by Tim Folger
Could this new entrepreneurial spirit be harnessed to provide India's poor with the three essentials that NOIDA takes for granted—water, energy, and mobility? There seemed only one way to test the proposition: to embark on a journey that would give me a sampling of this astoundingly diverse and complicated country, from its mountains to its deserts and back again to the city. And the prime minister's speech seemed to suggest where I should start looking for answers—by going to the river that is the cradle of India's civilizational legacy.
The Water Tower of Asia
The Hindu pilgrimage town of Rishikesh in the Himalayan foothills, where John, Paul, George, and Ringo spent the early months of 1968 in thrall to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, sits on the banks of the Ganges, which Indians call the Ganga.
On the outskirts of town, an imposing line of high-tension electricity pylons marched southward from the mountains, carrying power to Delhi and the cities of the plain. Nearby was a poster advertising Ambuja Cement. A heroically muscled man, chin raised, gaze fixed on the future, clutched a gigantic dam under his arm. Ambuja is a private corporation, but the artwork suggested Soviet-era socialist realism.
Coal still accounts for 55 percent of India's energy mix, but hydro supplies 26 percent. That's an unusually high proportion—China, for all the publicity about Three Gorges, generates only about 7 percent of its power from dams—and India's climate plan assumes that hydro will continue to expand steadily. The plan also speaks at some length about the potential for large-scale solar power, since most of the country has clear, sunny skies for 250 to 300 days a year. But solar is expensive, and hydro, despite the huge economic and environmental cost of dams, remains the cheapest of all conventional energy sources.
On the other side of Rishikesh, a few miles upstream, an intense young woman named Priya Patel sat cross-legged in the garden of an ashram and showed me a map of the headwaters of the Ganga. Small rectangular symbols marked the site of proposed hydroelectric projects. Patel is the unofficial leader of the Ganga Ahvaan, a campaign to stop them.
There is already one colossal dam on the upper river at Tehri, which came into operation in 2006 and produces about 2,400 megawatts. (By way of comparison, the Hoover Dam generates about 2,000 megawatts, and Tehri is about 100 feet higher.) The new dams, impoundments, and diversion tunnels on Patel's map would add another 5,000 megawatts to the mix. I counted about two dozen new sites, more or less equally divided between the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, the two rivers that come together to form the main stem of the Ganga at the small town of Devaprayag. Patel said that the first of these structures, the 380-megawatt Bhaironghati I, would be built just eight or nine miles below the Gangotri glacier, where the Bhagirathi originates in an ice cave. The diversion tunnels and proposed minimum flows would dry up miles of riverbed, she said, and to make matters worse, all these massive engineering works were being planned in one of the highest-risk earthquake zones in the world. When a 6.6-magnitude quake hit the Bhagirathi valley in 1991, the greatest number of casualties occurred in a village that sits on top of one of the new tunnels.
"But surely they must have done an environmental impact assessment?" I asked.
She smiled without humor and enumerated some of the assurances that had been given by the National Thermal Power Corporation, including one that promised that "no historical, religious, or cultural monuments" would be affected by the dams. Of course, the Ganga itself is the sacred core of India's national identity, but the irony of this seemed to have escaped the government.
Later I made the bumpy three-hour drive upriver along a tortuous corniche hundreds of feet above the Ganga until I reached the confluence at Devaprayag. The town is built on a narrow, triangular point of rocks that ends in a ghat —the ubiquitous riverside steps where Hindus gather to wash, bathe, worship, and burn their dead. The Bhagirathi, a foaming torrent colored turquoise by silt from the Gangotri glacier, rushed in from the west. From the east, the Alaknanda was an unbroken slick of emerald between sheer cliffs. But the waters were much lower than usual, people said. It had been a strange winter, unusually warm and raining only once, a brief downpour a few days before I arrived. Peaches that normally fruited in April were ripe in February.
