India’s growing thirst for water
A little over 18 months ago the journal Nature carried a report analysing data from two orbiting Nasa satellites that has dire implications for the Indian subcontinent. The data, which came from the space agency’s ongoing Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace Tellus) mission, revealed that in India’s northwest – a region that includes Delhi, the world’s eighth-largest metropolis – the water table was falling by some 4 cm per year.
In the report, published just 48 hours after the release of an Indian government study that warned of a looming water crisis, Nasa researchers said the likely cause of the shrinkage was “excessive stress due to people pumping too much water,” as rainfall over the period had been relatively steady.
Photo: Rice paddy irrigation, India
Over a six-year period the loss had amounted to some 109 cubic kilometres of water – more than twice the capacity of the country’s largest reservoir.
Changes to agricultural practice lay at the root of the problem, according to Dr Raj Gupta, a scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre. He told the BBC’s Richard Black that irrigation had been found to increase rice yields as much as seven-fold over rain-fed rice, and that a switch to less water-intensive cereal crops such as maize or sorghum was dependent on government policies.
United States-based Grail Research has concluded that India’s worsening water shortage is largely the product of poor resource management. In a June 2009 report, the consultancy forecast that the country’s drinking water would be pushed to critical limits by 2050 as a result of increasing agricultural and industrial demand and a population that was expected to exceed China’s by mid-century.
Photo: Sorghum is an important crop used for food and biofuels.
Grail’s report pointed to heavily subsidised or free water supply in many of India’s 35 states and territories, which encouraged overuse. Delhi residents, for example, paid US$3.52 or less for 28 cubic metres of water and in the Andhra Pradesh city of Vijayawada, it cost just US$1.50. By comparison, residents in Miami, Florida paid as much as US$32.84 for the same amount of water and in Boston it cost up to US$47.19.
Rapid industrialisation is adding to the problem. In 2000, industry accounted for six per cent of India’s water use. By 2025 that is forecast to reach 11 per cent, and by 2050, 18 per cent.
India’s growing economic power is in contrast to what Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has framed as part of a larger “ecological poverty” – the difficulty of providing adequate water and sanitation to the majority of the country’s population.
Early hope was pinned on the National River Linking Project of India: an ambitious proposal to join some 30 rivers across India, interlinking Himalayan rivers in the north with peninsular rivers in the south, at a cost of about US$100 bn. Proponents claimed the project would reduce the effects of both floods and droughts, which have hit the subcontinent hard in recent years, and would lift the average income of farmers to US$200 per ha, from the current $16 per ha. Critics warned the scheme would displace wildlife, increase the number of disease vectors and increase pollution due to low water levels in summer.
Something similar was proposed by engineer Sir Arthur Cotton during British colonial rule, though primarily as a means of inland navigation. The idea was again broached by Irrigation Minister KL Rao in 1972 and 25 years later another engineer, Captain Dinshaw Dastur, outlined plans for a northern Garland Canal, consisting of two sections with a combined length of 13,500 km.
Photo: Holy water - the Ganges river at Varanasi
In December 2009 Federal Water Resources Minister PK Bansal announced that the latest incarnation, the National River Linking Project, had been dropped because its anticipated cost was “beyond the capacity of the federal government.”
More limited links would go ahead, he added, but over a longer period.
All of this is being played out in the context of heightened regional concerns over water security. India is embroiled in three significant trans-border tensions: the Indo-Bangladesh water dispute over the Frakka Barrage across the Ganges, the Indo-Pakistan dispute over the Wular Barrage (which India calls the Tulbul Navigation Project) and the Indo-Nepal dispute over the Mahakali River Treaty.
A 2010 study by the Mumbai-based Strategic Foresight Group (SFG), "The Himalayan Challenge", predicts that by 2030 the countries comprising the Himalayan sub-region – India, Nepal, China and Bangladesh – “will face the depletion of almost 275 billion cubic metres of annual renewable water”. That volume is greater than the total amount of water available in Nepal.
The ultimate cause of such a gloomy forecast is climate change. The region’s major rivers, including the Brahmaputra, the Ganges, the Indus and the Yangtze, all originate on the Tibetan Plateau and the report’s authors believe that within two decades all will be badly compromised by melting glaciers.
Photo: The Bhagirathi River, the source stream of the Ganges, at Gangotri in Uttarakhand, northern India.
They paint a picture of cumulative damage to crop production, electricity generation, food supply and jobs, with the prospect of heightened geo-political tension as all four countries attempt to secure water resources.
This scenario highlights an uncomfortable reality – the lack of global treaties relating to water. “Only 17 nations (none of them in the Himalayan region) have signed the UN convention on non-navigational uses of international water courses,” says the SFG report. Most disputes over water are addressed regionally or bilaterally.
In the case of India and China, however, there are no adequate dispute resolution mechanisms, though worsening water shortages in both countries suggest that a formal agreement is badly needed. Perhaps, suggests the SFG report, a new regional forum along the lines of a Himalayan rivers commission should be established.
“Like much else, that’s difficult in a region dominated by the trust deficit between countries,” noted the Times of India. “The key lies in doing something before the rivers run dry...”.
Pressure in the system
“India is a microcosm for the world’s water crisis,” says Ash Narain Roy of India’s Institute of Social Sciences. “For other federal countries, it is also a model of how, or how not to, deal with water and water disputes.”
Of India’s 28 states, some 15 have engaged in water disputes or are at odds over eight river projects, he says. A principal reason is that many subscribe to a doctrine formulated by United States Attorney General Judson Harmon in 1896 in a dispute with Mexico over water. The Harmon Doctrine, in essence, declared that “what falls on our roof is ours to use, without regard to any potential harm to downstream parties.”
Complicating matters is the blurred line between state and central government jurisdiction over water use. River water disputes have proved to be particularly problematic. The rulings of a tribunal established to adjudicate among states are not binding and the refusal of states to accept the court’s rulings has at times triggered constitutional crises.
Photo: India has the largest paddy output in the world and is also the world's second largest exporter of rice.
India’s population growth is putting increasing pressure on water resources, making individual states more intractable. Added to that, the mechanisms for settling disputes were forged in an era of strong central government and largely pliable states. The era of weak coalition governments has altered that balance.
As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in 2007: “It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that we have found it easier to manage bilateral agreements with neighbours on river water sharing than domestic disputes between states.”
- by Vaughan Yarwood
Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons