Dangers from India's interlinking of rivers project
A T Salahuddin Ahmed
Water is so important states can't afford to fight over it.
- Geoffrey Dabelko
In 1995, the World Bank's Vice-President, Ismail Serageldin, predicted that there would be wars over water in the next century. The Trans-boundary Freshwater Dispute Database Project at Oregon State University has challenged this view, demonstrating that there has been no war over water, except the one that broke out 4,500 years ago. Nevertheless, in 2000, on the World Water Day, The World Water Commission surmised that over the next 25 years, global water shortage would become so critical that the world's two in three people would suffer from regular depletion of water supplies. "Global thirst will turn millions into water refugees."
- Geoffrey Dabelko
In 1995, the World Bank's Vice-President, Ismail Serageldin, predicted that there would be wars over water in the next century. The Trans-boundary Freshwater Dispute Database Project at Oregon State University has challenged this view, demonstrating that there has been no war over water, except the one that broke out 4,500 years ago. Nevertheless, in 2000, on the World Water Day, The World Water Commission surmised that over the next 25 years, global water shortage would become so critical that the world's two in three people would suffer from regular depletion of water supplies. "Global thirst will turn millions into water refugees."
Bangladesh has been confronting water crisis owing to rapid growth of population, urbanization, and marked decline of freshwater supply. Groundwater situation and its management source aquifer for safe water supply to groundwater dependent Dhaka (by area 370 sq km), Bangladesh's capital city, has already become deplorable. The situation will hit exceedingly hard the Dhaka city when its population will predictably rise around 19.5 million by 2030 from its current level of population which is about 11 million. By 2030 water demand will increase from its current 2000 million litres a day (MLD) to 4073 MLD a day.
Of the current 1900 MLD production, around 87% is groundwater. Significantly, such large quantity of abstraction of groundwater, imperil the aquifer environment, critically threatening the very sustainability of Dhaka itself. Recharging groundwater cannot solely provide water security to the people. The moot point here is: the process needs sustaining through an alternative path other than huge abstraction of groundwater. Widespread arsenic contamination in Bangladesh (of the 64 districts, 61 are arsenic contaminated) is an emphatic case in point why the abstraction process of groundwater should not be pushed beyond its ceiling point.
Bangladesh's vulnerability
Water security has become more complicated because water has been privatized and globalized-an aspect that has been hardly addressed. Water, which is a means to achieve certain goals, touches not only national and international security but also human security. In Bangladesh, which is recognized as the world's one the most vulnerable countries (MVCs) in terms of climate change, water crisis will deepen further because of the impact of climate change on water resources management. The fact that some major rivers of Bangladesh have become exceedingly polluted and rivers have been dying and drying up has worsened the state of environmental security of Bangladesh. Whereas population and economies continue to grow exponentially, the world's freshwater supply remains finite. Asia has already been identified as water-deficit continent where its two most populous countries, India and China, suffer from water scarcity.
Bangladesh's vulnerability
Water security has become more complicated because water has been privatized and globalized-an aspect that has been hardly addressed. Water, which is a means to achieve certain goals, touches not only national and international security but also human security. In Bangladesh, which is recognized as the world's one the most vulnerable countries (MVCs) in terms of climate change, water crisis will deepen further because of the impact of climate change on water resources management. The fact that some major rivers of Bangladesh have become exceedingly polluted and rivers have been dying and drying up has worsened the state of environmental security of Bangladesh. Whereas population and economies continue to grow exponentially, the world's freshwater supply remains finite. Asia has already been identified as water-deficit continent where its two most populous countries, India and China, suffer from water scarcity.
It needs no reference to say that these two populous countries are already water stressed. About 97.5% of the world's water exists as salt in the oceans and seas. Estimate shows that of the world's 2.5% freshwater, approximately 99% is either trapped in glaciers and ice caps or located in water tables too deep to access. Thus, only 1% of the freshwater of the world is readily available for human consumption. The world's more than 31 countries continue to face chronic freshwater shortages (thus reaching the scarcity stage). And this number will likely grow to 45 countries by the year 2025. Thus, several factors influence water security. These include agriculture, industrialization, urbanization, and factors such as environment (climate change, erratic weather pattern, and pollution), demography (population boom), conservation and efficiency of water-use, etc. It needs underlining that both the availability of and access to water (quality and quantity) determine the level and degree of water security.
Seen thus, basic contentions that have been made here are that water security sits on a well-knitted integrated water resource management (IWRM). A well-crafted IWRM is contingent upon an integrated water resource management policy (IWRMP). An IWRMP in turn must be backed by necessary institutional and legal frameworks of planning capable of regulating water resources management at the national, regional and international levels to address the trans-boundary water disputes.
