SUDDENLY the lights go off. My north Delhi neighbourhood is plunged into darkness. As I grope for matchbox and candle, I think balefully of Nathpa-Jhakri. Thanks to the press, this hydro-power plant on the river Sutlej in Himachal Pradesh has become a household name for Delhi residents. If the power fails, we now know that it’s unlikely to be a local fault. Like the shopkeeper shrugging off enquiries about a missing brand of biscuits or hair oil, NDPL informs us, ‘supply peechhe se nahin aa raha.’ Now that mysterious backstage world of ‘peechhe se’ has a name: Nathpa-Jhakri. Every unscheduled power cut, each analysis of why electricity supply falls short of demand can be laid at the door of this project, and not without reason.

Nathpa-Jhakri was supposed to be the H-bomb in our conventional warfare arsenal against power scarcity, a sure-fire solution that would obliterate our bijli problems. Designed to generate 1500 mw of power, this mega-project was an engineer’s wet dream: Asia’s biggest hydroelectric plant (after Tehri), the world’s deepest surge shaft, the world’s largest underground desilting complex. Yet all these entries in the Limca Book of Records do not sweeten this little fact: Nathpa-Jhakri does not work. After spending 1.8 billion dollars (7,000 crore rupees) of our money, we the citizens of India have been handed a dud. Asia’s biggest, deepest, largest dud perhaps, but a dud all the same.

I won’t go into the enormity of the fraud that’s been perpetrated on us. But clearly, questions of public accountability and corporate responsibility need to be asked and aggressively investigated. By promoting a project so ill-designed that even the World Bank cancelled its loan citing fundamental flaws, we have been swindled by the governments of India and Himachal Pradesh, together with the construction firm, Jaypee. This is the same Jaypee who, by building Nathpa-Jhakri, Tehri, Sardar Sarovar and Indira Sagar, has decisively staked its claim to making the most money off socially and environmentally disastrous projects – no easy task since there are many hot corporate contenders for that spot.

I won’t also go into the issue of how such dubious projects find public favour, how the discourse of ‘big is best’ appeals to the pretensions of our modernizing national elite, and how we are willing to sign on to any grandiose scheme if we feel it will easily deliver what we desire. Questions about the ideology of development are integral to the political economy of large projects and must be carefully examined. But here I will focus less on political economy per se and more on how these issues come to bear on an element that has its own properties and processes – water.

 

That the turning of distant turbines on the Sutlej determines whether Delhi residents will get light and a respite from the heat indicates the centrality of water in our lives. Rivers sneak into our midst in disguise – when we open a tap, a stream from the Yamuna tamely trickles into our kitchen or bath. Its journey is made possible by complex engineering, much of it an unseen network of subterranean pumps and pipes, reservoirs and canals, barrages and dams, with a return trip through seepage, drains and sewers.

The domestication of water is the result of years of engineering efforts, of attempting to find standardized responses to different ecological and socio-political landscapes. The wide fluctuation in the flow of rivers in peninsular India, for example, where up to eighty per cent of annual flow occurs during the four monsoon months, becomes a critical factor shaping the extent to which damming can provide irrigation, flood control or electricity. The interactions between water and earth can also throw up challenges. For instance, the tendency of Indian rivers to flood expansively and create alluvial plains that enable agriculture in their fertile soils poses a dilemma for those wishing to minimize the impact of floods. Embankments built to protect life and property can end up aggravating the problem.

Then there are the interactions between water and the living world of plants and animals, which are that much more difficult to map and impossible to control. For instance, the connections between changing water regimes and ecology that gave rise to the malaria mosquito epidemic were scarcely imagined, let alone planned against. In his book Rule of Experts, Timothy Mitchell describes how in the 1930s and ’40s, the spread of irrigation by Aswan and other dams caused the malaria vector to be unwittingly introduced into areas of Egypt where it was previously unknown. Mitchell’s brilliant account traces how the Aswan high dam came to be imagined as a form of necessary and infallible techno-science, even as engineers struggled to cobble together techniques of taming a river whose workings they could not fathom. The slow demise of Egyptian agriculture and the rapid transmission of malaria and schistosomiasis were among the many changes wrought by their creation.

 

It could be argued that the ignorance of those who built Aswan was excusable; they were after all charting new territory, improvising interventions without knowledge of their consequences.¹ But no such extenuating plea can be made on behalf of the builders of Nathpa-Jhakri. They faced a Himalayan geography that had been extensively studied and mapped. They knew that the Sutlej carries a heavy silt load and yet the desiltation facilities were so ineffective that, in the very first year of operation, four of the six turbines were damaged by silt and debris in the water. These massive pieces of machinery, each one worth several crores, broke down simply because the engineers did not plan adequately for de-glaciation in the Himalayas and the quartz-rich silt load of snow melt.