It was the second day of the festival of Mahashivaratri, a celebration of Lord Shiva, the Destroyer, which is one of the most important events in the Hindu calendar. Pilgrims and priests had gathered on the lower steps of the ghat, knee-deep in the water, one foot in turquoise, the other in green. The wall behind them was scrawled with Hindi graffiti. Translated, it said, "Dam Is Murderer of Ganga."
The flow of India's sacred river is of much more than local concern. Fully one-fifth of all humanity depends for its survival on the great rivers that are born among the glaciers of the Himalayas, which some people call the water tower of Asia. But even as the downstream demand for water increases, the upstream supply is contracting, because the glaciers are melting, and rapidly.
Before leaving Delhi for the mountains I'd talked to Syed Iqbal Hasnain, India's best-known glaciologist. A jovial, white-haired, grandfatherly man, he punctuated his gloomy observations with improbable bursts of laughter.
"The Ganga system is about 60 to 70 percent snow and ice," he told me. "There are more than eight hundred glaciers in the Ganga basin. The Gangotri is the big one. It used to cover more than 250 square kilometers [about 100 square miles], but now it's breaking up in many places. You will see blocks of dead ice that are no longer connected to the main ice body. I'm afraid that if the current trends continue, within thirty or forty years most of the glaciers will melt out." He chuckled.
No one could fail to notice the changes in the Himalayan weather, Hasnain said: "The monsoons are being affected by climate change. We are not getting the westerlies, which bring snow in the wintertime. Crops like potatoes, peas, and apples are growing at higher altitudes now. At lower elevations the temperatures are no longer suitable.
"There's also the atmospheric 'brown cloud,' a layer of dust particles three kilometers thick, which is warming the glaciers and creating all these anomalies," he went on. "And black soot is being deposited on the white ice of the Tibetan plateau." Together the soot and dust reduce the albedo (from the Latin albus, or white)—the amount of solar radiation reflected back into the atmosphere. Instead it is absorbed by the darkened ice. The dust is mainly from fossil fuel emissions, with China the principal culprit. Most of the soot comes from cooking fires on the Indian side, a seemingly trivial source that in fact generates huge amounts of highly polluting "black carbon." I was surprised when Hasnain told me that even the firewood and kerosene burned by the growing numbers of pilgrims to the Gangotri temple and nearby ashrams have a significant impact on the glacier.
The government misreads, or perhaps chooses to misread, these symptoms, Hasnain complained. "Because the glaciers are melting, a lot of water is flowing downstream," he said. "They think, the water is coming, people are happy, so why rake up all these issues of climate change?"
The melting also poses a direct threat to the new hydropower projects, he said. More glacial melt means more silt, and more silt means clogged turbines and incapacitated dams. No one was thinking about that either. "There's a total disconnect," Hasnain said, "between those who are designing these power projects and what is happening on the headwaters." He laughed again.
He said that measuring the precise extent of glacier loss was not easy, and the government's climate action plan had used this shortage of hard data to justify a disturbingly agnostic view of the problem. All the plan says is that "it is too early to establish long-term trends" and that there are "several hypotheses" about the reasons for the great melting. Part of the difficulty is that outside monitors are not welcome in areas that border on China and Pakistan: a matter of national security. You can figure out a certain amount by satellite imagery—even by looking at Google Earth—and it's not hard to measure the distance by which a particular glacier has advanced or receded. But the critical issue is w
hat glaciologists call mass balance, the most sensitive indicator of the impact of climate change, and measuring this requires getting up into the high peaks and taking ice-core samples. Hasnain said he had begun to work with the celebrated glaciologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University. "He's the leader in the ice-core business," Hasnain said. "So in four or five years we may have a credible database." He was no longer laughing now.
Under the Desert Sun
The Ganga Ahvaan campaign was launched in an unlikely place: the former palace of Maharaja Gaj Singh Ji of Marwar-Jodhpur, on the edge of the Thar Desert in western Rajasthan, India's most drought-stricken state. It is also the largest, with 56 million people in an area slightly larger than New Mexico. If India ever realizes its ambition of building affordable, large-scale solar power installations, this will be one of the prime locations.
