Canal bureaucracy and the corruption nexus around water in the Mumbai hinterland: Questions for development and governance in Maharashtra,India

This is a case study of corruption in an irrigation project in a “tribal” belt of the Mumbai-Konkan region in India. Using Robert Wade’s framework of the corruption nexus in the irrigation department, it critically examines, among other features, the relationship between junior section engineers on the one hand, and senior executive engineers and politicians on the other. The article highlights key features of this nexus in the specific context of tribal Maharashtra, and shows that junior section engineers and bureaucrats in irrigation projects often wield informal power and can frequently block the activities of rent-seeking senior executive engineers and politicians. The article later relates this account of bureaucratic politics to throw light on the social, political and economic dynamics of water management in the context of the intensely competitive inter-sectoral politics of water sharing in the Mumbai-Konkan region.