Simple map of command area of SSP 77

One NGO, SAVE (Saline Areas Vitalization Enterprise), told me they worked in Jambusar, a

taluka (sub-district) which suffers from salt-water intrusion and is also identified in official

77 _{The dark green area is Phase 1 of construction . Source: http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/iwmi-}

117 government statistics as backward, in 1974 it was even the “most backward” taluka of Gujarat (Pathak, Desai et al. 1974). We drove to the SAVE office in Jambusar town to check out the conditions in Jambusar and the status of the SSP there. A farmer and associate of SAVE was present and suggested Krushigam would be a suitable village to study, as Narmada water had arrived there. He called his contact in Krushigam and prepared him for our visit. This contact turned out to be one of the richest farmers in Krushigam, living in an enormous modern house. He said I was welcome to stay in Krushigam when I returned the following autumn, and offered to help find accommodation. However, whereas Narmada water had rightly arrived in the Baroda Branch Canal which traversed the village fields, the minor canals were dry and the sub-minor canals not yet constructed. The farmers had been told that the irrigation system should be functioning by the coming monsoon, but doubted it.

In March 2004, I decided to compare Krushigam with another village I had visited just north of Ahmedabad near Kadi town. This decision had to be revised in October 2004, when I arrived in Krushigam and experienced that the sub-minor construction had not started, that the Water Users‟ Association was not working, and that the Narmada water was only available to farmers with access to diesel pumps and pipes. There was no clear contrast between the situation in a village waiting for Narmada water and a village having received Narmada water. On the contrary, in most parts of Phase 1 of the command area, there was a long-lasting period of conflict and negotiations between the villagers and the government about the implementation of the project. This period had already lasted a couple of years, and I arrived in the middle of it. I therefore decided to contrast the findings in Krushigam with a case study of Motugam, where the farmers were stealing water supported by their political networks. Motugam was found in the list of villages from the same conference presentation in which I found the crude map of the command area78. I located it in March 2004 by combining the road map and the simple command-area map. On arrival, we discovered that Motugam was actually not part of the command area, although located on the left bank of the Narmada Main Canal, within the larger command area of SSP. I had probably found the wrong Motugam. Because this Motugam was part of the command area of another canal irrigation project, the Panam Scheme, it was not entitled to Narmada water, despite hardly ever receiving water

118 from Panam because of its tail-end location. The villagers had therefore installed three large pipes which siphoned water (called baknari in Gujarati) from the Narmada Main Canal into the Panam field channel network, formed a baknari-organisation, and were vehemently fighting for the right to water from Narmada. The sarpanch of Motugam welcomed us and told us that as he was taluka-level leader of the BJP, no government official would dare remove his village‟s baknari. I figured that this would make an interesting case for exploring how power structures affect the implementation of a project like the SSP.

Motugam and Krushigam were good contrasts also on other terms: The first is a relatively remote, poor, agricultural village, with no irrigation source and few services. Not even a ration shop, where households with BPL79 ration cards can buy subsidised rations of rice, wheat, sugar and kerosene, was available in Krushigam. Motugam has twice the population, is centrally located on the Interstate highway between Ahmedabad and Indore, is visibly richer with paved streets, streetlights and numerous small shops and banks, and the income structure is not entirely agricultural based, but also based on several stone quarries and services related to the highway such as tea stalls and garages. And more importantly, the village is endowed with irrigation resources from groundwater and river as well as the new Narmada Main Canal. From a data-collection viewpoint, the difference in resource endowments of the villages also translated into different availability of village statistics. Whereas Motugam had a staffed panchayat office which held maps, land records, and lists of households below the poverty line, this was not available from Krushigam. I was told that the BPL-list was located either in the ration shop or with the gram sevak, but neither was available when I called for a visit. My own survey was therefore a necessary tool to bring forward important village statistics.

