If, as is widely speculated, future wars will often be fought over water, then it will be partly because the voices of those like Anupam Mishra remained unheeded. One reason for this is he preferred to be low key. Mishra, who died earlier this month, never sought to project himself and chose to communicate in Hindi. This brought him closer to the ground among the peasants and pastoralists whose inherited traditions he researched to gain his insights. It is fascinating how these, despite coming from a Gandhian environmentalist who is typically seen as looking back and not forward, remain so relevant in a world driven by modern scientific solutions. If the welfare of most Indians is still so painfully fettered to the vagaries of the monsoon, then it is partly because traditional water harvesting solutions have been forgotten.
Mishra rescued that knowledge and captured it in his writings and talks and dispensed it with a gentle sense of humour. In a detailed interview with Civil Society, he made the tradition immediately relevant by pointing to the folly of piping water from rural India to rapidly growing urban India. Instead, a smart city should be one which smartly manages its own water. Delhi airport’s T-3 terminal has been built by destroying as many as 10 traditional water tanks and one consequence is periodic water logging around it during the monsoon. (Chennai airport has recently emerged from being nearly drowned.) On the other hand, Frankfurt airport, told by the municipality 15 years ago to pay heftily for water, went ahead with extensive water harvesting so that today it is self-sufficient in water.
At one stage Gujarat shipped water to a drought-hit area by the sea. Then sending water to Latur in drought-hit Marathwada by train was etched in the public mind. Mishra’s sense of humour comes through in his speculation that since we have moved from Vibrant Gujarat to Vibrant India, one day we may even take water by aircraft.
Mishra pointed out the great contradiction in villages in the Jaisalmer desert being drought proofed but Latur not being so. Jaisalmer has used the knowledge that it has a stratum of gypsum under the sand which prevents moisture from going through, that if you dig a little in the sand you find moisture. Where did we go wrong? A brave new world was unveiled in the sixties with the opening of the mega-dam Bhakra Nangal based on the premise that we could use development to overcome the uncertainties of the monsoon, thus forgetting traditional methods of capturing rain.
Another example of going astray is Punjab, which traditionally consumed makki ke roti (from corn flour), going in for cultivating rice and wheat (not their traditional crops and not even of great quality) and coming to such a pass that the ground water used to grow water-guzzling crops will run out in five years! As to water wars, look at how Haryana and Punjab are at loggerheads over building a canal to share water when both these state governments and the one at the centre are run by the same political dispensation. Obviously, the reality of having to share a finite supply of water trumps ideological commonality. On a positive note, Mishra mentioned how a new IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) coming up in Jodhpur has decided to build 30 tanks and not rely on the municipality for water. Mishra was highly cogent when it comes to analysing the devastating floods that visit Bihar periodically by the major river Koshi. Trying to control the Koshi with barrages and embankments can cause further devastation, he said in the aftermath of the floods of 2008. The Indo-Nepal border barrage has failed to deliver for Koshi what it was supposed to. Floods are predictable, yet they come as a surprise today. If the government had engaged local people who have boats and detailed knowledge of topography, it could deliver flood relief (and evacuate people where necessary) at a fraction of the cost of engaging helicopters. Earlier the region had thousands of natural and man-made depressions, which acted as lakes during floods and water holes during the dry season. Then they were filled up, with government help, to grow crops. Today, when flood waters come they have nowhere to go and end up wreaking havoc on human settlements.
Ramachandra Guha, environmentalist and historian, in a tribute in The Indian Express, describes Mishra as an intellectual without snobbery and an activist who was never judgemental. His insights came out of steady research on the ground and not from ideology. Perhaps the greatest insight was that water, not oil, held the key to a sustainable future.
The critical issue is where does the development agenda, first pursued through planning and then under free market conditions, whose progress is benchmarked against gross domestic product (GDP) numbers, stand in the light of the insights which Mishra offers. The cost of building a canal with modern civil engineering technology (captured in GDP figures) is astronomical compared to the fraction (barely a blip in the GDP) spent on ponds and wells dug and maintained by a rural community with self-help after carefully studying patterns of weather and topography. There will be a similar but obverse dissonance between the welfare impact of a modern canal and that of village level water conservation which is sustainable. If you total up all the pluses and minuses, Mishra’s insights in the final analysis win against dams and embankments built by civil engineers in the last 60 years, which are today often considered to be worse than useless.
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