In India, the Narmada rebellion contributed to the 1991 economic reform movement led by Manmohan Singh, then finance minister and later prime minister, that liberalized the domestic private sector and transformed the advanced part of India’s economy with startling rapidity. India became the world’s second fastest growing major economy after China, reaching an average 9 percent per year from 2005 to 2007. World-class technology service companies arose and the size of its professional middle class quadrupled. Toward the end of the first decade of the 2000s, India was on the verge of surpassing Japan as the world’s third largest economy. It was emerging as a regional superpower and swing state in the international balance of power and as a potential liberal democratic model for developing countries worldwide.
Yet something was awry. India’s rapid economic transformation was precariously lopsided. In effect there were two Indias: a dynamic private upper tier of modern, high-tech service enterprises driven by a rising urban professional class alongside the three quarters of the population that remained locked in desperate poverty and held back by obsolete water infrastructure, weak governing institutions and unproductive practices, particularly in the rural farming countryside. Indeed, one of India’s most striking aberrations is the abysmally poor productivity of its surface irrigation grain farming—Indian wheat farmers consume twice as much water per ton as their counterparts in America and China and lag behind those in Egypt, for instance. Untimely and unreliable delivery of government-managed water, poor transportation to get crops to market, shockingly small storage capacity despite the country’s plethora of dams, and simple bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude are some of the contributing factors. India’s poor, rural farmers are twice dispossessed: first by being located far from prime water sources occupied by the wealthy and powerful, and second by being last to be served due to the higher cost of transporting water to them. Prime Minister Singh himself declared that India needed a second Green Revolution “so that the specter of food shortages is banished from the horizon once again.” To do that, it needs to reinvent its wobbly water economy.
For millennia, Indians’ lives have been whipsawed year in, year out between the unpredictable cycles of bounty and destruction brought by the torrential monsoons, which concentrates 80 percent of the annual rainfall and runoff into only a few months. A late, small monsoon can mean tragic famine, while a heavy, early one can inundate the countryside with terrible floods and landslides that kill thousands and set armies of climate migrants marching across the landscape. A good and balanced monsoon, on the other hand, waters the crops, replenishes rivers and groundwater and delivers modest prosperity. No single event is more important for India’s economy to the present day than the onset of the monsoon, news of which is urgently transmitted to government offices across the country far and wide.
To cope with the capricious tyranny of the monsoon, Indians over the centuries developed small- and medium-scaled local storage technologies that conserved water for the dry season, including simple water tanks and elaborate stone stepwells as deep as several stories that water fetchers descend step by step as the water level falls lower and lower throughout the dry season. In the British colonial era, traditional storage was superseded by mass industrial age water storage methods and partly forgotten. But industrial age water technologies were never effectively enough applied to be able to fully buffer India from the extreme unpredictability of the monsoons. Thus while Aswan gave Egypt a two-year storage buffer, and America’s Colorado and Australia’s Murray-Darling river system banked two and a half years’ river flow against the uncertainties of their drought-prone environments, dam reservoirs on the Ganges, on whose waters half a billion Indians’ lives depend, store no more than a couple of months’ protection; the Narmada and Krishna rivers stored but four to six months’ flow. As a result of India’s failure to attain its long sought goal of delinking its annual economy from the monsoon, three-quarters of Indian society still suffers from the persistent poverty of unreliable water management and occasional buffeting from devastating water shocks.
India’s failure to provide adequate storage, flood protection, and delivery of clean freshwater is driving the nation to perilously overdraw its national store of groundwater. From the 1980s, when government investment in irrigation virtually ceased, Indian private enterprise had on its own impressively continued to expand domestic water supply. Finally given access to reliable irrigation water, farmers’ food production surged—cereals’ output more than doubled between 1968 and 1998. But it did so through a ferocious, unregulated, and ultimately unsustainable pumping of groundwater from India’s shallow, depleted aquifers and lavish water consumption, both exacerbated by government farm electricity subsidies that made pumping water virtually free. In 1975, before groundwater pumping became significant, India had about 800,000 wells. Most were shallow and dug by hand, with water lifted in the traditional manner by tethered oxen. Only a quarter century later, the nation had an estimated 22 million wells. The majority were small tube wells that had been drilled by power rigs, operating off of government electricity subsidies. They are continuing to increase phenomenally, by about 1 million each year.
