S CIENTIFIC  AUTHORITY  IN  THE  POLICY  PROCESS

This section turns to the literature on scientific expertise and its relationship with policy.

On the one hand, in India today, formal policies to address water quality are guided by powerful water resource management bureaucracies, including water ministries as well as water and sewage engineering agencies at city level. On the other hand, significant powers in terms of water quality management are placed with a separate group of institutions focusing on environmental pollution regulation. Because of the federal structure of governance in India, the latter function in two tiers, the central government level and ‘state’ level. These are what will concern this thesis the most in the following chapters. Such sectors are traditionally directed by technical experts operating within a limited range of specialisations, including pollution control and water technology specialists, hydrologists, river engineers, and chemists.

7 Delhi authorities have invested in an ambitious multi-million dollar technological project to intercept domestic wastewater entering the Yamuna river (The Hindu, 2010). Other large-scale initiatives are also promoted by global institutions such as the World Bank sanctioning 1$ billion credit and loan for

cleaning the river Ganges. The criticisms surrounding the implementation of these projects are escalating, primarily because of the largely technocratic approach adopted to address core water pollution issues presented in the Indian context today (CSE, 2007).

The role of this particular group of actors is fundamental to understanding how experts influence policy approaches for managing water quality. Bringing in perspectives from the academic debate on the function of science (or science studies) is therefore relevant and useful because it examines how different relationships between scientists and governments are formed and sustained more thoroughly than the policy studies literature discussed earlier. However, as this is a very extensive body of literature covering a long time span and including many sub-fields and disciplines, the purpose here is not to encompass all the different aspects but to present some of the most relevant themes, based on authors who have examined the function of science both in Indian as well as Western contexts.

The basis for much of the work on the sociology of science is to highlight how science, like other domains of authority (such as religion or law), also needs to be examined as a socially constructed phenomenon (Latour, 1987). This means that even though scientific knowledge is often presented as ‘objective’ and ‘rational’, in reality the production of

‘scientific claims’ has associated social and policy commitments (Irwin and Wynne, 1996). A widely accepted line of explanation emanating from the Mertonian school stresses the shared norms that foster cohesiveness in science, even though its

practitioners may enter from divergent geographic, cultural or linguistic backgrounds (Merton, 1973). Other scholars have called attention to the elitist process of entry into the scientific community, which is encouraged by invisible colleges⁸, academic research networks and ‘gatekeepers’ comprising senior academic colleagues and lead editors of scientific journals (Crane, 1967, 1989).

As critics of technocracy have further pointed out, these processes have in turn legitimised science as an authoritative body of knowledge, and have facilitated the perception amongst decision makers and policy makers that science is capable of providing accurate and objective answers to what should be achieved in matters of policy (Price, 1965, Habermas, 1971, Wildavsky, 1979). Based on these assumptions,

8 The term has been used to describe a closed network of individuals that share similar core beliefs (mainly technically driven) about a subject area or policy problem. An early use of the term was to describe members of the Royal Society in London and to emphasise that they were geographically close together and shared common scientific interests (Lievrouw, 1989:618). A related contemporary use of the term can also be traced to the concept of ‘epistemic communities’ to describe networks of expert actors operating at the international level who can have a powerful role in shaping dominant policy positions (Haas, 1992).

the state in post-colonial societies has become very supportive of western scientific models in development projects and modernisation schemes (Sachs, 1992, Escobar, 1995, Scott, 1998). In the Indian context especially, Jawaharlal Nehru's conception of a

‘science-led’ Indian modernity formed the basis for science to become part of the modern state, facilitated by the foundation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and technical universities such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT’s), and also the nationwide expansion of large-scale engineering projects (such as the ‘Dam Era’), thus establishing the role of scientific experts in several domains of government functioning and policy making (Visvanathan, 1985, Kumar, 1995, Prakash, 1999).

Partly due to the introduction of engineering approaches in formal policy and planning, natural resource control, through maximising the utilisation and productivity of nature, became the new policy imperative (Scott, 1998). In specific sectors such as irrigation, water became the focus of engineering efforts to counteract its natural tendency to run to ‘waste’, thereby bringing large new areas of land under irrigation and improving the distribution of water to individual users (Gilmartin, 2003). The spread of powerful expert-driven views around resource control and the commodification of water empowered the state in colonial societies to break through the power of village communities and extend a technical system of irrigation into villages that were previously seen as development failures (ibid).

A series of development schemes taking place in India today affirms the continued hegemony of some of these engineering doctrines in post-colonial societies. For

example in the 1950s and 1960s the premises underlying the construction of large dams can be seen to be based on the same rational and positivist notion of western science that legitimises state control over nature and rivers (Mehta, 1998). Furthermore, more recent policy propositions, such as the ‘national river linking project’ involving the large-scale transfer of water (using large reservoirs and barrages) across separate basins and over long distances, confirm the prevailing prestige of established scientific

disciplines (hydrology and river engineering) in the management and planning of the water sector (IWMI, 2008).

