Between Salt and Water: The Environmental Crisis at Sambhar Lake, Rajasthan, India

Sambhar Lake is India’s largest inland salt lake and a haven for a variety of saliferous ecology. Lauded by the imperial state as an inexhaustible supply of salt, the British set about transforming the lake to protect salt farming from the effects of the monsoon. These changes, along with the reform of salt production since the 1950s, have created fierce competition for the lake’s depleting resources. This history, despite the imposition of a number of regulatory frameworks, has created an apparently intractable crisis of ever-worsening environmental degradation.