Yet each new well has to be drilled ever deeper than the last because water tables throughout India are falling sharply. Through unregulated drilling and pumping, India’s private water sector is effectively racing against itself toward each aquifer’s bottom. The best financed, deepest wells get the water; the Have-Nots who can afford only shallow wells get the dregs, or go dry. In India’s breadbaskets of Punjab and Haryana, for example, the water tables are falling over three feet per year; monitored wells in the western state of Gujarat show a fall in the water table from 50 feet to over 1,300 feet in thirty years. Southern India, an altogether separate geographic zone, is already effectively dry. As a nation, it amounts to a slow-motion act of hydrological suicide.
In the twenty-first century, India relies on groundwater mining for more than half its irrigation water. No other nation in the world pumps nearly as great a volume of groundwater. By some estimates, water is being mined twice as fast as natural recharge. Food produced from depleting groundwater is tantamount to an unsustainable food bubble—it will burst when the waters tap out. One warning occurred in 2006 when, for the first time in many years, India was forced to import large quantities of wheat for its grain stockpile. As the water tables hit bottom, clashes were breaking out between food producers and industrial and domestic users. In 2003 both Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottling plants in southern India were scapegoated and had their licenses revoked on unproven accusations that they were responsible for the region’s exhausted groundwater reserves. Elsewhere, textile plants have been forced to shut down, and information technology companies have moved away from Bangalore, over water shortages and undependable supplies.
Geographically, India is blessed with enough arable land, sunshine, and total quantities of water, even for its huge population. Notwithstanding its current plight, it still has significant potential to expand its irrigable cropland, hydropower, storage, and food production. It is a prime example of a nation that with stronger institutions and better water resource management would be in a position to feed itself for years to come, even without a new Green Revolution. Since India accounts for such a large share of global irrigation, even a small productivity improvement would leverage a significant betterment of food conditions on world markets. Yet there is no easy political blueprint for rooting out India’s embedded inefficiencies, ineffectual bureaucratic culture and distorted incentives, or for undertaking the many public waterworks that are needed. If the government suddenly eliminates farmers’ electricity subsidies to slow the uncontrolled overpumping of groundwater, for example, it is likely that farm failures would soar and tens of millions of Indians face imminent famine.
Yet the subsidies have become so perverse that many farmers no longer bother to grow crops with the precious freshwater they pump up. Instead, they simply sell it to fleets of priva
te water tankers carrying 3,000 gallons apiece that come a dozen times each day to transport it at a tidy profit to India’s desperately thirsty and unsanitary cities. A large percentage of urban dwellers are not even connected to India’s dilapidated municipal water delivery systems, which commonly lose 40 percent of their supply to leakage, waste, and piracy. For those who are connected, the taps often turn on for only a few hours each day. In New Delhi, with 15 million inhabitants, an Indian government report from 2006 found that one-quarter of households lacked access to piped water, and of those that had it, over one in four got water for less than three hours per day. Nearly 2 million households had no toilets. Upscale neighborhoods typically are the best connected with the best service, while the slums go wanting. Because the charge for municipal water is often less than one-tenth of actual provision costs, the water poor are effectively subsidizing the wealthy with good water connections. Most urban water is unmetered—in some places newly installed meters broke down because they required 24-hour water pressure to function properly—undermining efforts to substitute physical volume rationing for more efficient and equitable regulation by price and measured usage.
To get their daily water, Indian city dwellers—mainly the women—have to be resourceful foragers. To supplement what can be obtained from the public tap, water is purchased from private tankers and drawn from legal and illegal wells drilled in apartment blocks. For Ritu Praser, a middle-aged resident of a middle-class New Delhi neighborhood, every day involves planning to obtain enough water for her family: On the typical day when the municipal service doesn’t deliver enough water, she dials the private water tanker on her cell phone, then waits for its arrival. In the meantime she draws what water she can from her apartment block’s self-financed, courtyard tube well. The quality of the apartment tube well water is increasingly salty as the aquifer under New Delhi is running dry from overpumping. To get through the day she recycles what water she can, using leftover laundry water to mop the balcony, for instance. In an average month, she gets only 13 gallons from the municipal pipes and 243 gallons from water tankers.
