by Sunil Amrith
A further push to crack the monsoon’s code came in 1979, as part of a worldwide effort called the Global Weather Experiment—the Indian Ocean component of that came to be known as the Monsoon Experiment, or MONEX. The scale of the operation was vast, even larger than the Indian Ocean Expedition of the 1960s, and more fully equipped with satellite technology. It encompassed 3,400 land stations, 800 upper air observatories, 9 weather ships, 7,000 merchant ships, and 1,000 commercial aircraft drawn in to record observations, 100 dedicated research aircraft, 50 research ships, 5 weather satellites, and 300 balloons. Despite this scale, despite the dazzling advances in equipment, Webster noted that much older ways of knowing the monsoon—the instinctive knowledge of mariners—were still in evidence in 1979; he saw that dhows, the traditional sailing vessels of the northwestern Indian Ocean that had for centuries harnessed the monsoon currents, were still widely used.68
COLIN RAMAGE, DIRECTOR OF THE METEOROLOGICAL COMPONENT of the Indian Ocean Expedition, returned to India in the 1970s. In his spare time while there on assignment, he turned amateur historian and wrote a short and provocative essay on how his predecessor John Eliot—the second director of Indian meteorology, after Henry Blanford—had failed spectacularly to forecast the crushing drought of 1899–1900. Ramage delved into the archives of the Times of India and wrote a powerful account of the famine that followed. “The government refused with religious fervor to modify the holy writ of laissez-faire,” he declared. Like many critics of imperial policy at the time, he saw that the railways had done as much to worsen as to alleviate the famine, by making it easier for speculators to ship grain out to areas where purchasing power was higher. He praised the Indian government’s efforts to protect its citizens against the threat of famine, but noted that, despite best efforts, India remained dependent on food imports, as it had since the 1920s. His conclusion was ominous. “Can we be sure that such a devastating famine will not recur?” he asked; not since Indian independence had there been a drought as severe as the drought of 1899. He ended his essay on that note, leaving implicit the underlying question: what would happen if another drought of that magnitude were to materialize?69
But another threat was now on the horizon. In 1979, the same year as MONEX, the World Meteorological Organization held its first World Climate Conference. The conference declaration recognized the need to “foresee and prevent potential man-made changes in climate that might be adverse to the well-being of humanity.”70 From the 1980s, the combination of climate change and other environmental threats compounded the water-related risks faced by billions of people in Asia.
NINE
STORMY HORIZONS
IN THE 1980S THE FULL PROPORTIONS OF ASIA’S WATER CRISIS BECAME manifest—including its vertical dimension. In that decade, satellite images and remote sensing data revealed to scientists how fully human activities had transformed the physical environment, reaching from the underground waters to the upper atmosphere. Much of the impact was visible without the aid of sophisticated technology. It became viscerally clear in the quality of the air that people breathed and the water that they drank, in the strangulation of the rivers they lived by and lived from. In 1984, the chemical pollutants that coursed through the holy Ganges reached such concentrations that a stretch of water caught fire: it became a river of flames.
Asia’s waters were subject to unprecedented demands that came from the convergence of two large processes. The first, which began in the 1950s, was population growth. India’s population grew from just under 370 million people in 1950 to 684.8 million in 1980, an increase of 185 percent; through the 1970s alone, India added 131 million new citizens. China’s population grew more slowly, but from a larger base: from 562 million people in 1950 to just under 988 million by 1980, and with an absolute increase of close to 166 million people in the 1970s. Although the rate of population growth in both India and China had slowed considerably by the 1980s, not least because of coercive population “control” measures in both countries, the cumulative impact of the previous decades’ growth has been manifest. Belying the fears of the Malthusian prophets, the effects of this expansion on the biosphere were initially limited by very low levels of income per capita—and limited, too, by deliberate efforts by both the Indian and Chinese governments to hold back consumption to generate savings for future investment in industrial development. But then arrived the second major transformation, which began in the 1980s: the rapid economic growth of Asia’s two largest countries, China and India, both of them following a path forged by other countries in East and Southeast Asia a decade or more earlier, but on an altogether different scale.
