ON the full moon following Diwali and growing Chhath awareness in South Asia (thanks to the Bihari diaspora), Thais in South East Asia celebrate Loy Krathong, which literally means floating a small leaf boat with a lamp into a river or a lake asking Mae Khongkha or the ‘mother river’ to take away the bad in their lives, that is, to expiate away their sins. It is said that this festival was started by Nang Noppamas, the daughter of a Brahmin priest during the reign of King Ramakhamheng of Sukhothai in the 13th century CE. It does not take much knowledge of Pali or Thai and Khmer languages to see how Ma Ganga has become Mae Khongkha or its further transmutation into the Mekong, nor does it need much reflection to relate Loy Krathong to similar ceremonies from Hardwar to shores of Orissa and elsewhere.

Today’s South East Asians, baring a few remote scholars, do not associate this ritual with South Asia anymore; and in South Asia itself, many have forgotten the cultural magic that links a healthy river – a reflection of a healthy society – with a vivacious urban or village life on its banks. A sick or dying river running through a town is a good indicator that not all is well within its socio-politics. The Yamuna through Delhi, the Gomati through Lucknow, the Bagmati through Kathmandu or the Lai river through Rawalpindi have essentially become open sewers that are flushed clean only in the aftermath of a flash flood, not a place one would see happy denizens ambling by for fresh air and pleasant company.

A Mekong-Ganga dialogue is needed not just for mutual learning between these two mega regions of the world whose civilizations are defined by their great rivers, but is necessary primarily to bring back some of the deeper cultural ethos on which the Mekong and the Ganga civilizations were founded. Without going back deeper into our cultural memes, without interrogating and re-interpreting our basic values that lie as rich subtexts to many of our common social endeavours, the larger healing of our dying rivers and the miasmic social life along their lengths will not bear success. Time has come to appeal to our deeper collective consciences that might move us into meaningful action for cleansing our rivers – and our societies along with them – when hydraulic equations and economic modelling have failed to do so.

 

Water management overall, and river restoration as its important sub-themes, have been termed ‘wicked problems’ that defy an easy definition of what the problem is, let alone its solution afterwards. The sewers that our rivers have become, indeed the only major use we seem to make of them as we give up on their navigation, fisheries, spiritual and aesthetic uses, are certainly a pollution problem that chemical engineering is eminently qualified to handle. Unfortunately, as one unpacks that definition, a can of worms opens up that shows it is simultaneously, and as wickedly, a legal land rights problem, a municipal failure problem, a technological choice problem, a multiple agency problem, a cultural problem and much, much more. And thus, if we differ in our definition of what the problem is, the solutions we propose are obviously going to be even more different and unacceptable to others who see them as not really solving anything that matters to them.

And therein lurk the seeds of all intractable water conflicts we currently live through. Given that water is life, both bio-physical and socio-economic, river waters have many properties that are used by even more diverse social groupings, and the use by one would necessarily prevent or at best curtail its use by others. A fisherman in Bangladesh’s Gorai river losing his livelihood because his river is being dried up to meet irrigation or port flushing needs of someone elsewhere, devotees thronging to the Dhari Devi rock outcrop in the middle of the Alaknanda river in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand that is to be submerged by the Srinagar dam, those facing the potential danger of uprooting from their home and hearth from dam reservoirs in the Nepal Himalaya, or downstream countries seeing upstream ones diverting their common rivers to meet needs that are not their own – they cannot be impressed with the ‘non-solution’ of their problems by appealing to the ‘greater common good’ brought about by GDP growth or more industrialization from hydroelectricity.

 

Both the Mekong and the Ganga regions are facing these challenges as they struggle to cope with modernity; but given that the history of collective endeavours define water management institutions we currently have inherited, the trajectories of successes and failures in these two regions have lessons for both that may help them avoid pitfalls or find adaptable solutions. ‘Wicked problems’ cannot be solved by conventional textbook knowledge that in all probability brought us the tribulations we currently face: they need ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ that is often counterintuitive, needs re-thinking from a different interdisciplinary perspective, and should make those comfortably ensconced in routinized organizations a trifle irritated.

Such knowledge is either produced by the more radicalized activist community – and whose capacity to produce irritation is of a higher magnitude – or by enlightened statesmanship within those comfortable organizations that appreciates the need to find new solutions. Failure to do so will only invite greater involuntary pain further down the road, after much time, energy and careers of bright people have already been invested in construction enterprises that come to a grinding impasse. Comparative inter-regional studies such as a Mekong-Ganga dialogue can be an important and less abrasive method to bring in new knowledge.

Water management institutions are essentially of two types: official ones, such as departments of irrigation, hydroelectricity or flood control, that are historically new, often tracing their origins to colonial needs and times, and informal ones managed by unwritten rules of village communes and even larger settlements that have existed since very long. In Nepal’s case, the oldest country in South Asia that avoided direct colonization, there are functioning ‘farmer-managed irrigation systems’ (as opposed to official agency managed ones) that have been running for the last eight hundred or more years.

