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What
is India Editorial
Water
and river management
in South Asia
China's
environmental record has been far from exemplary. India should join
an Asian alliance to pressure the big neighbour into behaving more
responsibly
Aravind Sitaraman
What is India News Service
September 1, 2004
Few really appreciate the importance of actively managing bilateral relationships. Bilateral relations are important not
just to maintain peace but also to increase trade, exchange
information and education, and in the last couple of years, to fight terrorism.
A major issue that has cropped up in the last few days is a huge human-made
dam in Tibet.
Tibet was colonised by China in the 1950s by first encouraging insurrection
and later by an all out invasion. At that time, the Dalai Lama and his
senior administrators set up a government in exile in India. This led
to serious friction between India and China which resulted in many missteps by
both parties, including a border skirmish in 1962. Differences were invented,
enemies were nurtured, and borders were disputed all to gain leveraging
points over the other.
However, over the years, there has been a degree of pragmatism that has
grown between respective diplomatic communities. The economic growth of
China, the economic potential of India, the diminishing of Pakistan as
a serious player in South Asian policies, the rise of terrorism and
the potential for trade between India and China are some motivations for the
growing pragmatism to find common areas of consensus than disagreement.
In the last few years, China has acknowledged Sikkim as part of India
while India has accepted Tibet as an autonomous region within China. This
agreement disappointed many who saw Chinese exploitation of what they
saw as Indian naiveté. Whether it was the “Hindi Chinni Bhai Bhai
slogan” slogan as a precursor to the 1962 Indo-Sino war, instigation of rebels in
Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Mizoram, and Arunachal Pradesh, or the occupation of an island in
the Nicobar Islands in collusion with Myanmar to create a Chinese Naval
outpost in the Bay of Bengal, India's big neighbour has had a
dubious track record.
Proposals from Russia and Japan to create a pan-Asian block to create a multi-polar global
scenario involving Russia, China, and India or Japan, China, and India has found ready acceptance in China,
but Indian acceptance of such proposals has been in part reluctant because
of past experience in dealing with China. In many people’s minds, China is
not a country that needs to be trusted.
This is a sad saga to millenniums of close co-operation in art, culture,
trade, religion, and technology between many Kingdoms in India and corresponding kingdoms in China. Overland and maritime trade was always
active with an active flow of information and people between these two
large dominions. Ancient Indian kingdoms even had stationed large trade and
military guilds in China. There was a frequent exchange of ambassadors
and trade missions between the dominions. However, recent history has not
seen congenial behaviour and outlook between the two countries.
One such recent incident that is fast reinforcing such fears and reluctance
to accept China as an honest partner of India is an artificial and supposedly
unintentional dam created by Chinese road engineers across the Peerechu
river (a tributary of Sutlej) in Tibet. A burst in that dam could create a huge calamity that could affect over half a million people
over 280 kilometers away. A similar incident in 2000 ended with 120 people dead
in India and it is not clear what diplomatic and bilateral consequences
China faced for that incident.
By all accounts, this situation is far more serious than the incident
in 2000. What makes it worse is the Chinese reluctance to allow Indian
engineers
to visit the site and evaluate the potential impact to India.
This again reinforces the suspicion that China is engaging in environmental
warfare.
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The bigger question is the environmental damage that this incident could
create. The Himalayan region is known for the tectonic activity resulting in
large earthquakes and creating a large body of water will have unknown
implications to the stability of the region. A downward thrust of such
a force would remove all tree cover in the valleys that it would go through
creating major landslides, flooding, destruction of property, ground
cover and trees, irrigation systems, aquatic life, etc. In other words, it
may result in the destruction of ecosystem as we know it today. Another
unknown is the impact of rainfall, snow further up the Himalayas and the
Tibetan plateau. Ten major rivers of South Asia and South East Asia originate in
Tibet and 90 per cent of the water flows through India, Bangladesh, Pakistan,
and Nepal. Millions of people in South Asia and South East depend on this
water feed and any alteration to this eco-system is bound to impact
them.
China has had a disastrous record in water management. Being an
authoritarian regime, that country has caused great hardship to its population through failed dams, broken dams, and unilateral
construction of dams. Since the so-called “Great Leap Forward,” China has constructed
dams across dams across all rivers except the Salween that originates high
in Tibet before emptying into the Andaman Sea through Myanmar and Thailand.
While 80,000 dams and check systems have been built since then, 40
per cent of major dams (4,500 of 10,000 large constructions) were found to be ineffective
for flood control and below specifications. Over 3,000 dams have since
collapsed, including some major ones on an average of 110 dam collapses a year.
While Government estimates that only 10,000 people died from these accidents,
independent sources suspect the figure is close to a quarter of a
million.
Hence, if anything, China has been balanced in the destruction that it
has caused—equally to its own population and other countries. The irresponsible
water management policy of the “Great Leap Forward” movement has
actually taken China and South and South East Asia backwards on environment and
resource management. The demonstrated incompetence of China to manage
natural resources and its indifferent attitude towards actually fixing
these issues is worrisome.
Instead of trying to deal with China on an individual level, India would be
better off gaining momentum and support from other South Asian and South
East Asian countries to leverage China to be more transparent in its water
management policies and plans. There also needs to be an acceptance and
applicability of International Water treaties that govern water sharing
between riparian nations. Only collective bargaining will work.
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