Across India as a whole, three-fifths of households, or over 650 million people, do not have tap water as their primary drinking source. India’s sanitation is even more abysmal. Some two-thirds of the population, 700 million people, lack indoor toilets of any kind. Less than 10 percent of urban sewage is treated. Not surprisingly, raw sewage chokes the nation’s fabled rivers, from the Ganges to the Yamuna at Agra, with noxious filth and pollution. Such rivers are the drinking source for hundreds of millions of Indians, and the source of immeasurable sickliness and child mortality. An appalling two-thirds of India’s total available surface and ground water supply is polluted with agricultural pesticide and fertilizer runoff, industrial discharges, and urban waste. It is a testament to the depth of the public bureaucracy’s apathetic ineptitude on pollution cleanup and that a full quarter century after the infamous 1984 poison gas leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, the undisposed toxic storage is still seeping into the local groundwater to poison a second generation of residents.
The time bomb of India’s mounting water crisis is all the more insidious because it is ticking down unheard and unseen by the public hundreds of feet underground in the falling water tables as well as high atop the fast-melting Himalayan glaciers that are the ultimate source of its great rivers. Due to global warming the Gangotri glacier, an important source of the sacred, but unpredictable and irregular Ganges with perilously little man-made reservoir storage, is shrinking by 120 feet per year and twice as fast as in the 1980s. Glaciers and snowpacks are nature’s mountain reservoirs; they accumulate in the cold months and release their precious water to recharge river flows and groundwater tables when they melt in the warm season. By disrupting the glaciers’ formation and melt cycles, global warming reduces available water volumes and exacerbates seasonal water mismatches—larger flooding in the wet season and worse drought in the dry months.
A similar, rapid shrinking is taking place on Himalayan glaciers across the entire Tibetan plateau, threatening the fate of Asia’s greatest rivers—Indus, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Yangtze, and the Yellow—along which live 1.5 billion people and whose waters provide the basic food and energy for most of Asia. The nations most affected hardly understood the dynamics of what was going on in the mountain ranges high above them and hadn’t ever discussed the problem together until the World Bank sponsored a round of informal dialogues starting in 2006 in Abu Dhabi. The global climate change impact is predicted to hit especially early and severely on hot India—causing up to a one-third fall in agricultural output by 2080.
The impact of accelerated glacier melt looms perilously over the Indus River, which depends far more than the Ganges on melting snows to supply the waters that make the Punjab one of the world’s most intensively irrigated regions of the world and an irreplaceable, stabilizing food lifeline of both nuclear-armed Hindu India and its crowded, and also nuclear-armed Muslim neighbor and rival, Pakistan. The 1,800-mile-long Indus rises in the Himalayan glaciers and gathers flow from tributaries in India and in hotly disputed Kashmir, which has been the object of two of the three wars between India and Pakistan. In Pakistan, the former mainstay of the ancient Indus Valley civilization flows through the Punjab’s dense matrix of irrigation canals, and then southward into the Sindh, before fanning out through its delta and emptying into the Arabian Sea. The Indus is not a giant river by streamflow—it is roughly one and a half times the size of the Nile and plays a role of nearly parallel importance to Pakistan as the Nile does for Egypt. Not coincidentally, Pakistan’s population at nearly 160 million is twice that of Egypt’s, and both countries are suffering from similar water resource scarcity. Indeed, Pakistan’s demographic burden has risen even faster than Egypt’s, with its population having more than quintupled from 1947 to become the world’s sixth largest. Pakistan is projected to have 225 million inhabitants by 2025—and possibly will be in the throes of a full-fledged water crisis.
