Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  In the years leading up to his death in 2015, Ramaswamy Iyer remained an eloquent critic of the scheme. “The project is in essence an attempt to redesign the entire geography of the country,” he wrote; “underlying it is the old hubristic idea of ‘conquest of nature.’” He argued that the water diversion project was based on a simplistic and dangerous view of India’s hydrology; even to divide India simply into “water surplus” and “water deficit” areas, in ignorance of local ecology, was absurd. The problem went deeper, Iyer thought: “Rivers are not human artefacts; they are natural phenomena, integral components of ecological systems, and inextricable parts of the cultural, social, economic and spiritual lives of the communities concerned.”45 Iyer gave voice to a view of water ecology that was at odds with the conceptions of the Indian state, but it was a view of which we have seen echoes throughout Unruly Waters. It was a view that sustained numerous local initiatives that pushed against the juggernaut of large dams, including careful local efforts to restore ancient irrigation systems, through a system of small and simple check dams, in arid regions of Rajasthan.46

  But still, “gigantism” prevails. At the time of writing, the river-linking project has been given renewed emphasis, though it is years behind schedule, and it is far from clear that it will ever be realized. The counterpart project in China is much further advanced. China’s own river diversion project seeks to redress the country’s inequalities in the distribution of water by redistributing it on a massive scale. The South to North line, from Danjiangkou reservoir in central China to Beijing, opened in 2014; it is the most expensive infrastructure project the world has ever seen. Two-thirds of Beijing’s tap water now comes from Danjiangkou, almost nine hundred miles away. Another arm of the diversion project, the “eastern route” that follows the old Grand Canal, opened in 2013. Already, the diversion scheme has brought similar problems to those predicted in India—heightened water conflicts, wastage, social disruption, and substantial ecological harm to riverine ecosystems. The most ambitious part of the project—the western line, linking the headwaters of the Yellow and Yangzi rivers across the Tibetan Plateau—lies in the future, and it is the most likely to cause problems for China’s neighbors.47

  The ecological and social effects of dams have been well documented; over the past decade, new scientific research suggests that, cumulatively, the world’s dams exercise a fundamental geological impact on Earth. The sheer scale of water engineering in the second half of the twentieth century is changing the shape of the world’s most densely populated river deltas, which are now denied up to a third of the sediment from flowing rivers that have, over thousands of years, built up the deltas and replenished them. On one estimate, reservoirs have increased by 600 or 700 percent the amount of water held in the world’s major rivers, but much less of it now reaches the sea. The once mighty Indus, like the Yellow River, is now a trickle by the time it reaches the Arabian Sea—dammed and diverted into a web of canals, many of them first built by the British in the late nineteenth century. The effect of hydraulic engineering has been to put coastal settlements—and mega-cities, above all—at greater risk of flooding, even before we take into account the effects of climate change and sea level rise.48

  AS THE RISKS OF CLIMATE CHANGE BECOME INCREASINGLY EVIDENT, water becomes ever-more central to political and strategic conflicts at the heart of Asia. In the face of ecological uncertainty and strategic competition, the Himalayas are home to the greatest concentration of dam construction projects in the world. In historical perspective this marks the final frontier in a conquest of water that began in the nineteenth century. From the 1880s, as European and Indian explorers reached the source of Asia’s great rivers in the Himalayas, it was known that the interaction of the Himalayan rivers and the monsoons held the key to Asia’s water supply. As territorial borders sharpened up in that era—the border between British India and Tibet, for example, was marked by the McMahon line in 1914—there came the faint knowledge that struggles over water may lie in wait. Even when imperialism was overthrown in Asia after the end of the Second World War, the problem of transboundary rivers arose directly only in relation to the partition of India. As late as 1960, as we have seen, Indian intelligence agents dismissed reports that the Chinese were planning to dam the Brahmaputra, arguing that they had neither the labor nor the infrastructure to do so.

