Wastelanding and Resistance: Climate Knowledge, Infrastructure, and Unruly Ecologies in the Thar Desert
Zahid Ali, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
Gorano, a village with a population exceeding 2,000, is located approximately 30 kilometers southwest of Islamkot in the Tharparkar district of Sindh, Pakistan. In recent years, residents of the village have raised serious concerns about environmental and health hazards linked to nearby coal mining operations. Most notably, the water in the village's wells has turned black, prompting concerns about contamination and its potential impact on public health. "Water gives life, but it has become a threat to our very survival," says Lakshman, a 42-year-old resident, pointing toward a visibly tainted well. This alarming transformation is widely believed to be associated with a large wastewater reservoir constructed just one kilometer from the village. Spanning several hundred acres, this reservoir was built to store effluent generated from coal mining activities. The reservoir emits a pervasive stench that can be sensed from hundreds of meters away. Disturbingly, a significant number of trees within its perimeter appear lifeless, with blackened trunks and desiccated branches, suggesting ecological degradation (see photo 1). Although large portions of the reservoir are obscured by barbed wire fencing and natural overgrowth, in certain areas, the proximity of the black wastewater to the fence line makes its discoloration visible. In 2017, the Pakistani government acquired 2,500 acres of communal grazing land, known as Gowchar, near the village of Gorano. The Sindh government acquired this land by invoking a colonial-era law known as the Land Acquisition Act 1894 (LAA). Through the LAA, the state can acquire any kind of land by invoking the “national interest” or “public good”. Before the acquisition of this land, the Gorano villagers were using it as a shared communal resource for cattle grazing.
Gorano wastewater reservoir. Photo by author, 2024.
The wastewater is transported via pipeline from Thar Coal Field Block-II, situated approximately 47 kilometers north of Gorano. This site is operated by the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC), a public-private partnership between the Government of Sindh and Engro Energy Limited. The company extracts lignite coal from the field as part of Pakistan’s broader efforts to expand domestic electricity generation. The construction of the wastewater reservoir near the village of Gorano serves as a focal point for analyzing the socio-environmental implications of infrastructural interventions in the Thar Desert. Initially touted as a solution for wastewater management and environmental mitigation, the reservoir has become emblematic of the region’s broader tensions surrounding coal-powered energy production. However, what emerges from this infrastructural intervention is not just a transformation of land but a rupture in the ecological knowledge and climate imaginaries of local communities.
The Thar Desert in Sindh, Pakistan, faces persistent water scarcity due to its arid climate, minimal surface water sources, and erratic monsoon-dependent rainfall. The growing population has intensified demand for water for agriculture, livestock, and household use, worsening the existing crisis. Climate change exacerbates this situation through altered precipitation patterns, rising temperatures, and increased frequency of extreme weather events. Within this fragile environmental context, large-scale lignite coal mining has emerged as a significant new stressor on water resources (Chernaik 2024).
The Ecology of Refusal: Local Resistance and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge
Seven years after the commencement of coal exploration in Thar, a visit to Gorano reveals a series of images depicting life in the village under the shadow of SECMC’s large-scale mining. Near the village entrance lies a communal well, carefully concealed behind thorny bushes intended to deter children from playing nearby and potentially falling in. While removing the bushes to reveal the well, Lakshman points out that the water in it has turned black, attributing this change to the presence of the wastewater reservoir. He expresses a sentiment shared by many: a sense of betrayal from the guise of development that both excludes and extracts from the Thari community. Lakshman is also one of the ten residents of Gorano who funneled this discontent into a petition filed against the encroaching coal development at the Hyderabad circuit bench of the Sindh High Court in 2016.
Extracted through open-pit methods, lignite mining necessitates extensive dewatering to lower groundwater tables, resulting in the generation of large volumes of potentially contaminated wastewater. As groundwater encounters lignite and surrounding geologic materials, it absorbs dissolved solids, organic byproducts, and humic substances from decomposing coal matter.
One of the most hazardous consequences of this process is acid mine drainage (AMD), which occurs when pyrite is oxidized in the presence of air and water. AMD leads to highly acidic water filled with sulfate ions and heavy metals, posing severe environmental and health risks. Additionally, the corrosion of mining equipment releases metals into the wastewater, worsening contamination levels. Together, these geochemical and anthropogenic factors result in significant degradation of water quality, threatening the ecological balance and jeopardizing the health and sustainability of communities already burdened by chronic water scarcity in the Thar Desert (Chernaik 2024).
Gorano wastewater reservoir. Photo by author, 2024.