Like the Nile, the Indus is badly overdrawn through trying to keep pace with rising Pakistani food demand. So much water is diverted upstream that the river carries no freshwater at all for its last 80 miles; its once-fertile, creek-filled delta of rice paddies, fisheries, and wildlife has become a desolate wasteland overrun by salty Arabian Sea water for want of outflow. Despite its growing scarcity, Pakistan’s water is poorly managed—much is allocated to growing water-thirsty crops to support local industries like cotton textiles and to politically favored regions and is delivered through infrastructure that is inadequate to the nation’s needs. The Indus basin’s storage buffer is alarmingly precarious—a scant thirty days’ capacity protects its crops against the caprice of a drought. At the same time, the extensively dammed and irrigated Punjab faces some of the worst soil salinization in the world. Starting in the 1960s with liberal financial aid from the United States that viewed it as a key strategic partner, Pakistan began sinking thousands of tube wells to pump out fresh irrigation water and lower water tables that threatened to salinize crop roots. When financial aid dried up in the 1990s, however, salinization began destroying huge swathes of Punjabi cropland, which is now in dire need of a modernized drainage system.
Water scarcity is also one of the big political forces rending Pakistan apart internally. As water runs short, the southern Sindhis are bitterly complaining that the traditional political and military Punjabi establishment is robbing an unfair share of the scarce water resources for irrigation schemes in the Punjab. Water scarcity and contamination is so acute in the southern port city of Karachi that residents routinely boil their water; water rioting, and deaths, are unexceptional. The water divisions are reflected in the internal ethnic strife and national political party divides, with the aggrieved Sindhi south being the stronghold of the party represented by the late Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007. As Pakistan’s available freshwater fails to keep up with the demands
of its burgeoning population, it is not at all evident that the tumultuous state will not start to fissure and fail. Indeed, in April 2009 Taliban militants broke out of rugged, northwest Pakistan and overran the pivotal Buner district—putting them less than 25 miles away from gaining control over the giant Tarbela Dam on the Indus, and with it, a strategic chokehold over central Pakistan’s electricity and irrigation waters.
As Pakistan’s water-scarcity problems intensify, the Indus is again becoming a rising source of potential confrontation with India. The original international boundaries of the postwar divorce between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India had sliced through the Indus river basin with no regard for its organic hydrological unity—a common problem in many shared international watersheds formerly under European colonial rule. Conflicts over the main tributary rivers of the basin broke out immediately. In 1948, the two states came to the brink of war when India’s East Punjab halted the flow of water through two large canals that fed crops on Pakistan’s side of the border in a bid to demonstrate its sovereignty over the river. Protracted diplomacy by the World Bank, which then held the key to vital international finance, finally produced the 1960 Indus Water Treaty. Yet the treaty was a minimalist compromise—each side got privileged water rights over three of the six Indus tributaries—rather than the sort of joint basin management agreement that could increase overall water resources through mutual, cooperative development. Although the treaty has held for half a century, including through subsequent Indo-Pakistani wars, a close call in 1999, and ongoing violence in Kashmir, the Indus remains a contentious fuse that can easily ignite again.
With India’s population expected to swell by another third to 1.5 billion by 2050, Indian leaders know they need to act swiftly to avert an imminent water crisis. Two main policy paths beckon in the nation’s race between economic growth and environmental sustainability: On the one side, India can strive to improve the efficient use of its existing water supply by undertaking the politically painstaking reform of the underdeveloped three-quarters of its economy through gradual elimination of distorting subsidies, rooting out bureaucratic corruption, and introducing new incentives to build small-scale, local storage and other water facilities whose benefits will accrete slowly. Given the political difficulty, and possible explosiveness, of such reforms, and the high uncertainty of success, it is not surprising that many Indian leaders are tempted by the second path of pursuing a grandiose water project that promises to deliver massive new water resources at once. A favored scheme is to build a nationwide plumbing network that interlinks all the nation’s main rivers. At the single turn of a few valves by water technocrats all of India’s seasonal and regional water disparities, all its extremes between flood and drought, and all the fierce court battles between federal states over water supplies, can be rationally evened out—at least in theory. Environmentalists have decried the idea as another facile, gargantuan, hard-technology folly of oversold benefits and underestimated deleterious ecosystem and human impacts. Yet even if it can be built and does work as advertised, at best it merely buys time for an uncertain, more lasting technological miracle, like Prime Minister Singh’s wished-for new Green Revolution, to bail India out from not facing up to the underlying structural causes of its impending water crisis.
Steven Solomon Page 48