  That Indian assessment was not mistaken. But things changed rapidly in the 1980s. It was in that decade that the Chinese state’s dam-building ambitions fixated upon the Tibetan Plateau, source of Asia’s rivers. By the 1980s, the large-scale settlement of Han Chinese in Tibet had changed the composition of the region’s population; the construction of roads and railways made it less remote from the lowlands and river valleys. Above all, China’s frenetic economic growth produced a demand for energy—and an uncomfortable dependence on imported oil—that the hydroelectric potential of the mountain rivers promised to meet.49 As long as the Himalayan source of Asia’s great rivers remained remote and forbidding, it mattered little who formally controlled them; but if the unruly waters were to be tamed, it mattered profoundly who brought them under control.

  As I write this, more than four hundred large dams are planned in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistan. Construction is already underway on many of these projects. A further one hundred dams are planned on the Chinese side, where so many of the rivers originate.

  If these projects come to fruition, there will be a dam every thirty-two kilometers along the Himalayan rivers, making it the most heavily dammed region in the world. A secretive complex of public and private interests converge and compete to harness the waters of the high mountains. The hunger for energy is widely shared across the region, though demand is driven primarily by the voracious needs of China and India. Geopolitical rivalries play out in the negotiations over who will build the dams, and on whose terms. As multiple dams line up along the same river valleys, the risk to downstream users is grave. In the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, there are fears about Chinese plans for the Brahmaputra upstream in Tibet, where it is called the Yarlung Tsangpo. Downstream, Bangladesh is most vulnerable of all. Already in the 1980s, Bangladesh protested the effects of India’s Farakka barrage, built in 1975 to divert water from the Ganges to the Bhagirathi-Hooghly, in part to revive the port of Calcutta that had, since the mid-twentieth century, suffered from severe silting. By reducing the river’s flow to Bangladesh, the dam had an impact on soil fertility, irrigation, and health. With an increasing number of dam projects upstream, the risk to Bangladesh has multiplied.50

  In one respect, the latest wave of dam construction departs from the precedents of the 1950s and 1960s—it is financed in a different way. Until the 1990s, large dams in India and China were financed primarily by the governments, with India receiving additional funding from international financial institutions like the World Bank, and China, until the split with the Soviet Union in 1961, benefiting from Soviet aid. The new rush to build dams depends more heavily on private capital. In India, public sector organizations like the National Hydroelectric Power Company and the North Eastern Electric Power Company play a major role in dam construction; but so too do private companies like Tata Power (architect of one of India’s earliest hydroelectric dams, in the 1910s), and Reliance Energy. State governments have raised capital from domestic markets as international organizations have backed away from funding large dams. But the biggest shift is the role of China. China’s dam-building industry, in the late 1990s and early 2000s emerged as a major force in the world. Given the scale of China’s own dam building, the depth of engineering expertise in China rivals anywhere in the Western world; and that expertise has been matched by money. By 2008, ten Chinese companies were involved in thirteen dam projects in Nepal and nine in Pakistan, many of them financed by Chinese state-owned and private banks. When India’s leading hydraulic engineers had visited China in 1954, they had found their Chinese counterparts dependent on Russi
an expertise, having to make do and improvise. By the end of the century, the Chinese dam industry led the world.51

