Amid threats of water wars, especially
Arundhati Roy, in her brilliant piece ‘The Greater Common Good’, claims that 3,600 dam projects since independence have destroyed more than 50 million lives in India
As tensions between India and Pakistan escalate, the specter of Indian water aggression once again rears its ugly head. India siphoning off large amounts of water from Chenab and Jhelum in violation of the Indus Waters Treaty is a potent threat promising disastrous consequences for food and water security in downstream Pakistan, a country already one of the most water-stressed in Asia according to the ADB. But how, if ever, will India execute this threat? By damming our rivers in Kashmir to have definitive control over the amount of water that flows through their beds. From India’s bullying tactics and Pakistan’s frantic remonstrations at international forums, it is at least decidedly clear that dams have the potential to wreak havoc with life down-stream.
The environmental hazards from blocking large rivers are not all that hard to envisage and have been the focus of vast scientific research. The case of the Sutlej is illustrative. The Sutlej was signed over to India by the Indus Waters Treaty and flows to but a trickle in Pakistan even in peak flood season. Over the years, water tables in the erstwhile Bahawalpur state and the southern belt of the Multan division have experienced precarious dips as the annual flow, both in the river and in irrigation canals, is insufficient to replenish underground freshwater aquifers. Tube-welling further threatens the depleted aquifers as desert creep in the Cholistan wastes arable land resulting in poverty and population displacement. The lack of rich annual silt deposits leads to reduced land fertility and falling agricultural production. The up-stream of the concrete wall that is a dam has its own peculiar set of problems. Bad water management around the massive man-made reservoir at Tarbela has seen thousands of acres of rich farmland lost to water-logging and salinity.
Basic life sciences show that the drainage basin of any river hosts complex ecosystems of aquatic plant and animal life. World over dams have been proven to rudely interrupt these fragile ecosystems by creating an insurmountable obstacle between migratory fish and their breeding areas, and aquatic flora and the nutrients that sustain them. According to Paul Brown, environment correspondent at The Guardian, dam projects, regardless of their size, inevitably result in riverine specie extinctions. Furthermore, environmentalists believe that the oceans actually need regular infusions of fresh river water to keep salinity in check and to be sustainable to marine life in the times to come. Favouring the modern scientific view that human life is but one important node in an interconnected and interdependent global ecosystem over the traditional understanding of man at the top of a vertical food chain, the big question here is, will mankind even be able to survive in the long-term with such temerity in the all-powerful face of nature?
Such environmental fallout, however, can take centuries, even millennia, to reach full effect. There are often more immediate human and political costs to building dams as well. As the Guardian reported in early 2015, major dam construction projects in Latin America, Africa and Asia have always resulted in destruction of livelihoods and uprooting thousands of people from their homes and fields. Third world countries tend to have higher population densities than say the US or Canada and almost uniformly suffer from weak state systems and redressal-of-grievance mechanisms. In many cases, the displaced people have seldom been appropriately compensated for their sacrifices towards a ‘great national cause’, which is what dams have typically been sold as. Instead, they have often suffered state repression, poverty, starvation, disease and death by the thousands, as most recently witnessed in the construction of China’s modern marvel, the Three Gorges Dam. Arundhati Roy, in her brilliant piece ‘The Greater Common Good’, claims that 3,600 dam projects since independence have destroyed more than 50 million lives in India. Scoffing at Nehru’s sanctimonious sermonising to displaced villagers that their suffering is in the interest of the nation, she rightly questions whether such massive projects have ever been able to fulfill their stated goals of poverty alleviation, food security and rural development. Neither India nor Pakistan can substantively claim that dams have led them to a higher stage of national development.
In energy-starved Pakistan, interprovincial discord on the matter, sown by the high-handedness of the Zia regime, has effectively stymied the prospects thus far of any large-scale dam project
And it is true that despite the fanfare and the huge explicit and implicit costs, dams often do not live up to the promise of widespread irrigation and large amounts of cheap and clean energy. Experts believe that by inundating forests, many dams create toxic gases that render energy generated by them just as inefficient and environmentally unfriendly as fossil fuel power-generation. Pakistan’s own Tarbela and Mangla dams seldom operate at optimal output. Furthermore, we in the subcontinent must also question why our annual flooding is in the form of a single destructive mega-cusecs wave? Is it divine providence or human meddling with nature? Glaciers up in the Himalayas do not melt in a single day to cause such a sudden surge. It is our dams and barrages which keep hoarding water until they reach their very breaking point. At that time, the floodgates open and the resultant surge inevitably spills over from the river’s natural bed. We must also question why there has been no notable dam construction in the US, the big-dam pioneer of the world with its perennial rivers, in the past 40 years? Or in Europe, despite its plentiful mountains and rivers? Perhaps the developed world perceives the cost-benefit disequilibrium but remains silent because western experts and corporations stand to gain tremendously from third-world projects championed by the World Bank and the like.
In energy-starved Pakistan, interprovincial discord on the matter, sown by the high-handedness of the Zia regime, has effectively stymied the prospects thus far of any large-scale dam project. Many people, especially in the Punjab, strongly believe that the Kalabagh Dam would be the panacea to all our energy woes. It is, however, a fair question that while politics keeps getting in the way of our dream project, is it possible that our much-vaunted nuclear capability be applied to anything other than a military purpose? Since we are used to taking our developmental cues from the West, Europe is gradually making a definitive paradigm shift towards nuclear energy. And despite the evil-sounding, fear-inducing N-word, well-managed nuclear power generation is not only environmentally friendly, it would also allow for sitting power plants across the breadth of the country. Whereas, building yet another dam in the Punjab would add further strain to an already fractious federation.
According to the above-cited Guardian report, dams reflect ‘the brilliance and arrogance of human ingenuity’. One major argument for dams in Pakistan is that this water-stressed country needs to store as much freshwater as possible. The counter-argument is that why does that storage need to be at one geographical location in the most environmentally destructive way possible? And what when the natural lives of Mangla and Tarbela expire in a few decades? Maybe it is time to apply our human ingenuity to innovation: the creation of smaller man-made reservoirs fed through our massive irrigation network and spread across the Indus plain in a manner that is politically amenable and environment-friendly. In a world where the notion of progress and development is increasingly prefixed with the word ‘sustainable’, we must take care that our ingenuity does not have us writing checks in the hopes of foreseeable benefit that posterity may not be able to cash.