 |
Transboundary River Management for Climate Resilience By B G Verghese (Visiting Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi) For the World Bank, 31 August, 2009 The Himalaya-Karakoram transboundary rivers of South Asia serve a population larger than that of the Mekong, Salween, Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Congo and Amazon basins combined. Every tenth person that walks the globe lives in the Indus-Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin. This region is also amongst the most vulnerable to climate change. So what happens here truly matters and must be of global concern. River basins do not recognise national boundaries. Nations within these international river regimes - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh in this case – must cooperate or risk dire consequences from which they might not easily recover. The terrain is varied: from mountainous and sub-montane to vast alluvial plains, large deltaic formations and mangrove swamps. These combined basins not merely account for huge and growing numbers but represent one of the largest concentrations of poverty and deprivation anywhere even as they boast an immense natural resource potential. Trans-basin cooperation is desirable at any time, more so among developing societies which are on a rapid growth path and whose actions could have unintended consequences for their neighbours. Cooperation is now further mandated by climate change which, with aberrant rainfall, rising temperatures and glacier melt, is creating a new hydrology that needs to be understood, measured and collaboratively managed. Much of the region was a single political entity until the Partition of India and Indian and Pakistani independence. India had a post-partition population of around 336 million in August 1947. Two more 1947-India’s have been added since and the population will grow by another two 1947-India’s before its population stabilizes in another 50 years. All the other countries in the region have witnessed a similar growth in population. And since water is life, water requirements for these staggering numbers must be assured to service the municipal, agricultural, industrial, hydel, recreational and ecological needs of these people at acceptable levels of national well being. Development, rising living standards and urbanization demand enhanced water use. Large parts of India and Pakistan in particular are facing conditions of water stress and groundwater depletion and more areas will begin to experience distress unless we learn to manage things better. South Asia has so far depended on the supply side management of water to meet its needs. This is but natural and a lot more water can be sustainably tapped. Nevertheless, demand side management of water is becoming increasingly important in all forms of usage – in the field, in domestic and municipal use, in industry and in preventing or mitigating pollution. Pricing, cropping patterns, more economical systems of field application and sanitation, improved maintenance, recycling, watershed management, water harvesting and induced recharge are necessary together with better drainage and groundwater management. Integrated water management and participatory irrigation management are powerful tools that can be more effectively employed. Yet, while demand management is vital and has been relatively neglected, the potential for supply side augmentation and management has is far from exhausted. The Indus and the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin offer a study in contrast. The so-called Canal Water Dispute between India and Pakistan in 1948 triggered tensions that resulted in a negotiated settlement pending a wider agreement on utilization of Indus Waters. Experts counselled joint, integrated management of the basin. But political compulsions dictated a partitioning of water flows. The Indus Water Treaty, 1960, accordingly allotted roughly 80 per cent of the total flows (the three western rivers) to Pakistan (minus some marginal uses by India in J&K), and the remaining 20 percent (from the three eastern rivers) to India. This was not an ideal solution; but it was practical and permitted both sides to go ahead with urgent storages (Mangla and Tarbela in Pakistan and Bhakra, Pong and the Ranjit Sagar dams in India) and related canal and hydro-electric systems. The Treaty has by and large worked well despite wars and political stress and has been monitored by Indus Commissioners from either side through annual meetings, surveys and inspections and consultations regarding new works by India in J&K. There have been problems occasioned by several Pakistani objections to works proposed or undertaken by India on the three Western rivers in J&K in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty. This has led to delays and postponements of several works and recourse to the award of a neutral expert as provided for under the IWT in regard to the Baglihar run-of-the-river hydro project on the Chenab in India. For its part, Pakistan has little or no control of the upper reaches of the three Western rivers (which lie on the Indian side of the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir) and confronts a shortage of storage sites in its territory as these are few, subject to inter-provincial