  Such is the rush for growth that warnings about the impact and the potential risks of these new Himalayan dams have been brushed aside. Environmental assessments on many of the projects have been cursory at best. Given that the dams are entwined with geopolitical and security considerations, given that governments around the region fear popular protest against the dams—which has been widespread not only in India, but increasingly in neighboring countries, too—considerable secrecy shrouds the plans. Even data about river flow across borders is guarded as a state secret. The Himalayan region is less densely populated than the river valleys, but the same problems that accompanied the large dams of the twentieth century are likely to follow here—drowned lands and displaced people. Large reservoirs are less common at these heights than in the lowlands, but diversions to the course of rivers affect life on the river. Mountain species are under threat from the loss of their habitats—already, the brown bear, the snow leopard, the musk deer, the golden mahseer, and the snow trout are imperiled. Much of the power generated by the large dams will be sold to large cities far away, while many local livelihoods are imperiled. The Lower Subansari Hydroelectric Project in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, one of India’s most controversial—it has been stalled repeatedly by local protests—threatens the passage of country boats that carry a lot of local trade. The submergence of forest lands will deny local people their main source of firewood. Historian Rohan D’Souza describes the Brahmaputra as a “moving inland ocean” bound together by the rhythms of subsistence fishing and floodplain agriculture—a system that is under threat from the dam. The now familiar problem of siltation menaces many of the dams. But this is also one of Earth’s most active seismic zones, with earthquakes of 8.0 or more on the Richter scale not uncommon. Fan Xiao, a geologist from Sichuan and a brave opponent of recent mountain dam projects in China, fears that dams will become “a source of permanent grief and regret for future generations yet unborn.”52

  THE GRAVEST RISK OF ALL—TO THE DAMS, TO THE HIMALAYAS, TO billions of people downstream—comes from climate change. Climate change affects the Himalayan glaciers two ways: by changing patterns of snowfall and by hastening the process of melting. Research findings are complex—not all glaciers are in retreat, and, more seriously, there are very few monitoring stations and few long-term studies. While research has been ongoing in the Chinese Himalayas since the 1990s, the Indian side has been virtually untouched by scientists. The inclusion (and later retraction) of a careless claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the speed at which the Himalayan glaciers are melting was wielded by climate change skeptics to try to discredit the organization’s work. But the consensus is overwhelming that the warming of the planet has led to a recession of the Himalayan glaciers since the mid-nineteenth century and at an accelerating pace in recent decades, if not uniformly everywhere across the mountain range. Most models predict that river flow will be augmented in the short term by the melting of the glaciers—bringing more frequent and severe floods, and even the risk of catastrophic dam collapses. Few observers believe that the designs for the large Himalayan dams have taken into account the uncertainties of climate change. The dangers are greater still given the heightened possibility of extreme rainfall—which, as we shall see, is likely. Around the middle of the twenty-first century, by 2050 or 2060, scientists predict that the dry season flow of the major Himalayan rivers will see significant declines. Not only will this diminution make many of the planned dams ineffective, it will put many lives and livelihoods at risk. More than 1.3 billion people rely directly on the Himalayan rivers for water; 3 billion people rely on the food, water, and energy the Himalayan rivers provide. Changes in the flow and behavior of the rivers as a direct result of the warming of the glaciers threatens a significant proportion of humanity.53

  III

  The monsoon has been a continuous thread through Unruly Waters—and it is with the monsoon that we conclude.

  The breakthroughs in tropical meteorology of the late twentieth century shed new light on the scale and complexity of internal variability in the monsoon on multiple timescales—from the quasiperiodic impact of the ENSO system to the intraseasonal variations attributed to the Madden-Julian Oscillation. In recent years, the focus of scientific research has been on how the effects of anthropogenic climate change interact with the monsoon’s natural variability in dangerous and unpredictable ways.

  The most fundamental forces driving the monsoon, as we have seen, are the thermal contrast between the land and the ocean, and the availability of moisture. Climate change affects both of these drivers of wind and rain. The warming of the ocean’s surface is likely to augment the amount of moisture the monsoon winds pick up on their journey toward the Indian subcontinent. But if the ocean surface warms more rapidly than the land, which appears to be happening in equatorial waters, this would narrow the temperature gradient that drives the winds, and so weaken circulation. Put simply, many climate models predict that the first of these processes will predominate: “wet gets wetter” as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. They predict, that is to say, that the moist monsoon lands will see an increase in rainfall. But the monsoon is an intricate phenomenon, as meteorologists have long known. It is increasingly clear that monsoon rainfall is affected not only by planetary warming but also by transformations on a regional scale, including the emission of aerosols—from vehicles, crop burning, and domestic fires—and changes in land use. The urgent challenge for climate science is to disentangle and to understand these global and regional influences on the behavior of the monsoon. And so far, the monsoon has proved much harder to capture in models than, say, global temperatures.54

