An Act of Water Acquisition?
Jayanta Bandyopadhyay

As the annual per capita availability of water in India declined from around 5,177 cu m in 1951 to 1869 cu m in 2001, the country is approaching a regime of water stress. This is because of increase in population and changes in its consumption pattern. With an annual precipitation of about 4000 cu km, India is a better endowed country for water. It has 2.45 percent of the Earths land mass, but it receives about 4 percent of its water resources. The scenario changes drastically when we consider that about 16 percent of the population of the planet lives in this country and depends on this 4 percent share of the worlds water. Experts say that this is more due to bad management of water resources that have encouraged unsustainable ways of using water. How India as a country, addresses this challenge of evolving a more equitable and sustainable way of using its water resources will be very important in the shaping of its social and economic future. As water becomes increasingly scarce, and its scarcity value climbs, attempts by all stakeholders to gain control over larger and larger volumes of water, by means fair or foul, can be quite expected. 

The domination of the Southwest monsoon in the making of Indias climate results in wide spatial and temporal variations in the availability of this critical resource. About 75 percent of the annual precipitation occurs during the 2.5 monsoon months. The numbers of rainy days vary from about 5 in Rajasthan to about 150 in Northeastern India. The geomorphic and climatic factors result in the larger rivers of India originating from the Himalaya and passing through the northern and eastern parts of the country. With rapidly growing population, demands on water for domestic supplies, irrigation and industry, may lead to wide-spread inter-state conflicts. Unless water is utilized sustainably and equitably, in a non-partisan manner, indications are clear that in the present political framework of India, playing with water may prove to be more risky than playing with fire.

The proposal for interlinking of the rivers in India has been prescribed by many, from leaders at the national level to the local, as the perfect win-win solution for addressing the twin problems of monsoon floods and water scarcity. The annual monsoon flows in the rivers in the northern, eastern and northeastern parts is perceived by the engineers as a harmful surplus. The flow of this harmful surplus reaching the sea is seen as a waste. By connecting the surplus rivers with those in the drier western and southern parts of the country, the proposed interlinking of rivers plan to solve the twin problems of floods and water scarcity. Quite simple, and on the face of it, this seems to be a great idea!

Unfortunately, whether this is a great idea or a millennium folly can not be established unless the technical details of the proposal are discussed in the open professional world. There is a great disappointment that no such information exists in the public domain. What is available is a 28 page booklet published by the Task Force on Interlinking of Rivers (TFIR), which does not give anything beyond lines on the map of India and several ad hoc claims on the benefits of the proposal, not substantiated by any background scientific information or technical data. 

Water does not be moved by simply drawing lines on a map nor does it follow the promises made by politicians. Its movements are guided by the global hydrological cycle and its benefits are provided through the ecosystem services it performs along the path of its movement. Thus, it is crucial that the technical details of the proposed interlinking of rivers should be assessed by the open professional world so that the justifications extended for taking up this mammoth investment of public money can be scientifically examined.

On an examination of the above mentioned booklet, it appears that the proposal for interlinking of rivers is guided by three basic ideas. Firstly, it sees the water flowing down to sea during monsoon as a wasted precious resource. Secondly, it classifies some river basins as having surplus flows and some other as water scarce basins. Unfortunately, as simple as this classification may sound, there is no such method in the world of water science that can so easily declares a river basin as inherently as having surplus or scarce water. River basins have evolved over geological periods by optimizing the use of each drop of water in it. In a river, all drops of water, all the time, from the top of the basin to the confluence, are performing some critical environmental services or the other. Only when one is unable to visualize these ecosystem services, can one naively declare them as surplus going to the sea as a waste. It may be better to identify such basins as donor and recipient ones.

Secondly, in modern and integrated water management strategies, priorities for the diverse uses of water are to be clearly given. Domestic water security should receive the highest priority and be considered as a basic human right. However, the proposed interlinking of rivers appears to be a single point one committed to irrigation. In para 7.0 on Project Justification in the information booklet, words like drinking water security does not find a categorical mention.

Thirdly, and this is the one most surprising, that unless the interlinking of rivers is taken up to add another 35 million hectares of irrigation potential, food production in India may become substantially short for meeting projected food requirements by 2050 AD (p.11). This factor sets the tone that the country needs to any how support this mammoth proposal for interlinking of rivers, otherwise the dark days of depending on food imports would return. The TFIR document warns that food is expected to be the weapon of tomorrow in international scenario.

How much water does such a position hold? A closer professional analysis of the three basic ideas behind the proposed interlinking, interestingly, presents a different picture. Let us examine the idea of declaring a river basins as a surplus one, based on a simple and ad hoc calculation of water supplies and the genuine requirement of the population they support. Guided by simple arithmetic, in this viewpoint the surplus water in a river is calculated exactly in the way it will be done for bags of cement. Who decides what is the genuine requirement is not known to anybody. Moreover, the inability of traditional engineering to understand the ecosystem services provided by in-stream flow of water in a river, provided free of cost, like free recharge of inland water bodies and groundwater, free conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, free sediment transportation and regeneration of the soil, free protection of the river from saline incursion from the sea, free maintainance of the rich fishing economies in the plains and the estuaries, free bumper harvest after flood water recedes, etc., opens up the question what is the method for assessing the genuine requirements.