disputes or located in remote and difficult areas. Climate change now confronts both Pakistan and India and the Indus Basin has been among the earliest to experience the adverse effects of aberrant weather, accelerated glacial melt, heavy consequential erosion and the creation of debris dams (as on the Sutlej). According to some World Bank consultants, water flows in the main stem of the Indus at Skardu might deplete by 30 per cent or more within the next 30 years on account of rapid glacial melt. This might offer a temporary feeling of plentitude but spells hard times for the future. The Indus Basin in India is similarly threatened. Aberrant rainfall, whether unseasonal or truant, has caused flood and drought in turn and enhanced uncertainties in hydro-power production with attendant implications for groundwater pumping and industry. Apart from water conservation and improved demand management, the answer lies in optimising utilization of the potential of the Indus basin through cooperative development and management of the basin as envisaged under Article VII of the IWT labeled “Future Cooperation”. The upper reaches of the three Western rivers (which Pakistan does not control) and the headwaters of the three Eastern rivers, where Indian developments are limited by the Treaty and subject to Pakistani concurrence, have an untapped potential together with that of tributaries streams in the Northern Areas that are controlled by Pakistan. These need to be jointly surveyed, developed and managed as a unified system. It is in this context that this writer has for several years advocated negotiating an Indus-II agreement under Article VII of the IWT to see whether and to what extent the two sides can jointly exploit and manage the full potential of the Indus Basin to mutual benefit. The Indian Prime Minister has more recently hinted at this possibility as part of his package solution for J&K that makes boundaries irrelevant and enables the two parts of J&K to come together in many ways without disturbing the existing twin sovereignties in a new cooperative relationship. Apart from the intrinsic merits of this idea, the imperatives of climate change warrant innovative thinking and solutions in place of tired, stultified arguments. If the Indus Basin was divided under the IWT and capable of being so carved geo-politically, the GBM basin must be shared as India is an upper, middle and lower riparian. Bhutan and Nepal are upper riparians (as is Tibet) while Bangladesh is a lower riparian. Nepal and Bhutan have a primary interest in hydro-power which is for them what oil and gas are to the West Asian Emirates, laden with aqua-dollars rather than petro-dollars. Bhutan is rapidly moving in that direction while Nepal, alas, has yet to decide on its water future which it can only make in cooperation with India on account of geographical compulsions. Bangladesh’s, primary interest on the other hand is water – for flood moderation, agriculture, fisheries, navigation, mangrove management and salinity control. Power imports from its hydro-rich neighbours, including India, could offer it a valuable energy substitute for depleting or imported hydrocarbons or carbon-emitting fossil fuels. But these imports must transit India. The other geo-political reality that confronts Bangladesh is that over 90 per cent of its river flows enter it through India which also controls virtually all the high ground where river training and management is economically feasible, the only exception being in the Chittagong Hill Tracts which lies outside the GBM basin but is not particularly water rich. India’s water relationship with Nepal pre-dates Independence in the form of the Sharda barrage on the Mahakali. This was followed post-Independence, after Nepal opened its doors to outsiders in the 1950s, to the Kosi and Gandak projects which lay along the boundary with India just inside Nepal. These were primarily irrigation-cum-flood moderation projects with a modicum of power generation. Nepal has had a long standing grievance that it did not get a fair deal with regard to these Indian-built projects though both were subsequently re-negotiated to ameliorate these grievances. Indifferent political relations from the 1960s onwards and Nepal’s fears of dependency from asymmetrical relationships stalled progress on all but a couple of small friendship projects. Divergent perceptions about energy pricing, cost-benefit sharing, construction, consultancy and management and notions regarding the ownership of flowing water in certain quarters in Kathmandu led to recrimination and impeded progress on the ground. Neither side gave adequate attention to the opportunity cost of delay and preferred to explore and exploit other options. Yet the problem Nepal confronts is severe power shortages leading to prolonged blackouts, lagged development and regional disparities that could be obviated by more purposeful harnessing of its abundant water resources. The country obviously needs a mix of large, medium and small projects to serve diverse needs. The turning away from large projects for some time on the ground that Nepal could manage without them meant forgoing opportunities to attract investments, including energy-intensive projects, that would generate much needed employment and income generation, stimulate