Kathmandu Valley’s intricate network of subsurface stone water spouts – some of which still function and serve the needs of core city denizens that the official water supply agency cannot reach – are still managed by informal systems called guthis and supported by the cultural practice of Sithi Nakha, which is a day of ‘cleaning wells and canals’ as a voluntary, semi-religious duty just before the start of the monsoon that traces its origins to the Lichhavi period in the first millennium.

 

In contrast, the departments of irrigation or of water supply have a history of only about half a century since the beginning of modernization with the end of the Rana rule after the Second World War. A similar story is also true in the Mekong region, and in both the Mekong and the Ganga, official water management bodies have been harbingers of imitative modernity that are blind to traditional institutions of water management. Had these modern organizations done a better job, it would not have mattered; unfortunately, the state of our rivers in our capital cities are showcase examples of dismal failure of official water management, and the primary reasons are not hard to recognize. Given that water, which is life, is inherently a multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary subject, every discipline taught in any university has some link to it – from the hard to softer social sciences and humanities.

 

However, it is surprising that official formal water organizations in both the Mekong and the Ganga have been defined in general as primarily civil engineering, concrete and earth-moving enterprises that are weakly informed of or by other disciplinary concerns. They are dominated at the officer levels by civil engineers trained only in concrete technology and have at best some weak links with the legal and economic disciplines for banking and contracting needs only. There is no sociology, no political science or economy, and certainly no humanities and poetry and the magic that collectively speaks of common social feelings and higher yearnings.

Unlike traditional informal institutions – such as Loy Krathong in South East Asia or Chhath and Sithi Nakha in South Asia that did integrate enchanting rituals and mysteries into everyday mundane management to inspire the much required volunteerism from society at large – modern water organizations have been emotionally sterile, and thus prone to the justifiable charges of pelf and failure to address the greater common good. The problem has been exacerbated by the growing domination of western-inspired bilateral and multilateral development agencies in defining the water management ‘vision, mission and goals’ of these official organizations that are quite expectedly blind to these cultural memes.

In South Asia, when it comes to many institutions including those of water management, the Raj has not ended. Indeed, the internal colonization of its natural resources, wresting of their control away from the gram swaraj of village communes to centralized official water bodies has accelerated and is exacerbating the malaise of social alienation and the brewing of Naxalite and other insurrections. After pulling down the Union Jack in 1947, independent India embarked upon the massive Kosi project in Bihar and related embankment building in the North Ganga plains as the new ‘temples of modern India’ at a scale even the British had not contemplated.

 

But the net result is that more land has gone out of production through water logging – as rainwater that drained into the Kosi and other rivers after the monsoon find their pathways blocked by rampant embankment ill-construction – than has come under irrigation under the Kosi project! And land that would comfortably give three crops a year with no extra fertilizer other than silt brought by the floods, now underwater for almost two-thirds of the year, will produce only one crop, and that too if the monsoon fails and the backlogged water can be pumped to irrigate parched fields. It has been a direct contributor to the large Bihari peasant diaspora to the megalopolis of Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai as disenfranchised peasants desperately seek alternative employment. A retired Bihari police officer has termed this plight in the North Ganga plains as the largest environmental disaster outside of war. And upper riparian neighbours such as Nepal are expected to happily buy into such misguided ventures of unbridled hydrocracies that have not suffered any serious review for these last half century.

The story on hydropower development is more recent and not any less dismal. The much hyped Mahakali treaty between Nepal and India in 1996 on the eponymous river that forms the western boundary between the two countries is in limbo. Even that which was promised in writing to be completed in six months – the completion of a detailed project report – has not been done in all these seventeen years. Though political instability in Nepal is blamed for the delay, the treaty itself was instrumental in promoting that instability: the Nepali Maoists, cashing in on the public opposition, declared their ‘peoples’ war’ a day after it was countersigned by Indian and Nepali prime ministers, and was originally included for scrapping in their forty point demands as they began their insurrection. Other projects on the Arun and Karnali rivers where licenses have been awarded to Indian developers on questionable legal grounds have become rallying points for opposition agitations and seductively easy India-baiting.

 

In India, the unbridled spree of ill-planned hydropower development in Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal is similarly promoting brewing social unrest. In the case of Uttarakhand following the June cloudburst disaster that saw the washing away of many built hydropower stations, the Supreme Court of India recently stepped in to put a halt to all hydropower development in the state without a serious review. Activists in Arunachal and Sikkim as well as elsewhere are demanding a similar review as well as a halt to unbridled resource colonization in their terrain as well.

To maximize economic and social benefits but minimize environmental damages, water projects are best designed as multipurpose venture, i.e. a single costly dam should serve as many social and economic purposes as it can and not be designed only as hydropower, irrigation or flood control schemes. Unfortunately, all over South Asia, it is difficult to find true multipurpose projects that have been designed as such and where the cost of the dam has been recovered from the various users of different products produced by the dam. We have seen flood control projects such as the Kosi where power and irrigation benefits have been subsequently added on but hardly paid for by its beneficiaries.