The bonfire of socialist austerity began first in China, where the reforms of Deng Xiaoping enshrined the notion that “to get rich is glorious.” From 1978 to 2012, the Chinese economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.4 percent, “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.”1 The Indian economy was slower to accelerate, but by the 1980s average annual growth was around 5 percent. Following an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund to meet a critical shortage of foreign exchange, the Indian economy underwent a process of liberalization after 1991, orchestrated by the economist Manmohan Singh. This involved a dismantling of elaborate regulations governing private investment and trade, dubbed the “License-Permit Raj.” High growth followed, picking up in the late 1990s; but it was accompanied by galloping inequality. India has remained home to more poor people, in absolute terms, than any country on Earth.2 In India, more than in China, the ecological threats generated by new prosperity intensified the more familiar, water- and weather-related risks of extreme poverty. Unlike China, India’s population has remained predominantly rural, and will continue to be so by the middle of the twenty-first century. The destabilization of Asia’s water ecology, which accelerated in the 1980s, put more people at risk in India and in neighboring Bangladesh than anywhere else.
This chapter shows how, starting in the 1980s, Asia’s waters submitted to a concatenation of demands from industry, from agriculture, and from the needs of booming cities. The mining of groundwater exceeded the capacity of the hydraulic cycle to replenish aquifers. A hunger for energy led to a renewed interest in hydroelectric power. States and private investors eyed the upper reaches of the great rivers. From the 1980s hydraulic projects converged upon the Himalayas. The most promising lowland dam sites were exhausted by the 1970s; the steep drops of the mountain rivers made them ideal for power generation. As a cluster of competing projects lined up along the rivers’ descent from the 1980s, the potential for conflict grew. States acquired the capacity to deny water to others downstream; not so much the technical capacity, since dam technology had changed relatively little from the 1950s, but rather the financial and infrastructural capacity—and above all, the will. New demands on resources, and new demands for water, came from the revival of trade between South, Southeast, and East Asia, which had ebbed in the 1950s and 1960s.
The final ingredient in this cocktail of ecological destabilization came with the accelerating effects of climate change. Already in 1982, environmental activists in India invoked what they called a “rather futuristic problem”—the “possibility of global climatic change taking place by the end of the century because of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” They raised an ominous prospect: “It is quite possible… that agriculture as practiced for centuries in India may have to change and crop outputs may become a matter of even greater uncertainty than today.”3 Since then, the scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change has been overwhelming.4 Climate change is no longer a “futuristic” problem—its effects are here, now. And its effects menace the coastal rim that stretches from India to China.
Climate change affects water in every form: it affects the rain clouds and the Himalayan glaciers, the flow of rivers and the shape of coastlines, the level of the ocean and the intensity of cyclones.5 Climate change is irreducibly historical. As historian and Marxist theori
st Andreas Malm observes, “The storm of climate change draws its force from countless acts of combustion over, to be exact, the past two centuries.”6 But the current crisis is a product of history in another sense too. The acute impact of climate change on Asia, and on South Asia in particular, will play out across a landscape shaped by the past—shaped by the cumulative effects of social inequality, shaped by the borders of the mid-twentieth century, shaped by infrastructures of water control. And it will be shaped by the legacy of ideas from the past, including ideas about climate and the economy.
I
Water was a core ingredient in Asia’s experience of what economist Angus Deaton calls the “great escape” from scarcity.7 The intensification of agriculture driven by the Green Revolution—a package of high-yielding seed varieties and extensive fertilizer use, sustained by vast quantities of water—augmented food production to an extent that would have been unthinkable even one generation earlier. Between 1970 and 2014, India’s production of cereals grew by 238 percent, compared with a 182 percent expansion in population over the same period. This took place with only a marginal increase in the quantity of land given over to food crops. In China the expansion was more dramatic still: a 420 percent increase in cereal output with no increase in land area under cultivation.8 Just a decade after the desperate recourse to American food aid during the monsoon failures of the 1960s, India became a food surplus country.