capacity building and infrastructure and generate revenue surpluses that could be ploughed into accelerated development. This is the route Bhutan has followed. The landmark Mahakali Agreement of February 1996 set out framework principles for all Indo-Nepal water resource developments and provided the basis for mutually beneficial cooperation. Unfortunately a trust deficit and differences on a number of issues – power pricing, cost-benefit sharing, management structures and technical details - stalled progress. Nearly fourteen years later, by which time this large multipurpose project could have been up and running and partly amortised its cost, remains at the starting line. The detailed project report on the long-conceived Kosi High Dam that was to be jointly prepared also remains stalled and not only for reasons of the continuing political transition in Nepal. A number of medium sized public-private and joint ventures such as West Seti, Buhri Gandaki, the Upper Karnali Bend and Arun-III are on the anvil and will, hopefully, be clinched to provide Nepal the urgent interim relief it requires with surplus power being exported to power-hungry India. Both sides are gearing up to resume talks on more and larger projects and India is willing to do whatever it can to accommodate Nepal’s concerns and constraints. The objective situation has changed over time. Both sides have new regimes that should facilitate a fresh start. Both recognize the existence of pressing domestic problems of employment, regional equity and growth that should render water resource cooperation a win-win proposition. The challenge of climate change should also act as a spur. Both countries need not just more energy but clean energy, which hydro-power is able to provide. Hydro-development could also yield carbon credits that could suitably assist project financing. Two points need to be made about financing. Since Nepal has resource constraints and must find an outlet for surplus power in or through India, it may find that financial closure is linked to assurance of market access to India that ensures the economic viability of individual projects some of which would entail costs approximating Nepal’s GDP or annual outgoes equivalent to its revenue budget. The second point is that India now has a national power grid with extra-high voltage transmission lines that make possible large transfers of energy from one end of the country to the other. This makes for least cost marginal pricing with availability tariffs and futures trading in power through national and state regulators. The electricity pricing system is thereby undergoing a transformation that renders past assumptions and calculations obsolete. India’s power trade has now to be globally competitive and market driven and monopoly pricing by state electricity boards no longer prevails. Therefore uneconomic, high-cost power as a result of excessive front-loading and time and cost overruns will not find a market in India. The other theorem that Bhutan has well demonstrated is that Nepal’s bargaining power vis-à-vis India will improve as interdependence grows with increasing Nepalese power sales and trade with India. India has had to learn this lesson the hard way itself in relation to its trading relations with other nations. Water relations between Bangladesh and India also represent a saga of missed opportunities from which both sides must draw the appropriate lessons. The problem again has been a trust deficit and political distractions at home. With the installation of a new government in Dhaka after two years of caretaker rule, the stage seems set for resuming the threads of discussion on Indo-Bangladesh relations across the board as water issues cannot be considered in isolation. Unfortunately, elements currently out of power have stirred up a raging campaign on the Tipaimukh project on the Barak (Meghna) in Manipur in India for which financial closure is still awaited before construction can begin. This is a flood moderation-cum-power project (1500 MW) which Bangladesh itself sought when the Indo-Bangladesh Joint Rivers Commission was set up in 1972, as it prioritised flood protection of the Sylhet bowl. Now the argument is that water passing through the turbines may cause summer flooding and leave insufficient water in the river for salinity control. The facts are otherwise – 20 per cent flood moderation during the monsoon and up to 25-40 per cent augmentation of lean season flows at other times – and the critics refused to join a parliamentary party from Bangladesh that was invited to visit Delhi and Tipaimukh, see things for themselves and put forward their concerns which India has promised to address on the principle of “no harm” which was incorporated in the critical Indo-Bangladesh Ganges Treaty that was happily concluded in December 1996. Climate change is worrisome for Bangladesh as abnormal floods from aberrant rainfall, higher erosion and coastal inundation from sea-level rise could jeopardize millions living on both sides of the border in the lower Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. As with Nepal, mutual interest dictates cooperation in river management, flood forecasting and disaster management. Watershed management and water regulation in the upper reaches of the GBM system in