The view of the Cauvery river near Trichy. Photo: K.A. Shaji/Mongabay.
On February 19, the Tamil Nadu government introduced a Bill “to protect the agricultural lands in the Cauvery delta” by declaring parts of the region a protected special agriculture zone. Aiming to restrict non-agricultural activities in the state’s largest rice-producing region, this Bill comes in the wake of a series of farmers’ protests in the region and a year ahead of the 2021 state elections.
But while it makes the right political noises, the Bill fails to account for the complex community geographies of the delta and the ecological changes it is undergoing.
Old wine in a new bottle
The Bill prohibits a series of activities, notably “exploration, drilling and extraction of oil and natural gas”, in Thanjavur, Thiruvarur and Nagapattinam districts and partially in Cuddalore and Pudukkottai districts. Crucially, it also recognises that agriculture is in crisis in these districts. However, in its solutions the Bill regurgitates old solutions and proposes no actionable steps.
It proposes measures such as integrated farming, enhanced cultivation practices, technologies to increase production, optimal usage of water and other inputs, promotion of agro-industries and research and development. This is not new for the Cauvery deltaic region given it has been subject to experimentation and research since the government built the Mettur dam canals in the 1930s and as part of the Green Revolution in the 1970s. The Bill simply renews some of these measures and re-advances them under new committees.
The Cauvery delta was once a rich and fertile agricultural region. Since 1971, however, there has been a 13-fold increase of wastelands in the deltaic region, meaning 20% of the land is now used for purposes other than agriculture.
Extreme weather events, predicted to get more frequent with climate change, haven’t spared the delta either. Cyclone Gaja, which struck India’s east coast in 2018 in the middle of the samba cultivation season (August-February), severely affecting rice production and wiped off thousands of coconut trees.
The Bill foregrounds large-scale protests in the delta against hydrocarbon extraction. Beginning in the village of Neduvasal in February 2017, they spread quickly to other parts of the delta. Protestors questioned the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Ltd. (ONGC) over what would happen to agriculture, especially water resources, in the event of a pipeline leak. Taken together, there is a collective sense of unrest among the delta’s farmers. A response in the form of this Bill was perhaps inevitable for the AIADMK government, which will seek reelection next year.
Vital omissions
One criticism levelled against the Bill is that it doesn’t interfere with existing projects and is clear that it won’t prohibit even new ‘infrastructure’ projects. Our fieldwork in the delta has shown that farmers are keeping lands vacant waiting for power projects to be set up on them because they fall within this zone of exemption. The partial inclusion of Cuddalore district, for example, gives the Cuddalore refinery project a green light despite the withdrawal of its ‘petroleum, chemicals and petrochemicals investment region’ status.
There is also no mention of the proposed fracking projects, onshore and offshore, with bids granted to the ONGC among other companies along the same coastal deltaic strip. There is no clarity on the status of these offshore projects, which pose a significant threat to the delta’s coastal ecology.
Worryingly, the Bill also makes little mention of farmers and other communities who live in the delta. Instead, “undue constraints” on agriculture by external projects are addressed through an abstract idea of protection, without any clear identification of farm economics. In particular, it doesn’t acknowledge issues in agricultural production – most important of which are support prices, assured procurement, cheap credit and timely availability of input costs through institutions – and the lack of which contributed to a high rate of farmer suicides in the region in 2016 (106 in December alone). Therefore, the Bill while recognising the need for more technical studies, does not fully account for structural economic forces that have shaped agriculture in the region.
Changing ecologies
Finally, the Bill fails to recognise the complexity of the changing political ecology of the delta, which can’t be reversed with production-oriented solutions alone. Ecologically, the major threats the delta faces are of receding sediment deposits and increasing salinity and coastal erosion.
The delta has lost 80% of its sediment deposit, the basis of a riverine delta ecosystem, over the last century. The reasons for this are intricate but the immediate cause is rampant sand-mining in the Cauvery river basin, which has gone unchecked for two decades. The rich silt, which the Cauvery carries into the delta, is mined at its head, especially in Erode and Coimbatore districts and used in India’s booming construction industry.
Further, the region’s coastal regions that the Bill seeks to protect are confronted with the problem of salinisation. At one level, saline groundwater is part of a broader problem of water quality that farmers across the delta are complaining about. Even when the Cauvery brings in sufficient water for agriculture, the quality is poor and its high nitrate content leads to algal blooms in fields. When there is a lack of river water, farmers depend on bore-wells that have turned saline across the coastal spaces of the delta.
However, salt water has not simply prevented agriculture but has also enabled shrimp farming. Since European markets for Indian shrimp started booming in the 1990s, the number of shrimp farms along the southern parts of the delta has steadily increased. What were once agricultural lands are now immersed in salt water and pesticides to farm shrimp. These lands, once pushed into the shrimp economy, are nearly irrecoverable for agriculture today.
If such crucial factors remain unaddressed by legislative intervention meant to address agricultural crisis in the region, deltaic people who directly depend on the natural environment will once again be left to fend for themselves. Agrarian communities and their political collectives will reflect on how they will take their movement forward in light of this new promised ‘protection’.
Aditya Ramesh is an Economic and Social Research Council fellow at the University of Manchester. He wrote his PhD on the history of the Cauvery river. Senthil Babu is a senior research fellow at the French Institute of Pondicherry.