The palace, a sprawling sandstone complex a few miles outside the ancient city of Jodhpur, is home to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation. An odd name, I remarked to its director, Kanupriya Harish, considering that we were out in the desert, that jal means water, and that the Bhagirathi River is hundreds of miles away in the Himalayas.
Not really, she said with a smile, because the word Bhagirathi also has another significance. In Hindu legend, a king named Bhagirath had to do penance for several centuries so that the goddess Ganga would forgive the sins of his ancestors. Finally she granted his wish and decided to come down to Earth, taking the form of a great river.
"Anything that is very hard to do is called Bhagirath prayah," Harish explained. "A very difficult task. And since there is nothing harder than to find water in the desert, that is how we got our name."
Finding enough water is a problem in most of India, and it's getting harder all the time. In theory there should be enough for everyone, since the overall precipitation levels are tremendous. But most of the rain falls in the three-month monsoon season, and in recent years it has been more and more concentrated into a small number of intense downpours. In a single twenty-four-hour period in 2005, for instance, Mumbai got 39 inches of rain. But if the water isn't captured in a timely fashion, it's lost, and India contrives to lose it in myriad ways, including profligate irrigation, degraded infrastructure, and a failure to treat and reuse wastewater. Rajasthan Isn't Mumbai, of course; much of the Thar Desert gets only about four inches of rain a year. But the same weather patterns are apparent, Harish said. If the meager rainfall is spread out over several weeks, people can get by, more or less, scratching out a bare subsistence by cultivating lentils, millet, and a poor variety of sesame seeds. However, such rain as there is in the Thar comes more often now in a single, violent burst. "Most of the work we're doing now is actually an adaptive strategy to climate change," Harish said.
In Delhi, Ramaswamy Iyer, a former government official who drafted India's first national water plan in 1987, had told me he saw three basic options for dealing with the water crisis. You can increase the supply by massive engineering projects—dams, canals, the interlinking of major river systems. You can leave it to the market to supply and price water as it would any other commodity. Or you can treat water as a community resource, making decisions at the local level and educating people about conservation. The Indian government has relied heavily on the first two strategies; Kanupriya Harish favors the third.
In earlier times, she said, people in the Thar developed all sorts of creative techniques for harvesting and conserving water. But the collective memory of these skills began to dissipate after independence, when the expectation grew (though it was often ill-founded) that the government would come in, lay a pipe, and solve the problem. The critique of government was a thread that ran through almost every conversation I had in India: no matter how grand various schemes might look on paper, most were beset by bureaucratic inertia, crippling inefficiencies, and a culture of corruption that allowed budgeted funds to drain away into private pockets like water into the desert sands.
Local people could act with much greater agility, Harish said, and communities could develop entrepreneurial skills along the way. The trick was to revive the old, forgotten techniques and combine them with the smartest of the new technologies. She snapped open her laptop and launched into a brisk PowerPoint presentation to show me the spectrum of possibilities. At one end, a woman dug a hole in the sand to collect seepage. At the other, an improbable high-tech structure, shaped like a pyramid, offered a way to harvest Rajasthan's scarcest resource—water—by using its most abundant—the desert sun.
That sun beat down mercilessly all the next day. It was still winter, and by the standards of the Thar it was not especially hot—95 degrees or so. We drove west through a landscape of rolling dunes and spiny scrub, innumerable camel carts, wild peacocks scurrying across the baking sand. Along the way we saw many of the water-harvesting structures Harish had described in her PowerPoint. There were beris and tankas and talabs—shallow and deep wells, ground-level and rooftop storage tanks, ponds large and small. Women walked away from a water hole with heavy pitchers on their heads, climbing uphill through a grove of thorny khejri trees. Harish told me that these are still zealously protected by members of the local Bishnoi caste—the original tree-huggers, who sacrificed their lives in a massacre in 1730 rather than allow the khejri to be cut down by the local maharaja.
As we drew closer to the border with Pakistan, the land was dotted with white salt flats, left behind by the evaporation of last year's monsoons. At one point a man in camouflage fatigues waved us off the one-lane road and ordered us to loop around across the salt flats. For hundreds of yards ahead the roadway was occupied by a long column of battle tanks.
