From Colonial Land Regimes to Contemporary Water Politics

The discourse on economic waste in Bengal can be traced to the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793, which classified land as either productive or waste. The swamps, mangroves, jungles, and uncultivated tracts of the Bengal Presidency were deemed wastelands to be reclaimed for settled agriculture. Colonial officials drew on geographical and geological knowledge to separate Bengal's fertile floodplains from the water bodies that had sustained its hydro-ecology for millennia. This severing of land from water lay at the core of colonial empire-building, exemplified by the expansion of Calcutta and Bombay as Presidency towns at the expense of local ecosystems, mangroves, ponds, backwaters, swamps, and creeks. Revenue imperatives further entrenched this regime, with labour extracted through sharecroppers and tenants under Zamindari control. This chapter examines how littoral Bengal was imagined as a land-based, revenue-producing frontier, where paddy cultivation displaced a more fluid hydro-social landscape. The Sundarban delta, the world's largest bird-footed delta, exemplifies how colonial strategies of ‘settling’ through land-water separation reconfigured ecological and cultural networks. The legacy persists: state and NGO interventions focus on terrestrial forest and biodiversity management, while transboundary water dynamics remain neglected. The WWF's Delta Vision 2020 echoes this bias, overlooking how rivers and wetlands underpin deltaic resilience across borders. Contemporary zoning of the Sundarbans into core, buffer, and transition areas privileges land-based mapping over riverine systems, fuelling contestations around river rights and livelihoods. Projects such as India's proposed Interlinking of Rivers also carry colonial imprints, privileging supply-side engineering over ecological and community-centred perspectives.