 

Nor did they adequately take into account the inherent instability of the Himalayan landscape. In 2004, a landslide blocked Pareechu river, one of the tributaries of the Sutlej, causing a lake to form upstream of the dam in Tibet. Nathpa-Jhakri was shut down for a large part of August 2004 because of fears that the breach of the lake would precipitate a flood that might damage the dam. Landslides and floods occur frequently in the Himalayan region; why was the dam not designed to withstand the worst of these? But the most egregious excuse that is offered for the project not working is surely this: there is not enough water in the river! You mean, we spent Rs 7,000 crore to get power from a river that cannot be harnessed for more than four months in the year? What a scam! And I thought only witless tourists got sold the Brooklyn Bridge. Well, at least they fork over only twenty dollars; we were gullible and greedy enough to be duped of 1.8 billion.

There are many lessons to be learnt from the Nathpa-Jhakri story. The one that I want to dwell on is our persistent inability to acknowledge the ecology of water. Our entrepreneurial ‘can do’ spirit can do colossal damage – wasting precious resources and devastating entire landscapes – simply because we refuse to respect the inherent properties and processes of hydrological regimes. The scheme to inter-link rivers which treats an indescribably complex web of ecological relations as if it were a mere plumbing problem – turn off the Chambal and turn on the Cauvery – is a prime example of such hubris. It is guaranteed to ruin our rivers while enriching our politicians and builders, patriotic souls among whose stated motives is the national integration from Kashmir to Kanyakumari that this project will promote. Independent analysis has shown that inter-linking rivers is not an effective or efficient strategy for preventing floods and droughts. Regional variations in water regimes are best addressed regionally rather than by attempting massive inter-basin transfers. But there is too much good money and bad science riding on this scheme for it to be set aside for saner considerations.²

 

The inherent variability and uncertainty of water, an element vastly more fluid and hard to capture than land, continues to be underestimated even though this variability has been amplified by global climate change. ‘Extreme weather events’, as the meteorological department terms crises like the deluge that drowned Mumbai, as well as more erratic monsoons, are likely to become more common in the coming years. The probability that hydrological regimes will be more uncertain in the future demands that we plan carefully and conservatively, making cautious assumptions about water availability rather than plumping for projects that optimistically promise best-case scenarios. It is well-known that all large water projects are based on exaggerated claims about water availability, irrigation efficiency, command area served; this is standard practice for winning approval for a project. Such fudged figures will create even more distortions when they apply to an increasingly volatile waterscape.

 

The difficulties of capturing water, physically and metaphorically, are better addressed through efforts that are site and context-specific. How a stream behaves in the Sahyadris with their distinctive climate, topography, ecology and culture, is bound to be different from a stream in the Shivaliks. Smaller-scale initiatives and modes of intervention that can be sensitive to the context-specific properties of water are more likely to be effective and efficient. But such a scale of water management will not yield the massive transfers that large dams do, transfers without which mega-cities like Delhi and Mumbai could not survive for even a day.

Concentrated urban settlements inevitably have a gigantic ecological footprint. As sites of power, they manage to requisition resources from a vast catchment and at the expense of rural residents. In the complex economy of exchange between the country and the city, the city is clearly the debtor on ecological grounds. Despite welcome steps like mandatory rainwater harvesting in Chennai, it may be impossible to make cities truly ‘green’ in terms of ecological sustainability. Yet there is great scope for making them less wasteful by better regulating how and by whom water is used.

 

A greater appreciation of the finite nature of water can only be brought home if there are strict limits to the amount consumers can get. A de facto form of such rationing is already in place in areas where the supply of municipal water is limited to a few hours or where water is provided by tankers. But such forms of regulation do not apply across the board. In a water-scarce area like south Delhi where groundwater has been sucked dry, richer residents can buy tanker-loads of water to top up their supplies for watering gardens and washing cars, while poor slum-dwellers are forced to fight over a trickling tap. Despite scarcity, luxury hotels manage to ensure that their showers and swimming pools never run dry. Water-intensive industries like luxury tourism should be compelled to harvest their own water or should not be permitted at all.³ ‘Demand management’ that uses penalties and incentives to target those who use water above a collectively-determined minimum is an urgent imperative.