For the Thari pastoralists, the contamination of water represents not merely an environmental issue, but a profound ontological crisis that undermines the very foundation of their ecological knowledge. The appropriation of communal grazing land as "wasteland" by the Sindh government and Engro Energy Limited overwrites long-standing relationships between Thari communities and their environment with the extractive relations of capitalism. In this context, acts of refusal emerge, manifesting not only through protests but also through the persistent assertion of alternative ways of knowing and interacting with the land. Between 2016 and 2018, the villagers of Gorano organized protests, rallies, and hunger strikes in opposition to the construction of the wastewater reservoir. In a petition filed in 2016 by the Gorano villagers before the Hyderabad circuit bench of the Sindh High Court, they articulated that the coal-related developments had resulted in a flagrant infringement of their fundamental rights, particularly their right to life and right to property. They accused the provincial government of Sindh and coal companies of either circumventing or wholly violating due legal processes regarding the protection of the natural environment, wildlife, and local culture and heritage (Muhammad 2024). Similarly, they implored the High Court to acknowledge the permanent threat to their right to life posed by the disposal of wastewater in areas that were once their fields and grazing lands. The narratives of the Thari people contest the state’s re-classification of their grazing lands as “wasteland,” challenging the epistemic authority of colonial-era laws that justify dispossession under the pretext of public interest.
Anthropological literature has long emphasized the relationship between ecological knowledge and resistance. James Scott’s (1985) work on "weapons of the weak" highlights how subaltern groups resist domination through everyday acts, including non-compliance and alternative knowledge practices. Similarly, Anna Tsing (2015) argues that landscapes are not passive but actively shape human engagement, resisting enclosure and commodification. In Gorano, these theoretical insights manifest in the ways villagers continue to engage with their environment despite infrastructural interventions meant to displace them.
For Gorano villagers, refusing the reservoir’s presence is not simply a legal or political act; it is an effort to resist an epistemological framework that renders their land invisible to the state except as a space for extraction and disposal. In their protests for reclaiming land, villagers are also asserting a different kind of environmental knowledge—one that recognizes grazing lands as ecologically productive rather than economically expendable.
The Limits of Technical Planning
The Gorano reservoir is more than just a static, human-made structure; it’s a permeable infrastructure, whose frequent lapses in functionality reveal a complex interplay between engineered design and the dynamic landscape it occupies. Rather than serving as a passive container for wastewater, the reservoir’s seepage into surrounding lands highlights the porosity and instability of the terrain in which it is situated. This interaction disrupts planned engineering design and undermines the state’s containment efforts. The resulting seepage has initiated land degradation in Gorano and nearby villages (Kamal & Moulvi 2021), threatening local ecosystems and leading to the decline of forested areas and grazing lands. While it may seem as though the reservoir is "resisting" its intended role, this breakdown is less an act of infrastructural resistance and more a consequence of its incompatibility with a dynamic and ever-changing landscape.
Gorano wastewater reservoir. Photo by author, 2024.
Ashley Carse (2012) examines how infrastructural interventions, such as the Panama Canal, generate unplanned ecological and social consequences, offering a framework for understanding the dynamics unfolding in Gorano. The case of the Gorano reservoir exemplifies how efforts to manage nature through infrastructure often result in failures of control and containment. Designed to isolate industrial wastewater, the reservoir instead functions unpredictably—seepage into surrounding soils elevates water tables, contaminates wells, and degrades grazing lands. These consequences are not the result of a resistant landscape per se, but instead of the inability of state-led engineering to anticipate and manage complex environmental interactions. The infrastructural project, intended to impose order, instead initiates disorder.
Just as the Panama Canal restructured ecosystems and displaced communities in ways that planners could not foresee or control, the Gorano reservoir has destabilized socio-ecological relations. The failure to contain wastewater effectively highlights the limits of technical rationality in governing environmental systems. The unintended hydrological shifts, salinization, and soil degradation are symptoms of infrastructural breakdown, revealing not nature's resistance but the fragility and incompleteness of human control. In this light, the Gorano case illustrates how infrastructure meant to assert mastery over nature can instead generate new sites of vulnerability and crisis.
Failure as Knowledge: What Malfunctions Reveal about Climate Governance
The Gorano reservoir, initially presented as a solution for wastewater management, instead exposes the failures of environmental governance in Pakistan. This failure is not incidental but intrinsic to the project itself, revealing more profound contradictions in the way capitalist states engage with climate and ecology.
Scholars such as Tim Ingold (2011) and Bruno Latour (1993) challenge the binary between nature and infrastructure, arguing that environments are themselves infrastructural, deeply interwoven with political and economic systems. The Gorano reservoir exemplifies this entanglement: built ostensibly to contain the toxic wastewater generated by nearby mining operations, the reservoir functions not as a neutral technical fix but as a mechanism to manage and obscure the environmental fallout of extractive capitalism. Its failure to contain, evident in persistent leakage, seepage, and contamination of surrounding lands, exposes the limits of this infrastructural strategy. What was intended as a containment device instead becomes a site of rupture, where the toxicity it sought to conceal resurfaces in the form of ecological degradation and local resistance.
The case of Gorano challenges dominant frameworks of climate governance that prioritize infrastructure as the solution to environmental crises. While the wastewater reservoir has introduced new uncertainties and anxieties, these disruptions have also generated new forms of resistance.
By centering local narratives of refusal, resistance, and rupture, this essay argues for an epistemological shift in how we understand climate interventions in South Asia. Rather than viewing landscapes as passive recipients of development, we must recognize them as active participants in shaping ecological futures. Through their resistance, the villagers in Gorano and their adjacent ecologies refuse to be subsumed within the logic of extraction; instead, they demand engagement with relational epistemologies and climate pluralities that assert their agency and realize alternative pathways for collective life.