Among the gravest, most urgent and most neglected threats to India’s security, one that has the potential to derail almost every dimension of collective national aspiration, is the deepening crisis of water. India has seen dramatic decline in movements of armed violence over the past two decades, but this could abruptly be put to risk if the abuse, overuse and contamination of our water resources continues on its current trajectory.
This is not a crisis that afflicts India alone—though this country is among the most at risk. Water conflicts are proliferating rapidly across the world. The Pacific Institute, for instance, records 220 water conflicts between 2000 and 2009, growing to 627 between 2010 and 2019. Crucially, the largest number of these conflicts afflicted Asia—111 in the 2000-2019 period, rising to 388 the following decade.
Often major conflicts that are not obviously connected with water have complex linkages with other factors of food, human and national security. Thus, shortages of water and lack of food, combined with other social and political factors to undermine political stability, has triggered uprisings and protests, as well as regime changes, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. The water emergency is one of the prominent, albeit unspoken, causes of India’s farmers’ protest in 2020-21 and currently ongoing. It is not the Indian farmer alone who is confronted with potential calamity. Alternating floods and droughts are among the factors that have provoked the current wave of farmers’ agitations across 25 of the 27 countries in Europe. Significantly, more than half the world is now water-stressed.
The water crisis also threatens India’s purported US$5 trillion GDP dream. According to the World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct initiative, 31 per cent of global GDP—as much as US$70 trillion—will be at risk due to high water stress by 2050. Just four countries—India, Mexico, Egypt and Turkey—account for more than half of this.
India is already among the high water-stressed countries of the world. Part of the problem is located in the natural order. With 16 per cent of the world’s population, India has just 4 per cent of the world’s freshwater resources. Moreover, climate change is augmenting environmental pressures. Nevertheless, much of the problem is self-inflicted. In a culture that deifies its rivers, more than half of these are highly polluted, and many others are contaminated at levels that are considered unsafe. Despite decades of ‘cleaning’ and tens of thousands of crores expended to this end, the most revered Ganga and Yamuna, among others, remain highly polluted, burdened each day with millions of gallons of human and industrial waste.
The second major source, groundwater, is heavily over-exploited, far beyond the volumes of annual recharge. Significantly, India accounts for a quarter of global groundwater usage, an amount that exceeds the combined total usage of China and the US. In 2009, a NASA study warned that India’s groundwater levels were declining at a dangerous pace. Worse, available groundwater resources have been widely contaminated by toxic agricultural runoff and industrial waste.
The result is that 163 million Indians lack access to safe drinking water and, in 2018, NITI Aayog noted that approximately 2,00,000 people die in India each year, due to this. In the most astonishing evidence of administrative incompetence and neglect, Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth, which receives more than 11m of rainfall annually, is chronically short of drinking water because of the failure to develop and maintain systems for groundwater recharge. Groundwater in 21 major cities, including Chennai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, is approaching the ‘zero’ level.
Water is a fundamental condition for life, and it takes no great imagination to realise that, as this precious resource is further diminished or contaminated, strife and violence will follow. India also has significant disputes over water with Pakistan and China, and the spectre of ‘water wars’ is not inconceivable.
The Thames was a ‘biologically dead’ river in London at the time of the ‘Great Stink’ in 1848, till it was cleaned up in the years that followed. It is, today, one of the cleanest rivers in the world. Between 2013 and 2017, groundwater extraction in Odisha was reduced from 42 to 30 per cent, demonstrating the dramatic potential of policy. With an average of 100cm of rain per year across India, there is no reason why sufficient rainwater cannot be harvested during the monsoons. Technical solutions are available for both cleaning surface water and husbanding groundwater. Corruption and neglect have prevented these from being realised. It is human folly, greed and ineptitude that have brought us to the present pass.
Ajai Sahni
Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management, South Asia Terrorism Portal
ajaisahni@gmail.com