I asked my taciturn driver if he thought India and Pakistan would go to war.
"Inevitable," he grunted, seeming almost to relish the idea.
In the village of Trisingadi Sodha, members of the local water users' association, the jal sabha—village elders with gold earrings and brilliant turbans of red, white, yellow, and purple—garlanded us with oleanders and daubed our foreheads with vermilion. We walked with them to a large pond, perhaps a hundred yards across, which collected rain that was channeled from a jagged line of sandstone hills five miles away. The pond held enough water year-round for 10,000 people. One of the men pointed out a flock of migratory Siberian cranes poking around in the muddy shallows on the far side. Later, as we sipped sweet masala chai, the elders brought out their records for inspection—dog-eared notebooks with minutes and decisions from their monthly meetings, signed in neat Hindi script or with thumbprints, careful entries of money spent and received. Some of the jal sabhas charged monthly fees to water users, Harish said. Others sold it by the tankerful. This income financed the necessary maintenance, with each village devising its own system—posting a guard by the pond, for example, to keep away would-be defecators, or perhaps training a young man to keep the pumps and filters in good working order.
"It's a challenge to get the women involved," Harish said. "This is still a very feudal area."
"But what about you?" I asked.
She twinkled. "For most of these communities I've ceased to be a woman. They think that I'm a man."
Something significant was happening here, it seemed to me. The jal sabha was blending traditional principles of community organization with a newer entrepreneurial spirit. In the process, India might ease some of the historic tension between village and city. Gandhi believed that the village was India's beating heart; Nehru, the first prime minister after independence, thought its future lay in the cities. Here was a way to maintain the integrity of the village while building the modest, incremental prosperity that might make it unnecessary for people to migrate to places like the slums of Okhla.
This was not the only way in which Gandhi's vision was being updated. Forty miles to the south, in the straggling village of Roopji Raja Beri, a surreal sight confronted us. I recognized the flattened foil dome, which somewhat resembled a silvery mushroom cap, from Harish's PowerPoint slide. It looked
as if an alien spacecraft had set down among the sand dunes, but it was a "water pyramid," only the second of its kind in India. The technology was Dutch; a team of engineers had come here for six weeks to install it, and the inauguration ceremony had taken place just five days earlier.
The entrepreneur in charge was an imposing, barrel-chested villager named Prem Ram, a twenty-year veteran of the Indian army. He said that the water shortage in Roopji Raja Beri had grown so severe that people had come to blows. The groundwater was so salty that you could literally burn your tongue, and there had not been a decent rain since 2003. "The natural order is breaking," he said.
Prem Ram seemed as proud of his pyramid as he was of his military service. He opened a vent for me to look inside, but a fierce surge of heat and humidity drove me back before I could catch more than a glimpse of the glittering pool of fresh water. The strange structure used the power of the sun to function as a combined distillation and desalination plant, he explained. And since it ran entirely on solar energy, the operating costs were close to zero. The brackish groundwater was pumped in from a nearby holding tank; once inside the pyramid, it was distilled through evaporation. He thumped a meaty fist on one of the sloping sides, and shimmering streaks of fresh water ran down the interior walls. The salt that was left behind provided an added source of income for the villagers, who subsisted otherwise by selling the milk from their scrawny herds of cattle, goats, and water buffalo.
One day, if the costs of the technology come down, if the government bureaucracy becomes more efficient, if the high-tech entrepreneurs from Hyderabad and Bangalore put up the start-up capital, there may be other strange sights here in the Thar Desert: gigantic solar farms, perhaps, each one capable of feeding as much power into the national grid as all the new dams on the Ganga. But it will be equally important for India to think small and local and to focus on the entrepreneurial village culture that is emerging in obscure places like Trisingadi Sodha and Roopji Raja Beri. To Americans, living off the grid may imply a hair-shirt lifestyle choice, a yurt among the Oregon redwoods. To Indians, paradoxically, it may be a pathway to the national mainstream.