Fighting a World War with Sticks and Stones

M. Dinesh Kumar

“I know not with what World War III would be fought; but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

                                                                                                                  Albert Einstein

It was in October 2005. I was in Israel to study water management in that country on an invitation from an internationally renowned Israeli water expert, Prof Saul Arlosoroff, who at that time was the Chairman-Finance and Economics of Mekorot, the National Water Company, which supplies water to the cities, Kibbutz and every farm in that country. There is no place on Earth which can illustrate the importance of water better than Israel. For Israel, water is a strategic asset and the way water is managed is like managing things during a crisis.

In Israel, much of the sophisticated efficient irrigation technologies being used by the farmers (which produce very high technical efficiency of around 98%) enjoy so much subsidy that the only way to justify this is to put a very high economic value for every drop of water really saved. This economic value is very high because water is also a strategic asset for that country.

On the second day of my visit, Prof Arlosoroff (who at that time was around 76) came driving his car to pick me up from Hotel David Intercontinental at Tel Aviv. He was to take us to the master control of Mekorot, where he would show us (my colleague and I) how the sophisticated water network of the country was being managed from a master control (located under a hill), and make a formal presentation of the complex but fascinating water management system of that country. What fascinated me the most at the master control was the sight of a well-oiled diesel engine (that time around 40-50 years old) of the size of a three-storeyed building, which was kept as a standby in the event of a terror attack leading to power outage and the electric motor failing to pump water into the grid!

While driving on the highway, Prof Arlosoroff talked about a wide range of topics and events, including his many visits to Gujarat as an adviser to the state government. The conversation switched to the talk about countries fighting a third World Water on water. In his opinion, it was simply an economic nonsense! Prof Saul who was a trained water engineer, quickly realized that to participate in international water discussion, knowledge of economics is a must. He explained it this way: “Dinesh, with the money we would spend to fight a war for water with our neighbours (for bullets, shells and rockets), we can build a few desalination plants that would create that water! At that point of time, Israel already had huge desalination plants, producing nearly 100 MCM of water annually and ‘desalinated water’ was already a major component of the country’s water balance. He proudly told me that the cost of desalination by the new systems built by the Israeli engineers (US $ 0.60/m3) in his country was much lower than the ones built by American companies for one of the Arab countries in the region.

The underlying message in his comparison of fighting a war and building a desalination plant was quite straight and clear. The countries which use modern science and sound economic logic will be able to win water, in spite of having very poor resource endowment (like in the case of Israel). Conversely, those countries which fail to use the opportunities of science would face water problems, no matter how rich their overall resource endowment is.

What I have provided is just a glimpse of the water management system of Israel and that country’s preparedness to deal with crisis. As against Israel, let us examine the preparedness of India, a country with a population of 1.3 billion people. India’s water security challenges are much bigger than that of Israel in spite of the fact that India’s per capita renewable water resources are much higher than that of Israel (though there are regions in which water availability is as low as that of Israel—western Rajasthan, Rayalaseema region of AP, north Gujarat). When droughts and floods occur, hundreds of districts of the country are badly hit with crop losses, loss of livestock, acute drinking water shortage, public health crisis and even loss of precious human lives. More importantly, unlike Israel, India won’t be in a position to import a significant proportion of the food for feeding its population for many decades to come, because of the sheer quantum of the aggregate food demand. Most of the food would eventually be produced in the water-scarce, but land rich regions.

But as a nation, our attitude towards such challenges is callous and we are totally unprepared. We use a lot of rhetoric when it comes to discussing water problems and the ways to solve them. We would talk at length about educating the masses about water and the need to conserve it. The politicians are best at it. They would come to inaugurate a water conference and deliver a long and emotional speech about why it is important to conserve water to avert a third world war that would be fought on water. Soon after the speech, they would go back to their offices and announce a 24 X 7 free water for the households or free power for the farms.

To put it simply, people would not try and conserve a resource for which they don’t have to pay any price, no matter how many awareness campaigns we run every year to make them water literate. This basic principle in economics is ignored by not only politicians but also bureaucrats and policy makers. The excuse often given for not charging for water is that it is a gift of nature (a free good), and pricing would lead to commodification! This view is largely held by a large section of the civil society. For almost 10 years, the country had also witnessed reverberation of such views in the policy circles as several members of the civil society and NGOs transformed into policy makers at the national level with the support of the party in power.

While the water which comes from precipitation is a free good, what is ignored is the fact pricing water supply services is essential for recovering the cost of storing, treating and supplying that water. The activists and politicians know very well that in such situations, it is one’s social status, and financial and political clout, that determine access to water, not one’s willingness to pay for it.

The debate on whether water is a social good or an economic good is often used to argue for or against pricing of water. The fact that water is an economic good, when used in production functions such as irrigated agriculture, is not suggestive of the need to price the resource. Instead, the gross marginal returns from the use of water for economic production functions can be a basis for fixing the prices, if there is a significant cost involved in its production and supply for these economic activities, as the marginal returns give an indication of the price users would be able to pay. In other words, when the resource becomes scarce, with high cost of production and supply, only those uses wherein the marginal returns are higher than the unit cost can be sustained. Conversely, if water is available in plenty in the natural system, pricing of water may not be a big concern, even when allocated for productive purposes, if the cost of production and supply of water is insignificant.

On the other hand, the recognition that water becomes a social good when allocated for human consumption doesn’t take away the right of the water utilities to charge a price for to recover its production and supply costs, though affordability should be a major concern in fixing the unit price of water. This is because lack of access to a minimum amount of fresh water could severely constrain social advancement and at times even threaten the very survival of the community itself. This essentially means that mechanisms should be devised to offer targeted subsidies to the poor when prices become high, so as to protect the right to life.

