Tipaimukh Debate : Robbing Paul to pay Peter By Lutfur Rahman , Canada India complains about 25000 Bangladeshis who go to India, a year, and decide not to come back. A few years back, India was claiming umpteen millions of illegal Bangladeshis, inside India, while justifying her policy of 'Push Back' of destitute Bengali speaking people across the border in the middle of the night. After what happened, post Farakka, in south western Bangladesh, in terms of dried out river beds, accelerated river erosion, sky engulfing shoals, creeping river salinity, increased arsenic contamination of ground water, ruined agriculture and fisheries, ecological and environment degradation rendering the land incapable of supporting traditional way of life, where do the Indian leadership think uprooted people go to live out their lives ? No body erects a 4500 km long barbed wire fence around a neighbor, maintains a one way trade imbalance in it's own favor, swamps the neighbor's airwaves with own cultural inanities while barring that of the neighbor from it's own, moves heaven and earth, arbitrarily and clandestinely, to build dams, across commonly shared rivers while proclaiming love and good intentions for a little neighbor without throwing a sense of awe and incredulity to mar the whole picture. India apparently had started working on her Tipaimukh project forty years back completing almost all of the preparatory ground work without much of discussion with any one including Bangladesh, the most effected lower riparian country. All this was carried out over such long period of time, at such a great cost, stifling local opposition from the Manipuris (aka Indians) only to produce 1500 MW of electricity, and that too, to share part of it with Bangladesh, so goes the explanation. Sure. A dam designed for generating power is also a dam full of water sitting at a high altitude, ideal for a quick detour for other purposes like irrigation, navigation, river flushing municipal use, or what have you, hundreds or even thousand of miles away. Even if one takes India's present claim on it's face value for now, with India's billion strong population growing at a high rate and her rapid industrialization, India's demand for fresh water is growing by leaps and bounds, particularly in her arid mid, west and southern regions. This demand is only going to accelerate even further as time goes. With fresh water already becoming a rare commodity all over the world, how would a newly empowered super power, coaxed groomed and abetted by the reigning significant other, look past the handy solution that would sit right at the doorstep, in the form of Tipaimukh, if it was to be built, when the crunch of water shortage in the heartland hits the political officialdom in New Delhi? Has Tipaimukh, the potential of turning into a reservoir of fresh water that can be channeled to other parts of India, no matter what India says now? The north east corner of the subcontinent supports a population density that is already the highest in the world with Bangladesh's 150 Millions and perhaps a similar number, or there about, in West Bengal and the other states. With the land already straining under this huge weight of humanity what tragedy would descend on the land and it's creatures if politicians and bureaucrats should decide to withdraw water from the basin the same way as has happened at Farakka? What recourse would Bangladesh have in countering such a move. What recourses would other regional countries have? How would this corner of the sub continent sustain it's natural habitat when China, embolden by India's move, embarks on her own design on the headwaters of the Brahma Putra? When these are questions which do not lend to easy answers, one thing is certain. Unlike in the mediaeval times, robbing Paul to pay Peter is not a viable strategy, in the twenty first century of the Christian Era, that yields satisfactory results over a sustained period of time. Human have survived, and thrived, for millenniums without electricity and will do so again without it, if need be, until the end of time. Try doing it without water even for a single day. People come and go, religion come and go, countries come and go, politicians, political boundaries, brick walls and even barbed wire fences come and go with time but the land, the rivers, the trees, the birds and the flowers that a land nurtures stay, and stay for good at least in context of human concept of time. Tipaimukh Hydro electric project has the potential of becoming the thin edge of the wedge that can reduce a corner of a deltaic paradise, home of a quarter billion people into a dead corner of a wasteland creating grounds for potential conflicts that would pale the events of 1947 to insignificance for people of the area. It is heartening to see that other voices, other than that of Bangladeshis, are making themselves heard. Dr Debabrata Roy Laifungbam and Dr.Soibum Ibotombi of Manipur State University have laid out the fallacies of building a massive structure on one of the most seismically active zone on the earth's crust. There are many others in the academia and elsewhere who have similar concerns on this project. If Tipaimukh is such a big deal, let it be conceived designed and constructed jointly by a consortium of all the countries who have a stake in it, with proper checks and safe guards, after proper feasibility/ environmental impact study under the auspices of an independent body like the UN. Nothing less would do justice to an important life altering project like a massive hydro electric project, particularly, at a time of heightened environmental concern, world over. A concern for a need for taming the over bearing over invasive ways of mankind that is pushing a planet almost to the brink as a habitat for all things living. ---------------- Lutfur Rahman Canada E Mail :mlr_ca2003@yahoo.ca |
__._,_.___
