Water as a catalyst

A recent visit to the Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP) in Turkey illustrates the point. This project, already half complete, envisages the harnessing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (which between them carry a little more water than the Krishna but considerably less than the Godavari) through a combined cascade of 22 dams to irrigate 1.7 m ha of land and generate 27 bn kwh from an installedhydro-electric capacity of 7500 MW.

First envisioned by Kemal Ataturk, the project took its present shape in 1989 with the establishment of the GAP Administration under the Prime Minister’s office which invests it with commanding authority. As germane is the fact that it has been conceived as an integrated regional development project for the all-round uplift of nine provinces in what was the most backward part of Turkey and not just as a large irrigation and hydro-power scheme.

Its charter embraces social development, infrastructure, agricultural improvement (including dryland farming), industrialisation, urbanisation, gender equity and, of course, resettlement and rehabilitation of 181,000 persons. The approach is holistic, bottom-up, participatory. The GAP Administration is charged with conceptualising, implementing, managing and maintaining the entire system with the emphasis being on human development and sustainability.

Southeast Anatolia, at the head of the Fertile Crescent, ranks among the veryoldest cradles of Mesopotamian civilisation products of the Euphrates and Tigris which watered what were, and otherwise still are, remorseless deserts. A faded ancient glory had long given way to poverty and out-migration, GAP seeks to reverse this regression and the results are already there to see.

The GAP programme is estimated to cost $ 32 bn of which $ 17.5 bn had been spent or committed by 1999, $ 2.1 bn of this in foreign assistance and $ 1.5 bn on the Birecik Dam under construction on a build-operate-transfer basis. The entire project is scheduled to be completed by 2010. $ 32 bn is an awful lot of money but just the Karakaya and Ataturk hydro-stations had by 1998 generated 145.60 bn kwh of energy valued at $ 8.7 bn or an energy saving of 36.6 m tonnes of fuel oil or 29.1 bn of natural gas.

Indians need to think about the national and individual opportunity cost of delay in putting off the Sardar Sarovar or Tehri dams for years on end. Bhutan’s Indian-aided Chukha hydro-project (372 MW) startedspinning in 1988 and had paid for itself by 1995. Today 45 per cent of Bhutan’s budgetary revenue comes from this single project. The moral development finances development and (soundly done), human happiness. Government decision-makers too must understand the opportunity costs of inordinate delay. In the name of “saving money” the country is losing a fortune. The Mahakali and Ganga Treaties were signed with great fanfare, and rightly so, in 1996. Little has happened since; not all of it India’s fault by any means but to nobody’s visible political concern here either despite all the talk of national security and attaining higher growth levels.

The GAP project also illustrates the salience of water diplomacy. The Tigris and Euphrates rise in Turkey, but their lower basins lie in Syria and Iraq. GAP’s regulated storage releases (through its turbines) now delivers Syria larger dry season supplies through the Euphrates than before. At one time Syria and Iraq feared the upper riparian might divert flows totheir detriment. The problem has not yet been finally resolved but Syria’s expectations of a minimum guarantee are currently being more than met and it has in turn agreed to let down into Iraq 58 per cent of the Euphrates’ flows crossing its borders from Turkey, Arable land in Anatolia, Syria and Iraq being limited, it should be possible to meet everybody’s consumptive uses from the GAP storages.

Indeed, when the Israeli Prime Minister visited Turkey in October 1999, the Jerusalem Post reported the possibility of his country importing water from Turkey. Syria and Israel are talking not only of the Golan Heights but of water which, regionally managed and conserved, could revive the Fertile Crescent and make the Mesopotamian desert bloom as perhaps never before. Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and even lands further afield could become partners in a historic development-for-peace process.

India has a greater opportunity in its vast Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin and sub-basins with its enormous potentials and direneed. Even nationally, water resource development, whether in the Mahakali, Kosi, Narmada, Mahandi, Krishna or Cauvery basins, should be thought of a fresh as integrated area development programmes with water providing the catalysing element. In the GBM or Indus basins (with an imaginative Indus-II Treaty), the marvel would be not how India transformed itself, but why its leaders did not have the wit to do so earlier.

The Aswan High Dam offers another telling example. Until, it was built it was tenaciously opposed, largely by international critics. Once completed, it has proved Egypt’s saviour and the disasters forecast have been avoided or significantly mitigated. Yet Egypt remains short of water. It is now mixing 2.34 bcm of agricultural waste water irrigation return flows with 2.11 bcm of fresh water from the Nile to irrigate another 420,000 feddans (a feddan being just under an acre). Some 220,000 feddans were brought under irrigation west of the Suez Canal by 1995 through the El Salaam Canal. Thesecond phase of the project, currently under implementation, entails taking the El Salaam Canal through a siphon (completed 1997) under the Suez Canal to irrigate a further 400,000 feddan along the Mediterranean coast of North Sinai.

The cost is estimated at $ 1.41 bn and 750,000 persons will be resettled in 55 villages to farm the land. Contrast the manner in which another transforming project, the Indira Gandhi (Rajasthan) Canal, has been made to drag on for years for paucity of funding.

The notion that large dams are per se bad and that the same results can be achieved in all cases through a combination of watershed management, micro-mini-medium and run-of-the-river hydro schemes and by tapping selective thermal and non-conventional energy sources is entirely fanciful.

These are not mutually exclusive but go together. In the Indian situation, the maximum that the country can do on all fronts is the very least that it should attempt.