Village field research

Village-level data was collected following a triangulation strategy, by a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. A 25% sample survey of all households in both

panchayat villages was done in the fall/winter of 2004/2005. In Krushigam, this gave a

sample of 105 households, and in Motugam, 196 households. The “panchayat village” is the smallest administrative unit in the Indian governmental system, and typically includes a main

119 village with surrounding hamlets. The aim of the survey was to identify socio-economic structures, political organisation and participation, and people‟s perceptions of the SSP. Households were selected by starting at a random house and then going to every fourth house in each hamlet of the panchayat village and each neighbourhood of the hamlet. The neighbourhoods would generally be laid out along a street or around a courtyard, so this was the easiest way to aquire a random probability sample. If no adults were at home in the sampled house, I would return at a later time to ensure a probability sample. The variables in the survey are mostly at the household level, and I tried to get the head of household, which meant the main earning man, to be the respondent. Sometimes, the respondent would be the housewife or an adult son. At times, an interview would start with the housewife, and if she did not know everything about the farm or other income-related issues, I would return later to get more information from her husband.

I interviewed selected leading persons in each village, such as the present and previous

Sarpanch, Talati80 and members or leaders of village organisations. Semi-structured interviews were done with people from different strata of the population, i.e. from different caste and occupation groups, such as landless labourers and shepherds. Frequently, a survey interview would evolve into a more unstructured conversation or interview about interesting subjects regarding life and social relations in the village outside the fixed survey questions. As such, the survey method was a good, although time consuming, way of identifying interesting people and subjects in a village.

I spent around seven weeks in each village in 2004/2005, over several shorter periods ranging from 7 to 12 days each, and returned for four days in each village in 2006. Together, this gave me the opportunity to observe practices, chat informally with villagers, and gain the confidence of the local population. As well as being the source of important knowledge which sheds light directly on the research question, such informal chit-chat and observations were important as a basis for interpreting the information I acquired during the more structured part of the data collection.

80 _{The Sarpanch is the head of the panchayat, which is the elected village council. The Talati is the accountant}

and keeper of village records. The talati is employed by the district panchayat, and may sometimes work in several villages.

120 In addition to interviews, I collected available village level statistics from the talati‟s office, and taluka and district-level information and statistics from the Census of Gujarat. Although the bulk of the village data material is from the two villages Krushigam and Motugam, visits were also made to other villages in other parts of the command area. I also drove through the central parts of the command area, visited briefly seven other villages, and talked to farmers from various villages at functions organised by the SSNNL. I visited the village which the SSNNL presented as a success story in farmers‟ participation in canal construction, and a village where an NGO where preparing and training the villagers for participatory irrigation management on a subcontract from the SSNNL. The information from the other villages indicated that the socio-economic conditions, farming practices, and the reception of the SSP in the case study villages are not unique.

Reliability and validity of household survey

A large part of the data collection from the villages was done through a household sample survey. In both villages, I began field research with the survey early, after a few introductory walks in the village with my hosts and a few semistructured interviews with villagers in different neighbourhoods in the village. A survey can be a useful research method in the beginning of field research to get an overview of the major groups, issues, and living conditions in the village, to get a basis on which to develop a more qualitative approach. Alternatively, it can be useful towards the end of field research, after knowledge about major issues and conditions have been aquired through more qualitative methods81, and in order to test the frequency and covariation of phenomena that have appeared to be important. I chose the first approach. Firstly, I had good experience with the survey method from field research for my MA-thesis, when I experienced that I got a good introduction to the broader picture of the research area by systematically interviewing every n‟th house, and that it was easier to explain to people what I was doing when I had a systematic approach dictated by “my professor”. I also found the survey interview a good opening to more qualitative and “thicker” information, as many survey interviews would evolve into longer qualitative interviews when the respondents had interesting viewpoints and stories to tell. Secondly, because of the problems with finding interpreters, I was short of time, and needed to focus on the survey

121 early when I knew I had the interpreter(s), as a half-done survey would be of little use statistically.