Intangible though it was, an unshakable sense took hold among the Indian elite that the threat of an uncertain monsoon had receded. It was a sense expressed by writer and newspaper editor Khushwant Singh in a 1987 essay on the monsoon in Indian literature. Singh ranged widely across Indian epics and poetry to show how deeply the monsoon had shaped Indian cultural sensibilities over hundreds of years. But he concluded that, in recent decades, “India has taken enormous strides toward freeing herself from dependence on the vagaries of the monsoons.” Technology led the charge: India had “raised enormous dams, laid thousands of miles of irrigation canals, and dug innumerable electrically operated tube-wells to supply water to her farms.” A sense of security brought disenchantment. “There is no longer the same agony waiting through long summer months of searing heat to catch a glimpse of the first clouds,” he argued. The monsoon had vanished from Indian literature; it “no longer stirs the imagination of the poet or the novelist with the same intensity it used to.”9
Those closer to rural India had a different view. The same year as Singh, the modernist artist Jyoti Bhatt, trained in the influential Baroda school in Gujarat and immersed in local artistic traditions, wrote that for all of the improvements in weather forecasting, the ability to predict the character of a whole monsoon season remained elusive. In folk culture, if not in high poetry, the monsoon’s mysteries lived on. Bhatt described an annual festival in the arid lands of Kutch and Saurashtra, in Gujarat, celebrating Bhadali—the daughter of a shepherd and a gifted diviner of rain. The festival was bound up with anxious expectation. Villagers in Gujarat, he wrote, “keep observing and interpreting various omens, signs, and factual symptoms around them.” They relied on the “collected experience of many generations” to decide when to plant their crops each year. Bhatt was agnostic about how far these rituals helped farmers, but at the very least he saw that they provided more excitement and drama than “watching a Door Darshan [the state broadcaster] weather forecast based on data received from Insat, on a small TV screen.”10
Also in 1987, but on a larger scale and in the language of economics rather than poetry, Harry Oshima revisited the old region of “monsoon Asia.” Hawaii-born Oshima (1918–1998) wrote his dissertation on the national income statistics of Asia’s new states; he worked for the United Nations in the 1950s, and served as the Rockefeller Foundation’s representative in the Philippines in the 1970s.11 Oshima found that monsoon Asia’s coherence had been shattered by a transformation in the relationship between water and productivity. Oshima began with a timeless vision: across the coastal and deltaic sweep from South Asia to East Asia, the intense seasonality of rainfall created common patterns of agriculture—labor-intensive paddy cultivation, high population density, a preponderance of small farms. He wrote, too, of the “philosophy” of the “monsoon economy”—an ethos of “harmony… compromise, moderation, diligence, and cooperation.” In writing this, Oshima echoed the language of an earlier era, which drew a straight line from climate to culture. But the period since 1970 had broken deep historical patterns. There had been an unexpected differentiation in income levels across the region, which was now, in Oshima’s view, “crystallizing with a few modifications into the three basic regions of… East, Southeast, and South Asia.” Oshima was least sanguine about South Asia’s prospects; pessimism about India was widespread among economists at the time. South Asia was effectively now the residue of “monsoon Asia”; everywhere else, industrial growth and intensive irrigation had powered an escape from the monsoon.12 But even in India, it was clear by the 1980s that something fundamental had changed.