 

Despite the fact that the Mahakali treaty has been called one for the integrated development of the Mahakali basin, its single purpose is the construction of the 6480 mw Pancheswar high dam as an electricity project and where the massive irrigation, flood control, fisheries and navigation benefits from the monsoon waters stored in its reservoir is ignored. It has led to suspicions in both Nepal and in Uttarakhand that the real purpose is to supply cheap and possibly free water to Delhi for which the denizens of the catchment have to suffer the cost of displacement, and is one of the reasons behind the impasse. A more honest and upfront planning – and sharing of benefits – would have avoided this poisoning of the political atmosphere.

In explaining this continuation of a failing Raj in much of South Asia, Pakistan’s former finance minister and a very perceptive social critic, Mobashir Hassan, has remarked that the order that the British created after the collapse of the Mughal empire and left behind after their formal departure in 1947 is taking decades to unravel in slow motion. It is not clear how many more decades it will continue to unravel in slow motion until South Asians find a new order better suited to the genius of its multi-hued peoples. Failures in water management are a part of the overall picture of this unravelling; but water is special because issues related to it are immediate, pressing and politically urgent, and without success here that can be used as etalons, reforms in other sectors and aspects of social life will not be easy to come by.

Countries of both the Mekong and the Ganga regions are facing similar problems with water and energy management. Issues such as that of the proposed dams on the main stem of the Mekong and of benefit sharing in truly multipurpose projects are issues that have riled activists and politicians in the lower basin countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia. Given that both regions have common cultural memes, howsoever dim, that they can draw on, but also given that the trajectories by which they have arrived at the current disjuncture are very different, what exactly would be the advantages to both in a collaborative dialogue?

 

Essentially the South East Asians, despite being more successful than South Asians in meeting their water and modernity challenges, find South Asian experiences in individual sectors of immense interest and value to them. They cannot read any academic publication on issues of their concern without finding a reflection of their problems in South Asia struggles of a similar nature or of individual South Asian scholars cited, whether it is in groundwater overdraft and its social consequences or development agency failures or transboundary conflicts. Indus has been of particular fascination as a success story with a specific twist, and given that China is upstream to both Mekong as well as the Hindukush-Himalaya regions, how South Asians deal with this economic powerhouse is a closely watched development, especially on the Brahma-putra. Their biggest fascination is to understand the ancient links to their own cultural water management practices that have deep resonances even today in everyday practices, as well as in the reverence for rivers and life tied to Hindu and Buddhist understandings and world views.

For South Asia, the issue is much simpler: South East Asians are generations ahead in regional cooperation, urban water supplies and many other concrete water management issues. Cities such as Singapore import a third of their water, locally water harvest another third (their international airport is one huge water harvesting structure) and recycle the remaining third of their needs. Their management organization is slightly more multidisciplinary and more strongly guided by larger social concerns – and hence more amenable to more creative solutions – than any such outfit in South Asia. There is much to learn for South Asians on these issues from the Mekong region but a word of caution, and a bit of mental re-positioning, is in order before it does so.

 

Mekong is not just the Mekong River Commission, as popularly misconceived in South Asia. Although South Asia does not have any such multilateral regional cooperation structure for its rivers as the MRC – all current efforts are strictly bilateral and extremely limited in terms of the multiple aspects of water resources management, and even within a country such as India, there is no cooperation between states on common rivers such as the Ganga – it has to first realize that the success of the Mekong region on this front has come from a more plural engagement at multiple levels. Besides the MRC which is a formal engagement of hydrocrats, there are: the Greater Mekong Subregion Cooperation, an effort of mainly business interests in promoting infrastructure development for transboundary trade and commerce; the special meetings of Mekong ministers and prime ministers where more political issues are sorted out that are not amenable to bureaucratic approaches; and there is MPower, the Mekong Programme on Water, Energy and Resilience, a network of universities from Yunnan in China to Cantho in Vietnam, NGOs and other activists with interests in alternative and democratic water governance for the region.

What this institutional pluralism has allowed is both multiple definitions of what the problem is with interdisciplinary water governance, and quite naturally allowed space for multiple ‘many ten per cent solutions’ that suit different social proclivities, cultural practices and economic aspirations. It has allowed the debating of issues that often cannot even be admitted onto the official agenda, but has allowed governments where statesmanship rules to gauge the public responses to the proposed (often wild or outlandish-sounding) solutions before moving formally and cautiously to cementing binding agreements.

In South Asia too in 1991, such an attempt was made in what is called the ‘Patna Initiative’, where the idea was for academic and activist groups, while wishing governments well in their Track 1 initiatives, to engage in multiple track debates, discussions and engagements on the Himalaya-Ganga, to hear as well as to respond to different voices, and to debate threadbare various concerns. It fell victim to the hydrocratic hype that surrounded the Mahakali and Farakka treaties in 1996 as well as the hegemony of the ‘Washington Consensus’ that saw the ‘end of history’ as well as the private sector as the solution to all ills. However, a Patna Initiative needs reviving because, without this Track 3 process, subterranean concerns will erupt in the future as major conflicts and creative solutions to our water woes, which concrete-thinking hydrocracies cannot even currently imagine as it is beyond their civil engineering paradigm, will forever remain unexplored. A Mekong-Ganga dialogue should help in this renaissance both for South and South East Asias.