The drawback of starting with a survey was that the questionnaire was made with regard to the original research questions which intended to explore water access in a completed canal system. In the case of Krushigam, the conflicts surrounding implementation only gradually dawned on me, and during the course of the survey I realised that many of the questions might not yield useful information. The questionnaire used in Motugam is slightly different from the one in Krushigam; first of all it had to be adapted to the issue in Motugam of bordering but not being part of the SSP command area, and secondly, I improved some of the questions from the Krushigam questionnaire to make them more precise. Both in Krushigam and in Motugam, the survey gave useful information about ownership of productive resources, variations in poverty and income sources, and participation in the social and associational life of the village. Much of this information has been used more as a basis for further analysis and reflections around the relationship between planners‟ and government officials‟view of villagers and the problems of implementation, than it will appear in the dissertation in the form of crosstables or comparisons of means.

I regard most of the data from the household survey as fairly reliable, as most respondents seemed to trust my intentions as a student. Response rates were good, and very few refused to participate. In Krushigam, one sampled household could never find time to answer my questions, but no interviews were interrupted because of drunkenness or other interferences. In Motugam, two sampled households were never home, two households refused to give more information than name and caste, and two interviews were only half-completed as one respondent was too drunk and in the other house we only met the wife and she did not know much about the farm. A response rate of 97% is nevertheless good. Many respondents hoped that I could be the opening to some kind of foreign funding and benefit and asked me directly about it, but they seemed to believe me when I explained that I was a student. However, I know that people quite often underestimated the size of their holding and ownership of resources during the survey. This is particularly true among the larger landholders, especially those owning more than the maximum holding allowed in the land-ceiling laws. As time went by and they got to know me better, some respondents told me that they had underreported their resources during the interview. However, it is safe to assume that the underreporting is

122 done systematically in approximate proportion to the actual holding (an owner of 12 acres may say 8, while an owner of 100 may say 80), and the pattern of land distribution will therefore give a meaningful picture of village inequality, even if individual information is not accurate. For the question of landholdings, official statistics are not more reliable as they will overestimate the number of small holdings and underestimate the number and size of large landholdings. It is widely known and openly acknowledged that large landowners will divide their holding on paper onto various close relatives to avoid the land ceiling laws. Other questions were more difficult in terms of validity, and I realised that the question was actually measuring different aspects for different respondents. In those cases, the questions have not been used as the basis for quantitative analyses, but have nevertheless added to my general knowledge about life in the village82. Some of the questions touch upon sensitive and personal issues, for example questions about death of children and lack of food. Regarding the first question, I included a question about child mortality to have some measure of the severity of poverty experienced in the village. I had experienced in informal talks that the loss of children and death in general was a much more common experience for people in the villages than they are in contemporary Norway, and not a taboo subject. However, I was sensitive to the context when asking this question, and in some households that had recently lost one or several family members, or where the respondent was clearly in distress, I would skip the question. It was useful to be accompanied by my interpreter in such situations, and I am grateful to them for their social skills in these matters.

The statistical analyses employed are of a basic character, as I do not think the data material is sufficiently unambiguous for sophisticated multivariate analyses. The aim of the quantitative analyses has been descriptions of the present rather than predictions about the future. I have used tests of significance (t-test of means and chi-square of crosstables) and generally been cautious about drawing strong conclusions from small differences in frequencies. Because of the relatively small sample sizes, some crosstables would not give reliable chi-square tests,

82 _{For example, in Motugam, I included the question “Is your household's living standard now better, the same,}

or worse than 10 years ago?” in an attempt to measure variations in improvement over time within various social

groups in the village. The answers to the follow-up question “why”, however, revealed that many related the first question to their own life-cycle, and that it therefore could not be used as an indication of improved poverty over time for different groups. Many would answer that it is better now because the children have grown up and are now earning. It would be wrong to conclude from such an answer that this household has climbed the socio- economic ladder.

123 and I relied on my own common sense in assessing whether the differences found could be seen to detect real and meaningful differences in the population.

I will discuss the validity and reliability of individual variables from the survey where I use them in the analyses of the chapters of Part 3 of the dissertation. Overall, I find the survey data to be reliable and useful for an understanding of the village social structure and of the challenges in implementation of the SSP.