It is increasingly argued that the inefficient use of water stems from the fact that it is not treated as an economic resource. The World Bank promotes the view that a comprehensive valuation of water, including its ecological utility, is key to properly managing this scarce resource. By failing to pay water’s true price, we have spawned a system rife with needless and misdirected subsidies, without incentives to foster better maintenance and delivery. This line of reasoning underlies World Bank-supported rural irrigation and urban domestic water management schemes around the world. The crux of these schemes is cost recovery – a crucial step paving the way for the corporatization of water management. Even where the scheme does not involve turning water infrastructure over to private firms for a song, it entails that municipal authorities act more like the private sector, raising water prices to ostensibly reinvest in improving the system.

 

At first glance, there is some merit to the notion that water be properly valued; for far too long it has been abused, wasted and polluted. It is also true that large sections of the Indian upper classes pay a pittance for water and there is no good reason why consumption by well-to-do firms and households should be subsidized by the rest of society. If paying a higher price compels these sections to curtail their current profligate use, surely it is socially beneficial. However, a closer examination of how such schemes actually work on the ground shows that not only is ‘cost recovery’ not efficient, it is also grossly inequitable.

In South Africa, raising water rates has taken water away from poor users. In Black townships and rural areas, the burden of water-borne diseases has risen manifold as people who can no longer afford municipal supply resort to collecting water from foul streams and muddy ponds. Delhi’s citizens are still reeling from being hit with a water bill at rates hiked threefold. If these rates stay, many modest homes will see their supply shut off. It has been found that, while poorer consumers will cut their already limited usage if they cannot afford it, for affluent consumers higher rates do not necessarily translate into reduced demand.

 

The demand for water is price inelastic for higher-income groups; better-off customers are often willing to pay a premium to corner supplies of a scarce resource. Thus even a system that is ostensibly fair and staggers tariffs according to the quantum used may still drive water out of the reach of the poor. In these circumstances, price hikes will place a disproportionate burden on those least able to bear them, depriving them of a basic resource.

In any case, a system of allocation that tries to reduce a resource as complex and multifaceted as water to a monetary matrix is guaranteed to distort its value. Does the Coca Cola Company value water more than the people of Plachimada in Kerala or Kaladera in Rajasthan because it can pay more and outbid panchayats to commandeer common property aquifers? How can villagers compete in the water market against a company for whom a few lakh rupees is merely spare change? How can they make this firm, part of a mobile global giant, take responsibility for water replenishment and restoration when it can simply pull up its stakes and head off to another location, leaving local residents to live with the after-effects?

For most people, particular bodies of water have multiple meanings and cultural value because their lives and beliefs have come to be tied to them by the historically-honed fact of association. A profit-seeking firm that can enter and leave at will depending on how its bottom-line is doing will rarely see water as anything more than an economic factor of production. Like Oscar Wilde’s cynic, Coke and the World Bank know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The poverty of market ideology is nowhere more apparent than in the campaigns to convert water into an economic resource in a social context marked by great inequality.

If monetary valuation is a poor measure of water’s value for different classes of citizens, and if a market-based mechanism for water allocation is both grotesquely unfair and socially inefficient, what other modes can we employ to better manage water?

 

Let us begin by recognizing that the availability of water in the future will be even harder to predict and manage than at present. Let us then mobilize politically to ensure that this water is first made available to meet the basic needs of each citizen. Like education and health care, food and water are basic necessities and ethical imperatives. Their provision transcends the calculus of profitability and cost recovery. Let us recognize that no system, public or private, will fairly deliver water on economic grounds. The commitment to provide water to all is primarily a political one and will last as long as there is democratic pressure to honour it. After this basic need has been fulfilled, let us work towards a genuinely democratic planning process that weighs the pros and cons of different projects – Nathpa-Jhakri and Indira Sagar, luxury hotels and water-based amusement parks – and then decide what is socially and environmentally desirable. After all, it is our money, our rivers, and our lives at stake.

 

Footnotes:

1. In retrospect, however, the British had second thoughts. In a private report in 1942, they acknowledged that the surest way to restore the health of the Egyptian population would be to destroy the dams and return to basin irrigation (Mitchell 2002: 23).

2. River inter-linking has the enthusiastic support of the President of India, a former technocrat. While Professor Kalam is an acknowledged expert on missile production, he is not a hydrologist and doesn’t appear to have consulted any either. More worrying, he has an uncritical faith in technological solutions to complex socio-political problems. By ignoring the social context in which science and technology are produced and used, we are prone to get inappropriate, ineffective and even dangerous outcomes. I write this on the anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy.

3. The Master Plan for Delhi 2021 envisages an economic growth model that discourages polluting manufacturing industries and encourages ‘clean’ service sector industries like international tourism, hoping to make the city a hub for conventions and sports events. Yet, in projecting infrastructural demands for the next fifteen years, the Master Plan is silent about the resource requirements of these forms of development, even though it is well-known that they consume high rates of water and power.