www.water-alternatives.org Volume 5 | Issue 2 Lahiri-Dutt, K. 2012. Large dams and changes in an agrarian society: Gendering the impacts of Damodar Valley Corporation in eastern India. Water Alternatives 5(2): 529-542 Lahiri-Dutt: Gendering the impacts of Damodar Valley Corporation Page | 529 Large Dams and Changes in an Agrarian Society: Gendering the Impacts of Damodar Valley Corporation in Eastern India Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program, Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; kuntala.lahiri-dutt@anu.edu.au ABSTRACT: This paper traces the gendered changes in agrarian livelihoods in the lower Damodar valley of eastern India and connects these changes to the large dam project of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC). The DVC, established in 1948, was one of the earliest dam projects in India. Although it was not fully completed, the DVC project has initiated unforeseen changes in the farming economy. The floods for which the Damodar river was notorious were not fully controlled, and the suffering of people living in the lower reaches of the valley never really diminished. This paper gives a brief description of the river and its history of water management practices and the roles of women and men in these practices. It traces the resultant impacts on gender roles, and outlines the new kinds of water management that emerged in response to the DVC’s failure to provide irrigation water when demanded. More specifically, the paper explores the changes in floods, changes in the farming economy, and the impacts of temporary sand dams or boro bandhs on the livelihoods of women and men from farming families in the Lower Damodar Valley. It observes that even over a longer temporal scale, the changes unleashed by large water control projects have significant and gendered impacts on agrarian societies. KEYWORDS: Gender impacts, canal irrigation, Damodar Valley Corporation, floods, large dams, West Bengal, India IMPACTS OF LARGE DAMS ON WOMEN AND MEN A growing body of literature has recently explored the impacts of large and centralised water control projects on the livelihoods of poor people, especially the more vulnerable communities that are susceptible to livelihood shocks from deteriorating environmental resource bases. Evidence is accumulating that women and men are not affected in the same way by large-scale resource development projects (see Ahmad and Lahiri-Dutt, 2006; Mehta, 2009) or large-scale land deals (Behrman, et al., 2011). Lahiri-Dutt and Ahmad (2012) argue that differences in gender roles account for the differential impacts on women and men. Evidence also suggests that women and men commonly adopt multiple livelihood strategies according to geographical scales and climatic season (Cleaver, 1998; Valdivia and Gilles, 2001). Yet many water engineers, administrators, and policy-makers continue to see 'the community' or 'the family' as a homogeneous unit, and neglect the intricate complexities of gender roles, tasks, and power relations residing within these units. Critiquing such purely technocentric views, Jones (2006) observed: [l]arge dams are more than just concrete and water. They have huge environmental and social impacts, and are often political strategies in disguise… Analysis of dam projects still often describes affected peoples as genderless, focusing on homogeneous 'households' and disregarding communities and family units as sites of gendered interaction. The reality is, however, that women’s relationship with water is diffe rent to that of men’s, which should be taken into account in all planning phases of dam development. Drawing on this comment, I explore a grey area in the existing literature: the gender differentiated impacts of older large dam projects. 'Older' or established projects have been in existence for some