https://epaper.timesgroup.com/Olive/ODN/TimesOfIndia/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=TOIGO%2F2018%2F07%2F31&entity=Ar01200&sk=1B7253B1&mode=text
Massed clouds crowd the horizon, while glorious rainfall cascades across the landscape of India’s smallest state. But even amidst the most excellent monsoon in Goa in many years, the spectre of water shortage emerges rude reminder to never take good times for granted. On the front page of this newspaper on July 23, Rajendra Kerkar reported “Karnataka has restarted diverting the water of the Mhadei, reducing the flow downstream to Goa” with drastic impact on Barazan and Ladkem waterfalls and the state’s watershed. These actions contravene sworn testimonials to the Supreme Court of India, so are probably reversible, but they’re consistent with long-term strategies to continuously divert water resources to benefit the much larger neighbour. The future will only bring more of the same. Rapacious investment bankers at Goldman Sachs have called the stuff we drink “petroleum of the twenty-first century”, and prescient analysts have long predicted any future world war will be fought over water resources. Now, there are conspicuous warning signs that conflagration has already begun. Epic drought is the best way to understand the epochal destabilization of a huge contiguous swathe of the Middle East across Syria and Iraq to Turkey and Iran, which has rrendered uninhabitable some of the earliest cradles of humankind. But that is only the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg of water disputes around the world. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague says at least 263 river basins are contested globally, so many potentially deadly conflicts involving billions of people. On this issue, India is stranded on very hard ground. On the eastern border, water security rests on nebulous presumptions about the Brahmaputra, while China busily constructs hydroelectric projects in Tibet that will have unknown effects downstream. Meanwhile, the main strategic importance of Kashmir is the headlands of the Indus river system which controls the welfare and livelihood of hundreds of millions in the plains below. Militancy breeds in arid conditions. The notorious terrorist Hafiz Saeed of Lashkar-e-Taiba (who carries a $10 million American bounty on his head for masterminding the 2008 Mumbai attack) returns most often to the theme of water in his rhetoric. Last year he promised, “India should listen, if it stops the water, blood will flow in the rivers.” Saeed shakes his fist at India, but who to blame when the whole Earth runs dry? That unthinkable yet seemingly unavoidable scenario is taking shape at warp-speed everywhere at the same time. This month alone, Algeria hit the highest temperature ever recorded in Africa (51.2 degrees celsius) and Oman survived the highest low temperature ever recorded in the world (42.6), while at least 30 people died in and around Kyoto as the Japanese city wilted through its most longest heat wave in history. At this very moment, scores of forest fires are rampaging through northern Sweden, exacerbated by drought that has extended hazardously north. Alarmed headlines telegraph “Arctic Circle on Fire”. But even if climate change on a devastatingly unprecedented scale is making matters unimaginably worse, India’s most intractable water problems are firmly rooted in abysmally poor governance. The NITI Ayog recently released its Composite Water Management Index 2018, which pointed out sustainability is a distant dream (and mere survival a virtual impossibility) when, for instance, “groundwater data is based on an inadequate sample of 55,000 wells out of a total of approximately 12 million in the country.” As a result of this kind of catastrophic mismanagement, the report says 600 million citizens face a severe water shortage, at least 200,000 die annually due to lack of access to clean water, and the crisis is “only going to get worse” as cities will very soon start to run dry. Already, India consumes more vital groundwater each year than China and the USA combined. There is only one way out of this mess, and it applies equally to Goa and Gothenburg. Every level of society must commit to eliminate waste, and recycle whenever possible. Also, at this point wise leaders should recognize that water harvesting is the best and most essential form of development required. Above all this and of paramount importance is respect, most especially for the rights of future generations. For it is terrible to consider but impossible to deny, we find ourselves standing at the brink of a precipice of true reckoning. The way to safety is difficult indeed, but the only other choice is death and the dustbowl.