  The availability of detailed records of climate and rainfall in India—which themselves are a product of the history of Indian meteorology going back to the efforts of Henry Blanford and his colleagues in the late nineteenth century—have allowed scientists to reconstruct in detail the monsoon’s behavior over the last sixty years. The picture these data present is complex, and in some ways surprising. Average summer rainfall over India has declined by around 7 percent since 1950. But what lies behind this trend?55 The cause of the decline in rainfall lies in the pattern of India’s development since independence. Its explanation, that is to say, lies in the province of economic history.

  In the late 1990s, research vessels observed exceptionally high concentrations of aerosols in the northern Indian Ocean. Satellite images showed a stain that spread across the Gangetic plain and over the Indian Ocean—researchers called it the “brown cloud,” an accurate if not a poetic description of the haze. Between January and March 1999, a large team of investigators set out to understand this brown cloud, taking readings from their base at the Kaashidhoo observatory on one of the most remote islands of the Maldives. The project was led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an Indian oceanographer based at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California. One of the scientists involved was Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who around the same time also coined the phrase “the Anthropocene,” referring to a new geological epoch in which human activity is the most important influence on Earth’s physical processes.56

  The project found that the haze was a noxious composite of sulfate, nitrate, black carbon, dust, and fly ash as well as naturally occurring aerosols including sea salt and mineral dust. Three-quarters of the composition of the brown cloud could be attributed directly to human activity especially concentrated along the densely populated Gangetic plain and northwestern India. In this region, where up to 80 percent of the population remains rural, and where many rural families continue to be deprived of electricity, much of the black carbon is produced by domestic burning of biomass—wood, crop residue, dung, and coal—used primarily for cooking. Open crop burning accounts for the rest. The stoves used in households are inefficient and combustion is incomplete, producing large amo
unts of soot. Apart from their likely effects on regional climate, these emissions also poison human bodies. On one estimate, more than four hundred thousand premature deaths each year in India can be attributed to indoor pollution. Black carbon combines, in the brown cloud, with sulfates and other aerosols—and the Gangetic plain bears an additional burden in this respect, as a result of pockets of intensive industrial and extractive activity. Since the late nineteenth century, the Indo-Gangetic plain has been the core region of India’s extractive industries, built around the rich coal and mineral deposits in the Chota Nagpur region. Further along Yamuna River, the Delhi region is one of India’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, and its largest in absolute terms. Emissions have increased exponentially since the 1970s as India’s population has grown, as its economy has expanded, as inequalities within and among regions have widened. The Gangetic plain suffers from a double pathology: the sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen dioxide emissions that accompany energy-intensive growth are combined with the black carbon that comes from the use of cheaper, dirtier fuels by millions without access to electricity. If India leads in black carbon, China, too, has a brown cloud problem, with sulfates from factory emissions dominating the mix there.57

  All of this is shifting the monsoon’s patterns. Aerosols absorb solar radiation, allowing less of it to reach Earth’s surface. This cools the land, diminishes the temperature contrast between the land and sea, and weakens the atmospheric circulation that sustains the summer monsoon. Changes in circulation over the Indian subcontinent in turn affects the tightly integrated air-sea interaction that binds the Asian continent with the Indian Ocean, a system that already contains plenty of internal variability. Because of the way the Asian monsoon is linked to other parts of the planet’s climate, it is possible that aerosols over South Asia and China have global consequences. When all of these effects are coupled with the impact of global warming on the ocean and the atmosphere, the instabilities multiply. Far from counteracting the effect of greenhouse gases in any simple sense, the impact of aerosols complicates them.58