Last month I attended a conference in Delhi. I arrived late at night and went straight to bed. When I got up the next morning, I was surprised to discover that just beyond the boundary wall of the conference venue was a sprawling slum.
I had just made a cup of coffee when I heard a commotion outside. A crowd of more than two hundred had gathered and many were in a fierce battle. I watched as one young man tore off his shirt and waded into the throng, swinging his fists at anyone who got in his way.
The crowd was so thick it took me a moment to register that the focus of the chaos was a water tanker, and that the conflict was over who would get served first. Buckets and drums lay strewn about, and a few women were trying to pull the fighting men apart. Suddenly the truck’s engine roared and it moved away from the scene. The fighting stopped abruptly and the crowd slowly dispersed.
Several drums of water had been filled up and left unguarded, and I stood there wondering what would happen to them. After a few minutes, two men arrived with a long pole. They hung one of the drums on it and together carried it down the hill. I don’t know what happened to the others because I had to go get ready for the conference. I went in to take my bath, and, with even greater amazement than usual, watched as the water flowed into my bucket.
Living in India has made me grateful for many things that I used to take for granted: water from a tap, light from an electrical switch, refrigeration, cooking with gas, more clothes than I can wear, and more food than I can eat.
But watching that battle not fifty feet from my room made my blood run cold. Why didn’t those people just break into the building I was in and take their share? They fought fiercely among themselves over a place in the line, but when the truck left, the owner of a filled drum felt safe enough to leave it and get a friend to help carry it back home. What kind of honor system is this? How long can it last? How long should it last?
Average water consumption in the United States is 700 liters per person per day. Here in India, a middle-class city dweller consumes between 100 and 300 liters a day. A poor person in the same city gets by on less than 50 liters. And in a rural area, that figure plummets to 20.
In the United States and other parts of the “developed” world, water conservation means not buying bottled water (the bottled-water industry is worth more than $15 billion a year in the United States—a country that boasts the cleanest, safest, most wonderful tap water in the history of the world), cutting back on watering public lawns, and the occasional ban on washing cars. But we already know all this. Consumption of natural resources is higher in the developed world than in the poorer countries. Why should water be any different from oil, electricity, or computer peripherals?
What is less well understood is the crisis soon to be on us because of acute water scarcity in political hot spots like India and China. Both countries are now massive, with rising middle classes who want their share of the world’s consumer goods. Both are already water-stressed and face increasing demands from irrigated farming and water-intensive industries. While both countries are now important food exporters, water scarcity could reverse the gains made in the green revolution of the 1960s. If either country needs to revert to food imports, the current global food crisis will become much worse.
China is clear about how desperate the situation has become. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao puts it plainly: Water scarcity threatens the very “survival of the Chinese nation.” It should be no surprise, then, that China has no intention of giving Tibet independence—for not only is Tibet a strategic military area; it also has vast glaciers and huge underground springs. Many of the major rivers of South and Southeast Asia originate there. Nowhere else in the world is there so large a water repository serving as a lifeline for much of an entire continent.
Several of the major rivers originating in Tibet flow into India, so how China uses the water upstream has a direct impact on us here. Flash floods in some of India’s mountain states have already been linked to activity in China, and the Chinese government’s plan to build a massive dam on the mighty Brahmaputra has alarmed India.
For those not accustomed to thinking of water in terms of daily survival, it is difficult to grasp water’s importance as a political issue. Whoever controls it upstream—whether through dams, canals, or irrigation systems-—determines how much is available to those downstream. And in times of war, water can be exploited for military purposes.
Many water experts in India actually fear Pakistan more than they fear China. Pakistan, downstream from India, is an arid-to-semi-arid state where water is dangerously scarce. As I write, it is experiencing civil upheaval, which may result in the fall of the present government. Instability in Pakistan always raises alarms in India. One worry is that some faction might be tempted to strike at India’s dams.
Water-sharing agreements between nuclear powers are crucial, particularly among countries with a history of long-standing tensions like India, China, and Pakistan. There have been wars over land, religion, and energy. Future wars might be triggered by something more basic. Without concerted efforts from all parties, supported by international pressure and example, there could soon be wars over water.
Related: Trickle Down by Jo McGowan
