The Kaveri Delta: Crop, Land and Labour

Climate Discourse: Crop, Land and Labour in the Kaveri Delta

Across the world, deltaic regions are undergoing dramatic geophysical and climatic transformations. Through the glut of financing available for climate change adaptation efforts, two types of landscape altering efforts are underway: water engineering projects and efforts to extract growing salinity and under-earth resources such as hydrocarbons for private, profit-making firms. Scant attention has been paid to how these transitions and transformation might affect the peoples of the delta. The following three groups of people will bear the brunt of these changes: the landless, the growing numbers of educated but unemployed youth, and the working women whose precarity has become the source of their creditworthiness for the credit industry. ROSA is developing research and resources that aid in shaping the possibilities for these sections of deltaic peoples.

In 2016, a climate adaptation project was implemented in the southern part of the Kaveri delta, building several water engineering infrastructures along various distributaries of the Kaveri with a multi-million dollar loan from the Asian Development Bank. Though framed as an effort to adapt the region to the predicted impacts of climate change in the region, the project proposed and implemented solutions, such as building dams and raising embankments, that alienated people from the rivers. Extraction in the form of corruption orchestrated by the local political class in collusion with the contractors resulted in violations such as the extraction of river sand.

Scrutiny of the planned infrastructure along with farmers’ movements brought out serious concerns. Ignoring alternative suggestions, the implementing agencies went ahead in building infrastructures which favoured shrimp aquaculture farms - benefitting the local political class and dominant castes - to the detriment of nearby agricultural fields and the livelihoods of inland fishers.

In this context, ROSA engaged in conversations across the Kaveri delta to understand the impacts of these infrastructures on livelihoods. We published a report of the findings that emerged from these conversations. We are working on publishing a booklet in Tamil with articles, based on both fieldwork and archival work, on ten major themes that impact the lives of deltaic peoples.