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Water wars forecast as feeding India's hungry leaves the land thirsty
Sydney Morning Herald - September 26, 2009
Balawas Village, Haryana – India is destined for water wars, one of its leading environmentalists has concluded after studying the effects of modern agriculture for more than 20 years.
"In a decade India could look like Darfur in Sudan," says Dr Vandana Shiva, a nuclear physicist turned environmental activist. "When you run out of water it's a recipe for killing. Water really makes people so desperate."
A patchy monsoon on the subcontinent this year has hit crops, particularly rice, highlighting the region's vulnerability to water shortages. But the problem is much bigger than one poor wet season.
In Haryana and Punjab, two states crucial to India's food security, farmers are drawing too much groundwater. Dubbed the subcontinent's breadbasket, this region has been the heartland of the country's green revolution since the mid-1960s. The high-yielding crop varieties grown here have enabled the country to feed its huge, fast-growing population. But the hybrid crops of the green revolution require a lot of water, as well as fertiliser and pesticides.
Farmers in Punjab and Haryana are now drilling deeper and deeper for water and the crop yields that once rose year after year have stagnated.
Last year the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, told an international agriculture conference there was a "persistent feeling that the first green revolution has run its course... we need a second green revolution". But a second resource-intensive agricultural revolution is not sustainable.
An analysis of NASA satellite data taken over north-western India from 2002 to 2008 found aquifers were disappearing at an alarming rate. The study warned of the potential "collapse of agriculture" and severe shortages of drinking water in the region unless things changed.
Associate Professor Raj Kumar Jhorar, a soil and water specialist at Haryana Agricultural University, says too many farmers have switched to water-intensive crops such as rice, wheat and cotton. His research shows that the area of rice under cultivation in Haryana has risen by about 430 per cent since the late 1960s, cotton by 230 per cent and wheat by more than 200 per cent. "This just isn't sustainable," he says.
A Punjab Government draft water policy document published last year said the state's water was being polluted by industrial waste, sewage and excessive pesticide use in agriculture. "This can adversely affect the health of the populace and may cause diseases like cancer, skin diseases and miscarriage cases," it said.
These reports only confirm what local farmers already know. Chatan Singh, a farmer in Balawas, has planted two crops in his fields since June but both have failed because of the scanty monsoon. A few years ago this would have been unthinkable because tubewells and a nearby canal could have made up for any shortfall in rain. But the canal recently ran dry and the tubewells are suddenly spewing out unusable saline water.
When this year's rains went truant, Chatan Singh's crops withered, leaving the father of eight deep in debt. "This is new," he says. "Once there was good water from the rains, the canal and the tubewells, but now it's scarce."
He and his neighbours now drink the saline water that comes from the ground. Tests by a local university showed it was not fit for regular consumption but the villagers keep drinking. They have no alternative.
Shiva says water shortages could split communities along deeply entrenched divisions of caste and religion. "What we will start seeing is localised conflicts over water," she says. "As livelihoods evaporate, along with water, you will see all sorts of cracks opening up in society."
Conflict is also possible between the majority rural population and the bursting cities. "People with power live in cities and as the water crisis is deepening what remains is being increasingly delivered to the cities," Shiva says.
She is monitoring eight big river diversions to provide cities with more water.
Farmers in Balawas do not quibble with her prediction of violent conflict about water.
"Our wives already squabble over drinking water so when it gets to agricultural water there will be a much bigger fight," says one farmer, Jai Singh Sharma. His family owns 16 hectares of land in Balawas but he now plants crops on less than half a hectare because of a lack of water.
"Our wells are no longer giving us what we need," he says. "If our water supply keeps receding at this rate we will see violence."
At Dauatpur village, about 50 kilometres from Balawas, the farmers are just as pessimistic.
Kulbhushan Sharma, whose family owns six hectares, says he has been forced to drill his wells deeper, especially in the past five years.
"Slowly, slowly, year by year, things are going from bad to worse," he says. "If this goes on it will be the end. Forget water for farming – we won't even have any to drink. The whole of India will be affected."
There have been bitter fights recently about the dwindling supply of canal water in Dauatpur.
"The violence has started," Sharma says. Last month a gang of farmers at Aurangabad in the poverty-stricken state of Bihar gained nationwide publicity when they took up arms to guard their watered fields. They said people from nearby villages were trying to divert water towards their fields. They were ready to kill or be killed to protect their water.
"We don't want a fight but if someone diverts the canal water then how will we irrigate our fields?" one of the armed men, Narendra Singh, told a local TV station.
The Government has been urged to manage water more effectively and to improve the patchy maintenance of the country's vast canal systems. The Punjab Government recently banned farmers from planting paddy rice until after the monsoon arrives in an attempt to save water.
However, political imperatives have stifled sensible reforms. Water is not priced appropriately and most farmers have free electricity to run their groundwater pumps. This encourages waste.
As if India's water problems were not enough already, global warming threatens to make them much worse. Scientists predict the annual monsoon, on which about 40 per cent of farmers depend, is likely to become more unpredictable as the country adds more than 20 million new mouths to feed every year. It is no wonder some locals are starting to fear the worst.
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