ENVIRONMENT-SOUTH ASIA: Ganga Could Turn Source of Sorrow, Say Experts

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Suman Pradhan

BOMBAY, May 23 1998 (IPS) - Since time immemorial Nepal, India and Bangladesh — three impoverished Suth Asian countries — have viewed the Ganga river and its Himalayan tributaries as perennial sources that sustain life.

Originating in the Himalayas, the river’s tributaries in India and Nepal, flow down into the plains of India to form the mighty Ganga, which ultimately passes through Bangladesh before it empties into the Bay of Bengal.

In its long journey from the Himalayas to the sea, the river provides sustenance to about 400 million people, or one third of South Asia’s population.

But the notion that the Ganga will forever sustain life and industry is slowly undergoing a change as experts and academics from across the region see limits to South Asia’s fresh water resources.

As depleting fresh water sources around the world are identified as areas of increased competition with potential for armed conflict in the coming century, South Asian experts too are having ominous thoughts.

They warn that if nothing is done now by the governments and peoples of the region, the ‘river of hope’ could soon turn into the ‘river of despair and gloom’.

“Fresh water in the region is not an infinite resource but a finite one,” Arifur Rehman, an adviser to Bangladesh’s Ministry of Water Resources said here last week during an interaction progrmme organised by the Economic Development Institute (EDI) of the World Bank attended by experts, journalists and academics from across the region.

“What is required is integrated water management policies if our rivers are to continue sustaining our way of life,” Rehman said.

Another expert, Ramaswamy Iyer, a former secretary of Water Resources to the Government of India and now a researcher at the prestigious Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, agrees.

“Increasing population pressure in India and Bangladesh is causing rising pressure on the Ganga. It is time we realised that only through better management of our river resources can we be able to deal with present and future problems,” Iyer said.

Iyer points out that friction already exists between the governments of Nepal, India and Bangladesh. Since the early seventies, India and Bangladesh have squabbled over the former’s building of the controversial Farraka Barrage on the Ganga just before it enters Bangladesh.

Originally built to flush the Hooghly river of silt and thus maintain the commercial viability of the Calcutta port, the barrage has caused problems in Bangladesh by drastically cutting down the amount of water available there in the dry season.

After much acrimonious debate, the two countries signed a new water sharing treaty in 1996, but suspicions have persisted.

If Farraka is an example of ill-will that is persisting between India and Bangladesh, then the proposed methods to deal with its effect on water scarcity have also caused problems between Bangladesh and Nepal, though government officials from both countries are loathe to admit it.

Bangladesh experts have in the past proposed building a string of high dams to store the Himalayan tributaries’ monsoon run-off, and releasing it in the dry season so that water is available in the Ganga.

But Nepal’s experts and planners strongly oppose the plan. A study they did says that about one seventh of Nepal’s arable land will be inundated if the Bangladeshi plan were to be carried out.

“There must be alternate ways of cooperating with other countries than building more high dams in the Himalayas,” says Rajendra Dahal, a Nepali journalist who has written extensively on water-related issues.

“Such massive technological interventions in the Himalayas will not solve problems. Rather it will aggravate problems by damaging the fragile environment, uprooting thousands of people from their ancestral lands, and by being economically unsustainable in the long run.”.

Meanwhile, Nepal and India too have their own misgivings about each other’s intentions when it comes to sharing the waters of the Himalayan tributaries. The two countries have held regular dialogues on a number of projects for the last four decades, but with little effect.

A new agreement to share the waters of the border river of Mahakali by building a huge high dam have also been clouded in controversy and suspicion ever since it was signed in early 1996.

While past acrimonies and suspicions hamper efforts to jointly utilise the fresh water resources of the northern parts of the Indian sub-continent, arguments for an environment-friendly approach for the future are gaining ground.

“Development, management and utilisation of water resources is, and must be, an integrated, holistic and inter-disciplinary exercise,” says Dr. T. Prasad, of the Centre for Water Resources Studies, Patna University.

According to Prasad, nations in this region need to get over the nationalistic approach to water resources and concentrate on developing a basin-wide approach in the Gangetic region.

That, according to the EDI’s Jose Furtada, is certainly the best approach. “River basin approach is more practical and better than the national interest approach. We have the examples of the Indus River Treaty between India and Pakistan to prove the point.”