Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

“Natural” water scarcity is often touted by international banks and trade organizations as a justification for the wholesale privatization of common water supplies and urban water infrastructure, giving powerful multinational corporations ownership over the most precious precondition for Life. Through participatory research, fieldwork, and a critical anthropological lens, this paper examines two struggles against water privatization in South India: the fight for water rights in the village of Plachimada against the exploitation and pollution of water by the Coca-Cola company, and the fight against privatization of the municipal water supply in the “Silicon Valley” of India – Bangalore - which would effectively cut off free access to drinking water for the city’s massive population of urban slum dwellers. I seek to deconstruct the notion of water crises as a “natural” phenomenon by showing how British colonial practices and the modern Indian State have created water scarcity by systematically destroying indigenous water harvesting technologies that have long created ecological abundance in village India and by usurping control and the ownership of water. With the recognition that water scarcity, ecological destruction, and accompanying poverty are man-made phenomena, I explore the inverse by arguing that human design systems can instead create local ecological abundance and economic self-sufficient communities. And it all starts with water: Earth’s most precious free gift to Life.