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Book Review
Contours of water crisis
PARVATHI MENON
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A fervent plea for an urgent and radical transformation of our thinking on water issues
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TOWARDS WATER WISDOM — Limits, Justice, Harmony: Ramaswamy R. Iyer; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B1/11, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area, Mathura Road, New Delhi-110044. Rs. 350.
Ramaswamy R. Iyer’s name is familiar to those who have followed the Cauvery river water dispute. His writings on the issue have provided much needed technical and legal clarity, and sound common sense, on an issue that has been so politically divisive that rational dialogue between the concerned states and peoples has all but collapsed. A former civil servant, he is a leading expert on water issues, an area he has written extensively on. His most recent book revisits
many of the water issues he has written about earlier, but puts them into a theoretical framework. He meticulously fleshes out the scope and dimensions of the water crisis, a grave threat facing India, its neighbours and indeed the world at large. The methodology he adopts, of arriving at the big picture by linking in honeycomb fashion each individual component of the water crisis, presents the complexity of the issue, and the reasons why solutions to the crisis of a finite resource are hard to formulate and even harder to implement in a world divided by political and cultural borders.
Management of crisis
That a water crisis — described as the diminishing supply of fresh water against a sharply accelerating demand — is already upon us is a view that all are agreed upon: it is the management of the crisis that sharply divides experts and policy makers. According to him there are broadly two ideological approaches to the problem. The first is the view of those individuals, governments and institutions who advocate that water become a tradable commodity like any other good (the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, the U.N. family and international ‘water’ institutions like the World Water Council, Global Water Partnership, and others). The second view, put forward by “a loose group of NGOs, social activists, civil rights people, left-wing intellectuals, and so on”, is that water is a community resource, access to which is a basic human right.
From a factual presentation of the water situation in India, and the many forms of water usage that are prevalent, he discusses the reasons for the failure of water management practices. He builds into the picture the Interlinking of Rivers Project, the technical impracticality of this grand but ill-conceived scheme, and its potential for creating more water conflicts in the sub-continent.
Disputes
An entire section of the book is devoted to an evaluation of water disputes both in India (the Cauvery dispute, the Punjab water dispute, the Sardar Sarovar Project) and in the neighbourhood (the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) and the Baglihar project on the Chenab). There are important discussions on water laws and policy, the water scenario in other countries in our neighbourhood, and the current formulations and theories on water and its management. A serious reader of Ramaswamy’s erudite book is soon a willing convert to the author’s own position on the water crisis, and eagerly anticipates the denouement. What is the solution to the crisis? Is there hope for the country, for the planet?
It appears not, says this expert as he gathers the skeins of his argument in a depressing forecast for the future of the globe, of which the water crisis is an important part. Economic development and environmental protection are not irreconcilable, provided there is clarity on what constitutes development, he says. However, there are no modern development paradigms that can be reconciled with protection of the environment, and even if a country adopts sound and ecologically responsible development policies, they operate in a global environment where there are a number of rogue countries, corporates and institutions that are wreaking havoc on the environment.
In his view, the formulation “development as destruction” is an apt description of the drive towards consumption and production. On solutions technology can provide, he is sceptical: indeed the “Faustian pact” with technology has come with a heavy price. “Bhopal, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, etc, are not incidental occurrences but ineluctable concomitants to the process of technological advancement that we have embraced ardently. Life in the modern world in no longer human; it is daemonic,” he says.
Global
With the threat of climate change now hanging over the world, “we have moved into a different world, and we have to start from scratch, and learn the world afresh”, he says. He presents the recent literature on the subject of global climate change that establishes beyond doubt the reasons for and the scale of an impending catastrophe that will hit life as we know it.
This is not a book therefore that has neat solutions to a massive global challenge of which the water crisis is only a part. Indeed its purpose is to convey a complexity that eludes easy solutions. According to the author, development can theoretically at least be informed by sanity, balance and wisdom; technology too could be benign. But can this transformation take place in a world where the challenge of environmental protection is global, but where any plan of action must tie together initiatives from the community upwards? It would appear from his discussion that there is plenty of thinking on this but no viable solutions – yet.
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