This limited vision of traditional engineering helps the creation of opinions that view the outflows of rivers to the seas as wasted precious resource. It is an imperative that the people as well as the state governments in the downstream areas of the river basins marked surplus seek an open and comprehensive environmental costing of the proposal.

The seemingly strongest justification for the proposed interlinking comes from its assumption that the country has to plan for 550 million tones of food grain production by 2050 AD. A simple Indian is highly vulnerable to the thoughts of food insecurity, and it touches a soft cord. It is also true that in the minds of the common Indians, the idea of food security has got almost exclusively linked with the physical expansion of irrigation potential. Thus, the imperative to reach the declared target of producing 550 million tones of food grain, correct or incorrect, can attract public sympathy for providing the additional water for increasing the irrigation potential by another 35 million ha. No question asked on the sustainability of the processes or the economic comparison with other possible ways of increasing food grain production without increasing water use, like by increasing the end-use efficiency for water.

How dependable are these targets set by the TFIR for Indias food grain production targets in 2050? These projections are based on an anticipated population of 1640 million in India by 2050, when the population of the country is expected to stabilize (p.9). This is a reasonable starting point. The annual food grain requirement can be estimated by multiplying this population figure with the projected annual per capita food grain consumption. The booklet of the TFIR is silent on the amount of per capita food grain consumption used in making this vital projection. However, many NSS reports and recent studies indicate that the average annual per capita food grain consumption in India has remained almost constant at about 155 kg. A recently published study on India by the London School of Economics suggests that in 2026 direct cereal demand will be roughly 220 mmt, with another 30 mmt being needed for other uses, giving a ballpark figure of 250 mmt. On the same basis the food grain requirement would be about 290 mmt in 2050. As one goes to enquire why the TFIR has put for India a far larger food grain production target of 550 million tonnes than this requirement, the justifications for the proposed interlinking become quite intriguing.

This space is too short to discuss that in details. Detailed research may be undertaken on it. However, as far as the basic domestic water and food grain supplies of an average Indian is concerned, there appears little reason to be worried that the present irrigation potential will not be able to ensure the security of basic food grain supplies. The present irrigation potential can easily produce the requirements of basic food grains. In this line, Bharat Singh, eminent water resource expert says, that there really seems to be no convincing argument or vital national interest, which can justify this mammoth undertaking (interlinking), in its entirety. Thus, neither from the point of providing drinking water security in water scarce areas nor the production of sufficient food grains in 2050 there appears much scientific justification for the proposed interlinking. 

How then did the water requirement for the other half of the projected 550 million tons of food grain requirement for the nation get into the books? A closer reading of para 3.4 in the booklet by the TFIR will make thinks clearer. Advocating self-sufficiency in food grains, it states in the beginning that shortages and large scale of import of food grain is likely to be socially unacceptable even in a globalised economy. However, later in the same para, it changes gear and goes to champion export led growth in agriculture. It argued that the country is not only to be satisfied with producing enough to eat, but the strategy needs to be to produce surpluses for export to achieve a commanding position. Any one aware of the level of price of cereals in the international market, and their cost of production in India, will not suggest that this balance 255 million tonnes of targeted production should be in the form of food grains. As the para comes to the end, it states that considering both internal consumption, and exports, the country has to plan for 550 million tonnes of food grain production by 2050 AD. A proposal that has been sold with the social objective of domestic water and food grain security, starts more and more to look like that of an export promotion zone! Will this export oriented water use, then, mainly produce speciality fruits, vegetables and flowers for EU and the US in the water scarce areas? It will not be a bad idea if it is a sustainable one. And if it is all a matter of earning dollars and Euros, why should the poor average Indian pay so much for it? Let them also get a return of the emerging agricultural revolution. This will mean that, firstly, the economic costs of all social and environmental damages to the donor river basins are comprehensively assessed and fully met a priory; and secondly, the water donor basins and concerned states of India, as the suppliers of the most critical factor in that export oriented agriculture, would get proportional returns from the new agriculture in the recipient states. All states being equal, some states should not be treated to be more equal than others in terms of natural resource use. If the state governments in the donor river basins do not act according to this principle, they will probably mortgage the economic future of the people in the donor basins to the recipient ones. As it stands today, the proposed interlinking of rivers runs the risk of becoming an act of acquisition of water, which uses the governmental powers to promote economic activities of some, while destroying the same for many others. This very much resembles the use of the Land Acquisition Act, the British rulers enacted in 1894. And like the Land Acquisition Act, this act will surely help at least one thing grow that is conflicts and litigations over water resources. Let the Cauvery not come up to meet the Ganga by the interlinking! Reference: Task Force on Interlinking of Rivers (2003) Interbasin Water Transfer Proposals (New Delhi, MoWR)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jayanta Bandyopadhyay is Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Views expressed are those of the author and not the institute he belongs to.