Nepal, Bhutan and India would benefit the lower riparians, Bangladesh and India, and also augment much needed lean season flows, enhance power supplies and benefit, agriculture, fisheries, navigation and salinity control. The need for this and objective possibilities of so doing have been spelt out in both Track I and Track II discussions over the years. Unfortunately there has been a lack of political will and a casual forgetting of the opportunity costs of delay. Trade offs are possible within the water sector and across the board and in some ways it would be desirable to broaden the canvas so as to ensure that single point bargaining does not result in a zero-sum game. Reference is often made to the Mekong and Nile Commissions as transboundary models for water resource development. Lessons can be learnt from these and other arrangements. But the GBM basin is so large that innumerable other factors intrude. The idea of a single Himalayan basin may be premature, but individual project and sub-basin agreements as on the Kosi, Gandak and Mahakali, the Ganges below Farakka and, hopefully, on other rivers have defined certain parameters for cooperation and sharing. These have lain dormant in some degree but if activated could provide an interlocking framework for collaboration and networking. Bangladesh has expressed interest in the Kosi High Dam as a possible source of navigation to Nepal, flood moderation and augmentation of lean season flows. It has also expressed willingness to bear its share of costs for benefits received. If such an agreement goes through, that would provide a basis for cooperative three country management of the Kosi-Lower Ganges basin. Any agreement on power supplies from Nepal or Bhutan to Bangladesh would also mark the beginning of an inter-regional transmission grid. It is in this incremental manner that the edifice for larger GBM cooperation could evolve over time. Trying to force the pace could prove counter productive. Meanwhile, it would be practical and wise to share data and medium and long term plans and project information once the parameters are frozen so that everybody is in the loop whether they are directly involved or affected or not. All four countries in the GBM basins have worked out long term perspective water plans of one kind or another. These have not been formally exchanged but were this to happen, all four would discover that cooperation and coordination could assist optimization and create synergy. This could be achieved by periodic meetings of concerned ministers and officials in an informal forum. At another level, the same result could be achieved by recasting the role of ICIMOD, from which India has hitherto regrettably remained somewhat aloof. ICIMOD has a wider mandate but there is nothing to prevent a regional GBM sub-committee being set up, including China, for this purpose. China’s inclusion is logical as an upper riparian in the GBM system and in view of Tibet’s role as a global water fountain and weather maker. Tibetan glaciers are melting as are large regions under permafrost. This could change critical weather parameters feeding into the larger regime of atmospheric circulation and climate change. As it is debris dam lake outbursts have caused major flooding and erosion in Arunachal and the Sutlej basin and probably in Nepal and Bhutan as well. These events, accentuated by climate change, have occurred in remote and isolated areas that could be monitored by satellites interrogating automatic data recorders located in these valleys. Indian and Chinese satellites could record the information and propagate the relevant data as and where necessary. These same countries could also take concerted steps to measure tectonic events in this highly dynamic region as earth tremors have a bearing on erosion, geological stability and dam safety. Himalayan seismic and glacier networks would be of great value for monitoring and planning purposes. China at present shares discharge data pertaining to the Siang (Tsang-po), Subansiri and Sutlej but not on other rivers as yet. This is a gap that must be filled. Meanwhile, considerable interest has been aroused by fuzzy reports of Chinese studies to divert the waters of the “Brahmaputra” north to the Gobi and the arid regions beyond Bejing as part of a larger chain of integrated diversion works on the Salween, Mekong and Yangtze. Studies are perfectly in order but Chinese literature itself indicates that such a project may not be possible on environmental, techno-economic and topographic considerations. A tract entitled “Tibet Water Plan to Save China” by Li Ling (2005) sets out heroic parameters and the debate between Reds and Experts. The undue nervousness shown in some South Asian quarters in such a diversion betrays a degree of ignorance of ground realities within this constituency. The Brahmaputra for one is formed near Saidya in upper Assam at the confluence of the Siang, Dibang, Luhit and Noa Dihing. So diversion of the “Brahmaputra” (70 per cent of whose waters are generated south of the Himalaya) itself indicates a lack of knowledge of the relevant geography, hydrology and geo-politics. It is also indicative of a wider lack of knowledge in the South Asian region of its own water resources and mountain eco-system. Climate change and water resource