The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in a report released on November 9, 2006, has said that lack of water is caused by lack of power, rather than by limited resources.
“The scarcity at the heart of
the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and equality, not
in physical availability… There is more than enough water in the world
for domestic purposes, for agriculture and for industry. The problem is
that some people -- notably the poor -- are systematically excluded
from access by their poverty, by their limited legal rights or by
public policies.”
The UNDP’s annual Human Development Report for 2006, that focuses
on water, advocates an approach to tackling the global water crisis
that is radically different from that advocated by the likes of the
World Bank and the Indian government’s water resources ministry.
Storing water in large centralised reservoirs centralises political
power. The benefits of big, capital-intensive water investments tend to
be captured by the rich and powerful. “The danger is that the claims of
the politically and commercially powerful will take precedence over the
claims of the poor and the marginalised,” the UNDP warns.
Illustrating the argument with an example from India, the report
says: “In water-stressed parts of India, irrigation pumps extract water
from aquifers 24 hours a day for wealthy farmers, while neighbouring
small holders depend on the vagaries of rain.”
Advocates small-scale solutions
The report, titled ‘Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global
Water Crisis’, argues that decentralised, small-scale solutions and
efficiency improvements are more likely to reach the poor than
centralised reservoirs and canals. “For much of the past hundred years,
water shortages in agriculture have been countered by dams and
large-scale irrigation works. In the years ahead, the focus will shift
decisively to demand management. Getting more crop per drop, rather
than more water to the fields, is becoming the central concern in
public policy debates.”
This should open the eyes of India’s water resources ministry that
is dominated by the big dam lobby. The performance of India’s
irrigation infrastructure, which is the largest in the world, is among
the poorest, India’s Finance Minister P Chidambaram said in his budget
speech last year. There is huge scope for improvements in the
performance of existing infrastructure, noted the mid-term appraisal of
the Ninth Five-Year Plan. A 10% increase in irrigation efficiency
(which would still not be the most efficient performance) could
increase irrigated area by 14 million ha, an agenda of about 10 years
at the current rate of growth in irrigated areas.
But there is little progress in that direction. On the contrary,
due to siltation, about 1.95 billion cubic metres of reservoir capacity
are getting silted up each year. This means that two-thirds of the
nation’s storage capacity is being silted up annually, and nothing is
being done about it.
Similarly, if the system of rice intensification (SRI), a new and
efficient method of rice cultivation, is adopted in even half the
irrigated rice area of around 24 million ha in India, it could help add
at least 6 million ha of additional irrigation, at the same time
increasing production by at least 50%. This is what the UNDP report
advocates when it says more crop per drop should be the approach.
Precious little is being done at the national level in India to adopt
the SRI, except for paying lip service to it.
Large irrigation projects won’t alleviate poverty in an unequal society
Such efforts are also much more likely to help in poverty
alleviation, says the UNDP report. Dispelling the myth that canal
irrigation necessarily implies poverty alleviation, the report says
this is true only where there is greater equity in landholdings. It
gives the example of Pakistan (and India) where poverty levels have
been found to be as high inside irrigation networks as they are outside
them.
Illustrating with an example from India how the benefits of
irrigation from large projects are cornered by the powerful, the report
says: “In India, about 13% of the population has access to irrigation.
Within this group, the richest one-third of farmers receives 73% of the
subsidy.”
The more than 500 million small farming families are the world’s
“epicentre of extreme poverty”. Most of these poor farmers work
marginal, rain-fed lands. They are far more likely to benefit from
modest investments in decentralised water storage and supply than from
large dams and riverlinking projects, as advocated in India. The UNDP
report says that with an initial investment of $ 7 billion, extending
small dams to store water and recharge groundwater could increase the
value of the country’s annual rain-fed crop from $ 36 billion to $ 180
billion. This approach would also help increase employment in rural
areas, reducing migration from rural areas and cutting the pressure on
urban infrastructure. It would also empower the rural poor and help
them gain excess to water.
Climate change will impact water-stressed areas more
The report warns that global warming will transform patterns of
water availability. The overwhelming weight of evidence can be
summarised in a simple way: “Many of the world’s most water-stressed
areas will get less water, and water flows will become less predictable
and more subject to extreme events.” In South Asia, the report predicts
that there will be disruptions in monsoon patterns, with potential for
heavier rain but fewer rainy days, and more people affected by drought.
Access to water is a right, not an “optional extra”
The hard-hitting report argues that access to 20 litres per capita
per day of safe, affordable and clean drinking water is a fundamental
right, and governments cannot shirk from the responsibility of
providing the same. “Human rights are not optional extras.” It
estimates that 1.8 million children die each year from diarrhoea (due
to lack of access to clean drinking water), and this death toll is six
times more than that of armed conflicts. The report says: “No act of
terrorism generates economic devastation on the scale of the crisis in
water and sanitation.”
But more water is getting polluted due to lack of effluent
treatment from urban areas and industries. The UN report is
particularly critical of Delhi in this regard. “Delhi has many of the
trappings of a developed country sanitation model,” but “less than a
fifth of the city’s waste is processed before it is dumped into the
Yamuna river, transmitting risks downstream.”
Privatisation is not the “magic bullet”
The report says that recent examples of spectacular failures in
privatisation show that it is no magic bullet: “From Argentina to
Bolivia, and from the Philippines to the United States, the conviction
that the private sector offers a “magic bullet” for unleashing the
equity and efficiency needed to accelerate progress towards water for
all has proved to be misplaced.”
Lack of sanitation kills five times more people than terrorism or wars
On sanitation to the poor, the report says: “Toilets may seem an
unlikely catalyst for human progress -- but the evidence is
overwhelming.” However, the UNDP’s advocacy of flush toilets for all
might not be appropriate everywhere, as different solutions may be
appropriate depending on the conditions of the area.
There is a lot that Indian planners and policymakers can learn
from this landmark report from a mainstream agency. Unfortunately, the
Indian government is proceeding down a suicidal path in pushing for
commercial and corporate agriculture. There are many indications of
this: the increasing number of farmer suicides is one of the clearest.
And if another were needed, the UNDP report provides it. “While many
governments extol the virtues of small-holder farming, most concentrate
scarce public investment on relatively large-scale, capital-intensive
commercial farming areas. That approach may be bad for long-run growth
and for poverty reduction.”
(Himanshu Thakkar is Coordinator of the South Asia Network on
Dams, Rivers & People, and Editor of Dams, Rivers & People)