IN INDIA, THE REVOLUTION IN FOOD PRODUCTION DEPENDED, above all else, on groundwater. As we have seen, the first experiments with using motorized pumps to extract groundwater in India date from the late nineteenth century, but until the 1960s, their use was negligible. The greatest growth came in the use of private tubewells: there were half a million in use across India in 1968; that number had grown to 5 million by 1994. As the exploitation of groundwater increased, so too did the depth that tubewells had to reach. Investment in tubewells has been almost entirely private, in contrast with dams and other surface irrigation works that have been publicly funded. But under Indira Gandhi’s government in the 1970s, landowners were encouraged to utilize groundwater and install tubewells through the provision of subsidized or even free electricity; state electricity boards were left to set prices, and many of them incurred heavy losses. The use of groundwater proceeded with no regulation. Large farmers, with the capital to invest in technology and with the large landholdings to benefit from irrigation, dug deeper than their neighbors, capturing groundwater for their private use and even selling it on to others. Cheap electricity provided an incentive for farmers to extract as much groundwater as they could, with little thought for replenishing the aquifers. Tushaar Shah, a leading expert on groundwater policy in India, has described it as “an atomistically managed water-scavenging irrigation regime involving tens of millions of pump owners who divert surface and groundwater at will.” In all, nearly three-quarters of the expansion in India’s irrigated cropland since independence has come from groundwater, and much of the expansion came in the 1970s and 1980s.13
The effects of this boom in water mining were clearest in Punjab. Already by the 1910s, Punjab was India’s most prosperous agricultural region; the elaborate system of canals built by the British made its arid lands productive. By the early twenty-first century, Punjab produced 20 percent of India’s wheat and 42 percent of its rice, on just 1.5 percent of the country’s land area. Punjab possessed only around eleven thousand tubewells in the late 1960s, on the eve of the Green Revolution—that number would grow more than 100-fold to 1.3 million over the next forty years. Groundwater provides two-thirds of Punjab’s water supply. But the water table has declined perilously since the late 1970s. The intensive use of pesticides in farming has contaminated water sources, and this is widely acknowledged to be responsible for a substantial increase in the incidence in cancers in the area. In the western Indian state of Gujarat, another region where agriculture is dependent on groundwater, the water table has dropped by 1.4 meters each year from the late 1970s through the end of the 1980s, and at an even faster rate since then.14
If the monsoon no longer inspired India’s poets, as Khushwant Singh observed in the 1980s, the infrastructure of groundwater extraction has become an unavoidable feature of the landscape in ways that have left their mark on South Asian literature. In a powerful short story published early this century, Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin evokes th
e landscape of that part of Punjab that formed part of Pakistan after Partition—the agrarian heart of a country even more dependent on irrigation than India. The protagonist is Nawabdin, the village electrician; his special talent was “a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric meters.” This mattered deeply, because electricity was the lifeblood of agriculture—“In this Pakistani desert, behind Multan, where the tube wells ran day and night, Nawab’s discovery eclipsed the philosopher’s stone.” In that simple detail, as Mueenuddin sets the scene, we glimpse a vast agrarian transformation.15
INDIA AND CHINA HAVE MUCH IN COMMON IN THEIR RELIANCE ON groundwater to secure an increase in food production, in their vulnerability to the depletion of water sources, in the economic geography of their water use, and in the sheer scale of change they have experienced since the 1980s. But China has grown much faster than India, and India has been even more vulnerable than China to water- and climate-related risks, as a result of its greater dependence on agriculture, its higher levels of poverty, and, to return to a theme that has recurred throughout Unruly Waters, because of the particular characteristics of the monsoon.
If China’s use of groundwater since the 1970s has not been quite as prodigious as India’s, it is not far behind. Underground aquifers provide water to 40 percent of China’s farmland, and drinking water to 70 percent of the population of China’s arid north and northwest. Across the North China Plain, groundwater levels have dropped by approximately 1 meter a year since 1974, a rate of depletion comparable with that of Punjab. Like India, China’s groundwater is contaminated. A study undertaken by the Chinese government in the 2000s showed that 90 percent of China’s groundwater was polluted, and 60 percent severely polluted with heavy metals and fertilizer and chemical waste.16