planning predicate such a study which is today rendered far easier by satellite imagery and monitoring and computer modeling for purposes of resource inventory and planning. Another example of this is the fact that the Electric Power Development Corporation of Japan made a most interesting desk-stop study of the power potential of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in Tibet and Northeast India based on satellite imagery as part of a series of proposals to develop mega infrastructures to pump-prime the global economy after the Oil Shock. The Global Infrastruture Foundation was set up in Tokyo after consultation between various global players and produced this paper the centerpiece of which was two alternative projects to harness the enormous energy locked in the falling water of the Tsangpo at the Great U-Bend where it swivels from Tibet into India, dropping about 2500 metres in a series of giant cascades. The potential of two alternative tunnel sites to link the two ends of the U-Bend was estimated at between 48,000 and 54,000 MW. Current folklore about China’s so-called Brahmaputra diversion plan envisaged this drop being used to provide the energy to pump Brahmaputra waters to the Gobi. The proposition appears prima facie infeasible but, divorced from the diversion-pumping mirage, the GBM regional partners, ASEAN, ESCAP, Japan and the World Bank and ADB might join hands to propose tapping the power potential of the U-bend to feed into a SAARC-ASEAN-China regional energy grid. The avoided carbon emission cost of this quantum of power generated from coal would be a notable contribution to carbon capture. Is this feasible – technically, economically, politically? Only a collaborative study will give us the answer. All GBM countries have presumably done water balance studies so that they are able to prepare water budgets sectorally over space and time, factoring in growing populations. The numbers may be crude but could be refined. Some recent Indian studies suggest that whereas India’s current water use is about 634 cu km, currently available utilisable water is not 1123 cu km as earlier supposed but no more than 654 cu km, based on global calculations of evapo-transpiration that work out to almost double the earlier assumed figure. (Prof T.N Narasimhan, Univ of California, Berkeley. Journal of Earth Systems Sciences, 2008). Allowance must of course be made for temperature, humidity, cropping patterns and so forth; but even allowing for these could it be that India is nearer midnight that believed? World Bank consultants have meanwhile hypotheised seven layers of very deep fresh water aquifers under artesian pressure underlying the north Ganges plain in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and in the Bengal Basin in India (bordering Tripura), and similar deep aquifers in the Nepal Terai and in western Bangladesh. Experimental drillings were proposed in the 1990s to prove the hypothesis after core drill samples of India’s Oil and Natural Gas Commission indicated seven water bearing lenses at the indicated depths. India, Nepal and Bangladesh all rejected the hypothesis on what would seem to be a most unscientific basis without meaningful empirical inquiry. Yet this hypothesis is of great relevance in water resource planning and development in all three countries and in the context of climate change. Water resource management to stabilise irrigation and drought-proof agrarian economies, prevent mining of groundwater and its contamination by arsenic and other toxic agents and ensure proper drainage are urgently necessary. New knowledge, new technologies and new legal frameworks are now available. So too satellite imagery for resource monitoring and computer simulation models as speedy and accurate tools for investigation, forecasting and the ordering of options with related costs and benefits, including the cost of not doing and the opportunity cost of delay. The GBM riparians have lost an inordinate amount of time in seizing the great opportunities that stare them in the face. Mounting social pressures, impatient populations and climate change now demand meaningful action, overcoming past prejudices. South Asia must make its best effort to reduce carbon emissions without waiting for others to do so first as a historical obligation. India, as the largest country in the region, must help create an enabling climate for cooperation in the Indus and GBM basins and reach out to China to join in what should be a mutually beneficial exercise. The international community in turn has an obligation to assist with funding and technology transfers. Much cutting edge technology is with private players who claim intellectual property rights. The world community must ensure that developing nations are not held to ransom by corporate greed as was witnessed in the UN-led Southern Africa HIV-AIDS eradication programme some years ago where market intervention by Indian suppliers forced a reduction of prices to a tenth or less of the exorbitant asking price by certain global MNCs. For South Asia, the stakes are high; the opportunities great. It is five minutes to midnight. |
||
| back to the top | |||
HOME | ABOUT THE AUTHOR | LIST OF ARTICLES | CONTACT | BOOKS 11-C Dewan Shree Apartments, 30 Ferozeshah Rd, New Delhi 110001, India
|
