AMITA BAVISKAR on Ramaswamy Iyer : He Watered the Arid Fields of Administration with Intellectual Rigour and Honesty
Ramaswamy Iyer, civil servant and water policy expert, passed away on September 9. He was 86
It was the monsoon of 1993. The campaign against the Sardar
Sarovar dam on the river Narmada was at its height. Although the World Bank had
withdrawn from the project, the Indian government was pushing ahead with
construction. When a 14-day fast in Mumbai yielded only empty assurances, the
Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) stepped up its protest by declaring the launch of jal
samarpan, activists inviting death by drowning in the river’s rising
waters. A day before the August 3 deadline, the government capitulated. A
five-member committee was appointed to review all aspects of the project.
Ramaswamy Iyer was on this committee. During his tenure as
Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources, he had played a key role, together with
T. N. Seshan, then Secretary in the Ministry of Environment and Forests, in
securing clearance for the Sardar Sarovar project in 1987. In the same year, he
had also drafted India’s first National Water Policy, which endorsed a strategy
of dam-building and inter-basin transfers to exploit water to the fullest. Most
observers naturally assumed that Iyer would support the dam.
However, as the committee reviewed documents, heard
testimonies from all sides and travelled to the Narmada valley to witness for
itself the lives and landscapes affected by the dam, Iyer’s position changed.
From believing that the project was desirable and needed only to improve its
record of resettling displaced people, he came to see the Sardar Sarovar dam as
a monumental folly on all counts – technical, economic, social and ecological.
Iyer’s critical view of large dams became stronger when he
was appointed to review the Tehri project in 1996 and to head the India country
study for the World Commission on Dams in 1997. Subsequently, studying
trans-border river conflicts between India, Nepal and Bangladesh, he began to
see dams as only one element in the larger mismanagement of water by engineers
impervious to social and ecological impacts. This led him to reject the
expert-driven model of expensive water diversion and advocate an approach based
on participatory planning and regulated water harvesting. Comprehensively
repudiating the dominant view of the water establishment of which he was a
leading light, Ramaswamy Iyer came to promote a radically different vision of
how the resource should be managed.
What was notable about Iyer’s conversion was that it was not
a leap of faith but a conviction that grew out of a careful consideration of
the facts. He remained open-minded, judiciously weighing arguments for and
against large projects, with a balance firmly calibrated to the constitutional
principles of social justice and the public good. And he dedicated himself to
pursuing this commitment in his characteristic style: never preachy or
polemical, he invited others to think for themselves, persuading them with the
rigour and clarity of his thoughts.
Working tirelessly till the end, Iyer
created a body of scholarly and popular writing that stands out for its
erudition and lucid exposition. His widely-read analyses of the Cauvery
dispute, the inter-linking of rivers, resettlement and rehabilitation laws, and
the larger institutional context in which water is managed, have shaped public
debate on these issues. An even bigger achievement is that his work has
compelled bureaucrats and engineers to re-examine their own practices and
prejudices.
Ramaswamy Iyer was born on October 18, 1929, in Thakkalai,
Travancore (now Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu), the eldest of five children.
His father was a government servant whose job took him to Bombay, where Iyer
went to high school and then college, studying English literature. He joined
the Indian Audit and Accounts Service and, as is the norm, served in various
ministries, including agriculture, finance, chemicals and fertilisers, steel
and mines, railways, as well as a two-year stint in Washington DC as Director
of Audits for Indian missions in the Americas. He was a member of the Jha
Economic Administration Reforms Commission in the 1980s and developed an
interest in the history of the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General
which grew into a larger concern about government functioning.
During this period, as public sector institutions came under
attack for inefficiency and corruption, and supporters of liberalisation
advocated scrapping them altogether, Iyer published a meticulous analysis of
public enterprises, dissecting their role in the larger framework of government
while recommending functional autonomy. This book, The Grammar of
Public Enterprises (1991), was followed by Water:
Perspectives, Issues, Concerns (2003) and Towards Water
Wisdom: Limits, Justice, Harmony (2007), and edited volumes on water
laws and other subjects. Putting into practice his belief that institutional
reform would only happen if there was sustained pressure from within as well as
without, Iyer lectured to engineers and government officials, mentored NGOs
working on water rights, and was a firm friend to social movements. His gentle,
unassuming persona could calm raised voices and mediate between big egos; he
inspired respect as well as affection.
Age did not seem to slow down Ramaswamy Iyer or stop him
from growing intellectually. Even as he became frailer physically, he surprised
his friends by publishing an article on linguistics, discussing Chomsky and
Wittgenstein. He continued writing on Carnatic music, a love he shared with his
wife, Suhasini (they met as students in Bombay and married in 1954; they had
two sons Sriram and Mahadevan). Several weeks were set aside by the couple
every year during Chennai’s music season, when the two of them would
stay in a lodge near the Music Academy and move around the city in public
transport attending concerts.
Throughout his life, he trained himself in new disciplines,
teaching himself calculus in his forties, and going on to study philosophy and
constitutional law. And he continued his early fondness for literature; his
tastes included Doris Lessing and Dick Francis. In Lessing’s poetic precision
and Francis’s driving pace perhaps Iyer found not only an entry into other
worlds but also that felicity with words that was the signature of his own
work.
