
Beyond the ‘water level’: Entangled ontologies and epistemologies of groundwater monitoring in Maharashtra, India
We’re thrilled to welcome Dhaval Joshi from the University of Edinburgh, UK, who will share insights into the complexities of groundwater monitoring in Maharashtra, India. Joshi’s work challenges conventional approaches, revealing the intertwining of scientific and ‘non-scientific’ perspectives in understanding groundwater. More details below
Abstract
While groundwater overexploitation has been questioned and critiqued by scholars (Srinivasan and Lele 2017, Molle 2023), it continues to inform the groundwater governance discourse at global, national, and regional scales (UNESCO 2022, CGWB 2021, GSDA 2014). In India, regular assessments concerning the ‘state of groundwater resources’ are produced by state agencies informing categorisation of areas as safe, critical, or overexploited which are then circulated through programmes and policies of groundwater. These assessments are steered by practices of groundwater monitoring- through a network of observation wells and periodic measuring and recording of water levels. Drawing from politics of environmental knowledge and STS of the subterranean, this analysis opens critical questions about its use of instruments and numbers to render the underground visible in certain ways that has implications for groundwater governance.
Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore practices of groundwater monitoring and associated work of ‘knowing groundwater’ in western Indian state of Maharashtra. I argue that scientific practices engage and embed with other ways of knowing groundwater that may be deemed ‘non-scientific’. Many of these practices move ‘beyond hydrogeology’- decisions made ‘off the record’ that are shaped by aspects of funding, project timelines and avoiding bureaucratic burdens. Lastly, groundwater user communities deploy a different way of knowing groundwater- one that is embedded in local socio-cultural practices and everyday practices which emerge from a different relationship with groundwater. I believe these observations question the current paradigm but more importantly highlight other ways of knowing groundwater, that may pave way for just transformations seeking to improve governance. In doing so, it attempts to contribute towards recent call for ‘critically examining and challenging forms of segregation and hierarchy in knowing groundwater’ (Zwarteveen et al. 2021).
Biography
Dhaval Joshi is a doctoral researcher at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. He studies Groundwater governance in India, particularly looking at knowledge(s) that shape state-led programmes and policies.