The prestige and authority granted to scientific expertise in addressing water quality can be traced back in history to Europe’s early modernity. In many towns and cities

including London and Paris, the emergence of the ‘bacteriological city’⁹ ideology in 19^th century Europe was set in motion by scientists, and this brought about a set of drastic state reforms for centralised public water and sanitation (Gandy, 2006). This was a period of profound transformation in people’s attitudes to and perceptions of the very notions of water and waste. The rapidly growing popularity of the newly established disciplines of microbiology and sanitary engineering meant that novel hygiene standards were quickly adopted by urban citizens and established traditional customs associated with water were soon forgotten (Goubert, 1989). People who had previously relied on their sensory perceptions (such as taste, colour and appearance) of water and its quality were becoming familiar with the technical logic of ‘monitoring’, ‘distribution’, and

‘drainage’ based on the newly acquired scientific knowledge (ibid: 32).

Specifically, concerns about the ‘contamination’ of drinking water quality were often the precursor for scientists to promote a broad range of institutionalised practices (Johnson, 2006). The harm caused to human health by typhoid and cholera bacteria meant that water contamination had to be contained by the vigorous monitoring and purification of drinking water sources (e.g. lakes or underground aquifers), or alternatively by installing an alternative ‘pipe’ system for the supply of ‘pure’ water (Goubert, 1989:109). Hence, from being merely a field of scientific enquiry, the pursuit of pure water in early modern Europe quickly became a large-scale political and

administrative priority. With expert assessments of water quality being entrusted to scientists, health practitioners and technical experts were recruited at various levels within the administration to assist the bureaucracy with the accumulation and dissemination of water quality information.

9The term has been employed in order to suggest an organic conception of the modern metropolis that viewed human faeces not only as a matter of unpleasantness but also as a source of danger to public health (Gandy, 2006). This was a core principle for introducing sanitary reforms in urban areas, in that public health fundamentally depended on water moving through the whole urban body, thus eliminating disease.

Today, with experts extending their power and authority beyond the traditional

boundaries of urban and sanitary reform, water quality has become a subject with new meanings and interpretations. More importantly, early modernity water quality concerns were focused around the potability of water in cities and towns, whereas attention has now shifted towards environmental protection, river conservation and pollution control concerns (Alley, 2002). This has contributed to the creation of new forms of hegemonic discourses and practices around water quality which will be explored in subsequent chapters. The doctrine of ‘assimilative capacity’ has formed a basis for viewing rivers not as ecosystems but rather as waste management commodities with the capacity to recover and dilute urban waste (Keeling, 2005). Furthermore, water quality has also become associated with new metrologies and monitoring strategies such as Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) which helps assess the level of pollution a river system can sustain (Keeling, 2005). (The use of the BOD is explored again in section 4.4.2).

This shift of attention around environmental water quality has encouraged the designing of new institutional structures and has promoted legislative changes that extend beyond public health concerns (particularly the contamination of potable water sources) to include a core environmental perspective as well. In India particularly, the fact that water quality became associated with the environmental degradation of important national river systems was a precursor for the inception of the Board (the subject of Chapter 4) in the 1970s and the founding of the Water (Pollution and Prevention) Act (Gazette of India, 1974).

Although the different measures that have been adopted over time for managing water quality are still greatly celebrated within the wider scientific community, in many regions of the Global South they have not produced the same positive outcomes observed in Western contexts. More importantly, the eagerness of policy makers to provide ‘quick fixes’ for complex, technical, environmental and social dilemmas around water and sanitation has, in many instances, contributed to segregation between the European elite and indigenous communities and also the changing by force of

traditional practices, behaviours and cultural relationships with water (Prashad, 2001, Sharan, 2002, Broich, 2007). All this has brought about the added cost of widening disparities between the rich and the poor, particularly in terms of access to clean water and sanitation (Gandy, 2006, 2008). These inequalities are also highly apparent in

peri-urban environments. Chapter 5 in particular demonstrates that, at present, in peri-peri-urban Delhi a clear demarcation between the poorer and the more affluent groups is sustained by the formal system for providing sanitary and water technologies. The way water and sanitation technologies are distributed among different populations determines the extent of their exposure to deteriorating water quality. Yet another unintended consequence of the granting of exclusivity to technical knowledge is the

underestimation of the importance of experience-based knowledge and perceptions regarding water quality (see Black and Fawcett 2008; UNDP 2006). Also discussed in more detail in Chapter 5 are citizens’ assessments of water quality. It demonstrates that a better awareness of citizen-based perspectives has repercussions for improving the living conditions of the poor. At present, however, these are not granted the same focused attention accorded to science and engineering, while policy makers in developing countries continue to draw upon technocratic approaches for proposing a diverse array of water reforms (Mehta et al., 2007).