When a rich, well-owning farmer abstracts several crores (1 crore= 10 million) of litres of water from aquifers for crop production and generates income worth millions of rupees annually, water is a pure economic good. The surplus value product from the use of water ($/m3) should give an indication of the price that can be charged for that water. But we as a nation are completely unprepared for charging even a meagre resource fee from such bulk users of water. Politicians compete to give cheaper water to the public as a social welfare measure, without even trying to understand who benefit from such freebies. Therefore, the war is almost lost before it actually began. In contrast, in a country like Israel, the farmers as well as the domestic water users and industries/municipalities pay for every unit of water used to the national water carrier, and water allocation to farms is rationed volumetrically.

While there has been complete paralysis on the policy front for many years in India’s water sector, the situation with regard to water sector institutions is even more alarming. While water is a state subject in India (for all practical purposes), our water sector line agencies at the state level are cold-hearted towards institutional capacity building. They are in no mood to inject new blood into the system and there are no major recruitment happening. The existing technical staff are not equipped with new tools and techniques and are not even aware of the latest developments in the sector. The technical staff are merely being used to keep track of the implementation of various popular schemes of the governments--implemented with no hydrological planning or technical supervision. The list of such schemes is long. They are not very keen to get advice from well known experts in the field including those who have decorated prestigious positions in the government, though several of them are from India and are also internationally recognised. Instead, the state agencies are after some ‘self-proclaimed water experts’, who are keen to push their pet ideas, which were tested in a village or two, using the government system.

Our Universities and premier academic institutions are not producing sufficient number of trained people to work in the sector, and the number is abysmally low when compared to what the sector requires to face this century’s greatest challenge for the humankind, i.e., water management. In the technical fields (hydraulic engineering, irrigation engineering, water resources management, public health engineering, etc.) very few graduates from well-known institutions stay back in India and explore opportunities here with the government, private institutions and NGOs. Most of the young graduates passing out of these institutions go abroad in search of higher qualification and would not like to return. In the field of economics, very few scholars work on the economics of water in India. Over and above addressing the issue of brain-drain, they need to reorient their research focus to make it more relevant to the practical problems of the real world. There is a critical need for academic institutions to develop good theoretical understandings of the science–policy nexus and strategies for managing the nexus that are capable of enhancing the accountability and policy relevance of scientific research while preserving the core of independent inquiry.

With the weakening of public institutions over time in terms of their analytical abilities, the governments are increasingly coming under pressure to lend their ears to groups from the Civil Society with growing clout. These groups are dominated by ideologues who are known to always take stands against large water infrastructure projects. For instance, they were all against big dams. Yet, until the recent past, the (Union) government had taken them seriously and put them in policy-making bodies, dialogue forums and high-level committees. They were given free hand to design important schemes relating to water, agriculture and rural employment, and decide the government strategies for addressing different challenges, be it tackling droughts, improving agricultural productivity in rainfed areas or provisioning of drinking water supplies in villages. The solutions were pre-determined with no diagnostics of the problems in the sector--water conservation, watershed development, aquifer mapping & groundwater recharge, and earthwork under NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme), and it looked as though they were looking for problems!

Needless to say, they fully endorsed many government actions to solve water scarcity, food insecurity and rural unemployment problems, though they were ill-conceived, short sighted and piecemeal. When delays occurred in implementation of large projects due to protests from the environmental lobby and court cases, often jeopardising the long-term water and food security and overall development, no concerns were expressed by this lobby. The occasional grievance was only about the corruption in the works executed under NREGS, for which also the blame was conveniently put on the government agencies. Such criticisms provided the ‘smokescreen’ for the serious flaws in the conceptual foundations of such schemes.

However, with the change of guard at the central level, these organizations and groups are finding it hard to get a platform to showcase their work, and an audience to voice their views and ideas. They have now become vociferous critics of the strategic shift in the policies made by the new government at the Centre in water sector. 

These Civil Society Organizations now seem to be preparing for the ‘war against water crisis’ solely as suddenly they have lost faith in the government. But the weapons they choose to fight this war are problematic. Instead of taking the help of scientific advancements and technological innovations, they want to go back to medieval and feudalistic ideas--digging of village ponds, building of small check dams, and rejuvenation of traditional water harvesting systems by parading them as artifacts of ‘ancient wisdom’. But these activities are given the democratic flavour by prefixing it with “community participation”. They educate the young professional about the ‘human sufferings caused by large dams in India”, while implanting some of their pet ideas like ‘aquifer mapping’ in them by way of launching new courses in academic institutions where they have found solace after losing hold on the governments. They pay little heed to the fact that in the past many of the schemes which they espoused (like the MGNREGS and National Watershed Development Project) had only created breeding grounds for corruption, helping some rural elite to appropriate the tax payers’ money, rather than solving India’s rural water problems or problems in agriculture.

While some commendable efforts are being made by the country’s Union government to review and revoke the wrong policies and programmes of the past that were essentially outcomes of wishful thinking by a few social activists, there is spontaneous protests from the Civil Society—often it is in the form of “a group of 100 eminent economists writing to the Prime Minister” to continue a scheme or to stop tweaking it. Such reactions show their clear vested interests. Given the fact that the water sector of the country is highly vitiated due to politicising, there is a real challenge before any government to protect the public interest and to make sure that the water agenda for the nation is not hijacked by these interest groups. These interest group won’t subject themselves to scrutiny when things go terribly wrong because accountability is the last thing that can be expected from these interest groups, a virtue which they often demand from the public institutions.

M. Dinesh Kumar is Executive Director of Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy, Hyderabad, India. Email: [email protected]