About 263 river basins in the world are international in scope. They represent nearly half the world's total land surface and provide about 76.5% sources of available water, 23% rainwater and 1.5% ground water, respectively. These 263 river basins include many of world's largest and most important rivers, such as the Amazon, Congo, Danube, Ganges, Mekong, Nile, Rhine, and Tigris-Euphrates. India's large portion belongs to the two vast international river basins, the GBM and the Indus. The Indian government has its own agenda to pursue the interlinking of rivers (ILR) project, (notwithstanding the bitter experience that it has given rise to in the form of inter-state conflicts within India, e.g., the Cauvery water dispute among Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, note Karnataka is previously known as Mysore in pre-1947 period) Undertaken in 2002 by the Bharatiya Janata Party government, even without putting it for discussion in the Lok Sabha (India's lower parliament body), the Indian government's avowed aim, through the ILR, is to get India's 37 major river interlinked by 2016 at the cost of Indian Rs. 5,600 billion (186 billion US dollars at 2002 price). The proposed ILR project is mainly linked to the "development" and transfer of water, particularly within and from the GBM river basin-with 14 inter-basin water transfer (IBT) links under the Himalayan rivers development constituent in northern India, and 16 such links under the Peninsular river development component in India's southern part.
To date, feasibility reports (FRs) of 16 links, of them, 14 Peninsular and 2 Himalayan, have been completed. Although IBT projects are worldwide phenomena (e.g. Spain's Tagu-Segura, South Africa's Lesotho Highlands Water Project, Central Asia's Aral Sea Project, China's Three Gorges Dam [TGD}, Nepal's Tanakpur Dam1, India's Periyar, Parambikulam Aliyar, Kurnool Cudappah Canal, Telugu Ganga, Ravi-Beas-Sutlej Indira Gandhi Nahar Pariyojana [IGNP], etc), they have both helpful and harmful impacts on the ecological and environmental systems as a whole.
A comparative study of both useful and damaging impacts of IBT projects reveal that it is the damaging impacts that overshadow the useful ones. Dangers loom large in the region following India's taking of the ILR project into the implementation phase. For example, in August 2005, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh to implement one link, the Ken-Betwa Link Project (KBLP) of the Peninsular constituent. It needs flagging here that in actuality the Peninsular constituent and the Himalayan one are intertwined, although they are identified as independent constituents. Ramifications of ILR project are many entailing, for example, hydrological, environmental, social and ecological, and legal in nature.
Historically, Bangladesh has been dependent on the regional flows coming through the GBM river basins. Although Bangladesh occupies only about 7% of the total catchments areas of the three rivers combined, it drains over 92% of all surface flows of the catchments areas to sea. On an average per capita basis, water availability is one of the highest in the world in the GBM river basins. Over 80% of all surface waters are available only during the monsoon months: from June to September. The ILR project has received widespread scathing criticism at government and non-government levels in South Asia and within Indian research community. Significantly, it is alleged that while one gets information about the peninsular component, no information is available about the Himalayan one. For Bangladesh, and for other concerned states of this region, information for the Himalayan one is vital. In the absence of it, dangers will loom large for the neighbouring downstream countries.
The Himalayan constituent of the ILR entails two of the largest rivers in South Asia: the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in which India is the dominant power and is connected by a narrow neck of land with Assam. These two rivers are international and their basin areas are shared by China, Nepal, India and Bangladesh. The stark reality is that the ILR aims at transferring the Himalayan waters to the peninsular south via the Subarnarekha-Mahanadi-Godavari links. Naturally, it is the Himalayan constituent, meaning the Brahmaputra-Ganga-Gandak and Kosi-Gharga-Sarda-Yamuna-Rajasthan-Sabarmati, which poses serious water security threat to both Bangladesh and Nepal. In GBM's river basin case, separate and bilateral agreements on smaller aspects have been signed among India and the three other countries, namely Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. Nepal plays a very crucial role for the Himalayan component because the Nepalese rivers supply almost half of the annual flow of the Ganges River. During the dry season, almost 75% of the Ganges flow comes from Nepal.
At the downstream, Bangladesh is very concerned because over 92% of the water that annually flows through the country is generated in the upstream. Bangladesh and India has 54 common rivers. Thus, the impacts of the ILR on Bangladesh will be the function of many variables, including the alteration of hydrology (both surface and groundwater), river dynamics, ecosystem changes, agricultural productivity, intrusion of salinity and public health. While both Nepal and Bangladesh have critical stakes in this project, reportedly they have not been officially notified of plans for the ILR project. The ILR project gets intensely complicated as India strives to carry out its ILR project plan with Nepal amidst Kathmandu's on-going political violence and instability which have plagued the country's political landscape. Some experts opine that combined with inter-state conflicts, the ILR project is bound to give rise to major inter-country conflicts and violent tensions both at intra-state and inter-state levels. In the words of a ILR watcher, the impact of ILR for Bangladesh will be the following: "It seems likely that Kolkata, an Indian city downstream of Farakka, would be less impacted by the river linking plan than Bangladesh, since one of the river links in the ILR (Farakka-Sundarbans link) plans to bring water from the Brahmaputra-Ganges link to flush Kolkata port. This diversion from the Brahmaputra through Indian territories will also reduce the amount of water flowing from India into Bangladesh, further inflaming tensions.
Less water in the Ganges delta, downstream of Farakka, would worsen salinity intrusion into the channel and groundwater aquifers which harms both drinking water supplies and agricultural production. Also, reduced flow in the delta would negatively impact the Sundarbans, a mangrove ecosystem highly sensitive to the relative balance of saltwater and freshwater inputs from upstream." Clearly, Bangladesh has genuine concern about Indian ILR project. So is other regional powers.
A T Salahuddin Ahmed, PhD from Australian National University, Canberra, is Senior Fellow (Director In-Charge & Head of Research Division) of a think tank.
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