This book is all about water. It is authored by academics, some of whom can write in a way lay people can understand. Importantly, all the essays are profusely referenced, so someone wanting to read further knows where to look. It begins with a chapter by Ramaswamy R Iyer, an authority on water in India, “setting the scene”. He calls his effort a tour d’horizon but it can also be called a tour d’force. He outlines two contending approaches to water — techno-centric and socio-centric. The former relies on technical expertise and engineering solutions; the latter on cultures, lifestyles and social system and structures to inform development, management and conservation.
The two approaches come alive in discussing what Nepal can do with its water, whether to build large dams to export power to India or not. It is a choice between large technology-driven, foreign-funded export-oriented projects imposed by the government on people and decentralised relatively small environmentally benign projects primarily for Nepal’s own needs and local exports. In Pakistan, India and Nepal, environmental concerns are powerful but not mainstream. Officials, neo-liberal economists and World Bank and ADB officials involved in the reform process juxtapose ‘development’ with the ‘environment’ and do not want the latter to be over-emphasized.
Avijit Gupta emphasises that there can be more than one way of looking at a river and trying to manage all attributers of it is one of the contending options. Even when you manage, it can be adaptive management. Floods can be seen as instruments of river management. He holds that “it is perhaps unwise to impound rivers in the name of management without examining … current and future scenarios. Diverting water from one river to another without adequate investigation is…unwise and bordering on folly.”
While examining the regional politics of water-sharing Douglas Hill notes upfront that “South Asia has the lowest availability of water per capita for any major region in the world” and in his opinion “it is clear that water shall remain a source of political division in the foreseeable future.” Not just between countries but within them too. The “uneasy” nature of federalism within countries has “exacerbated tensions” between sub-national governments in India and Pakistan.
Binayak Ray, in a key chapter on global conventions and regulation on international rivers notes that 34 per cent of India’s fresh water comes from outside its boundaries and, after its annexation of Tibet, China sits on the sources of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra. “As an upper riparian country China could use water as a strategic weapon against lower riparian countries.” He feels “China would be a major player in South Asia,” not commonly recognized in the region. He feels India should have a flexible approach. “Given the fact that subcontinental riparian countries are environmentally and physiographically interlinked, India can ill afford to ignore cooperation in developing a sustainable water policy.”
Rohan D’Souza, in his chapter on “River-linking and its discontents” contrasts how, over the last century, emphasis has shifted from seeking supply-side solutions to demand-side solutions to problems over water. This has happened as the downside of dam and canal irrigation has become apparent through the spread of resultant salination and water logging which have rendered areas irreversibly barren. Plus, siltation has reduced the lives of dams — Bhakra’s life is down from 88 years to 47 and Hirakud’s from 110 years to 35! His point is “damned rivers are dead rivers” and he wants us to shift emphasis to “river restoration and management”.
Can regions manage their water problems successfully? Jennifer Duyne Barenstein gives a fascinating account of this in northeast Bangladesh in the hoars which are saucer-shaped low-lying areas surrounded by river levees that let in water during the monsoons to grow fish and collect water in surface ponds and then as the dry season approaches and river levels go down, let out water to raise a winter rice crop which has to be brought home before early rain causes flooding again.
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It is an example of group and private ownership and effort. When monsoon flooding of agricultural land takes place everybody can fish; and when harvesting takes place generous leftovers are there on the ground for the poor to collect. People contribute with effort and subscription, some of it even coming from Londonis (locals who have migrated to London). These people are not victims of their environment but have adapted themselves to it by organising community participation in water management.
WATER FIRST
ISSUES AND CHALLENGES FOR NATIONS AND COMMUNITIES IN SOUTH ASIA
Ed Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Robert J Wasson
Sage; 435 pages; Rs 850
