse. There are abandoned buildings with broken windows. Any people here are foragers, collecting bits of plastic and cardboard for sale. There is the most enormous pile of shoes caught up in some twisted barbed wire. An old water tower overgrown with vines; the banisters have fallen away from the staircase that once spiralled up around its stem, and the steps jut out like rusty teeth. We pass a waterworks outside which hangs a banner saying, “Water is life”. The trees along the road are dead and desiccated. Here and there are rusty observation towers with broken spotlights. They look as if they have been lifted from a labour camp: I can’t imagine what they were here for.

“It was the British who ultimately broke with Delhi’s 1,000 years of water knowledge. Their rule was different from that of previous kingdoms, which had ruled without interfering in how people lived. The British wanted total rule, which would extend to education, morality, everything. And of course water too. But they had no experience of this landscape and they could not understand its water system. So though they did not set out to destroy it, destroy it they did.

“The British took no notice of the groundwater, which was the reason there had been cities in this place for 1,000 years. They were only interested in the river. They imported modern water practices from Europe, damming the Yamuna to the north of the city, in a place called Wazirabad, and running pipelines into the city from which they delivered water directly into houses. Sewage was then collected in drains which let it out into the river downstream. This is why it is ironic that the British chose not to look at the river. Previous kingdoms had not used the river, but they loved to look at it. The British lived off the river, but they could not bear to look at it.

“The British were used to getting water from taps and that is the system they wished to implement here. They also liked how this monopolistic system boosted their imperial hold on the place: they could make people dependent on them, and they could choose to deliver water to one social group and not another. But it was a total break with local water customs, and many in this city resisted water from taps. It was never considered auspicious. There is an old song which says something like, ‘Do anything to us, do whatever kind of harm you want to us, but don’t put taps in our houses. Keep your tapped water for your bungalows. Don’t bring it to where we live.’ Delhi people did not like the smell of piped water: they were used to taking water directly from wells. Before drawing water they would clean their utensils and rope, and then they would dip their vessels directly into the water source, which they could see and maintain for themselves. With piped water they could not see the source. It was far away, they did not know who was supplying it, how clean it was, or what kind of chemicals they were putting in. Even today you hear rumours of poison in the water system: people have not forgotten the paranoia unleashed when the British brought piped water.

“But gradually the British system extended everywhere. People opened a faucet and water came out and the water issue seemed to be ‘solved’. Delhi residents no longer had to think about a water ‘system’. And gradually the age-old system broke apart. There was no longer any need to maintain the channels and reservoirs. People demolished them because now the population of the city was growing: water tanks were taking up land which could be used as real estate. It did not hurt people to demolish them because they had forgotten what their function was, so they accorded them no prestige. It is the prestige of a system that directs you to conserve it and honour it; if that prestige disappears people cease to care. Of the seventeen rivers and 800 water bodies we had when the British came, hardly any are left.”

We are walking through strangely idyllic scenery, with trees and cultivated flats on both sides. In this city of 20 million people, there is no one around. The sun is on our heads, and we drink frequently.

“We still use the British system, which by now has turned into a disaster. It is a disaster because it has been taken out of the hands of people, who have therefore lost all their sense of water as a system. Now people think that water is just a wet substance that comes out of a tap, and if you need more you just turn on more taps. Which is why we now have such enormous problems. Delhi has water, it has lots of water. That is why the city came to be here in the first place. But water needs a system. And whereas Delhi once had an intelligent, scientific system, it now has no system at all.

“It is funny that we think ‘democracy’ is about voting. We are a democracy in the sense that we vote, but everything else, everything that constitutes our actual lives, has moved in the opposite direction. Water systems used to be entirely democratic: knowledge of the system was distributed to everyone, and everyone played their part in taking care of it. Now water provision is centralised, only a few people know how it works, and for everyone else there is only a vague sense of valves and pipes. And even the people who are running it have no deep knowledge of how water functions in this place.

“As soon as the water tanks were lost, Delhi began to have severe flooding. In our own time, everything that could once absorb monsoon water has disappeared. The tanks have gone and so has all of Delhi’s agricultural land. But the monsoon is still with us. The entire city is now one hard surface so there is nowhere for this sudden rush of water to go. Delhi is submerged every year by floods. This is an entirely modern phenomenon.

“But we also began to have severe water shortages. This place that drew conquerors from all over the continent because of the richness of its water is now in a water crisis. The river rapidly ceased to be adequate for the city’s water needs: Delhi’s population is fifty times larger now than when the British built their system, while the Yamuna is the same size. So Delhi began to take water from other places. Now we have pipelines bringing water from the Ganges and Bhagirathi rivers and from the Renuka lake. We can do this because compared to our predecessors we have acquired some small quantum of technological power. But it is a completely immature solution. First of all because we are close to exhausting these supplies too, and there is no other water we can use that we can bring to Delhi with gravity. Can you imagine if we had to use electricity to raise water to the city? And secondly because it pays no attention at all to the wider economy of water. Thousands of farmers have protested against Delhi taking their water, they have tried to smash the dams that stop their rivers’ traditional flow — but so what? Delhi wants water, and Delhi is powerful. Delhi is drying out the country for hundreds of kilometres around, which creates more refugees from the land, who come to Delhi, who require more water, so Delhi takes even more — and so it goes on.