When I was a young boy, my parents took me to see the great magician, PC Sorcar, Sr. I remember the show as dazzling, with mystifying disappearances, appearances and other illusions. But the one illusion that has always remained in my mind was Water of India, where Sorcar seemed to fill large numbers of vessels with water from a tiny pitcher. India?s water was abundant; it was mystical; it was the thread running through the show and the country.
Perhaps no more. A report, Charting Our Water Future, by the 2030 Water Resources Group (WRG), suggests that India is the most vulnerable country in the global future where water will be crushingly scarce?unless the right actions begin to be taken now. The report ranks alternative measures to close looming demand-supply gaps. If nothing is done, the potential global gap will be 40% of current projections of accessible, reliable and environmentally sustainable supply. India will have by far the worst shortage, with demand projected to be double the supply in 2030. This could be compounded if climate change accelerates the melting of Himalayan glaciers: the long-run flow decrease could be 30-50% of current levels of water flow.
One way to close the gaps is through rationing demand, which will affect both economic growth and well-being. Avoiding these costs makes sense if the costs of investment in water are lower. Interestingly, India has the greatest opportunities as well as the greatest threats. The largest increase in India?s water demand will come from agriculture and the solutions will also have to be found in the minutiae of that sector?s operations.
The WRG report develops the idea of a water-marginal cost curve, which orders different possible actions according to their incremental costs, as well as showing their potential impacts on closing the demand-supply gap. Not surprisingly, supply augmentation measures like desalination, the National River Linking Project and large dams are among the most costly. But so are rainwater harvesting and smaller dams. In fact, none of these costly measures are necessary in the next 20 years.
The most cost-effective actions for water availability include changing farming methods, reducing over-irrigation, balancing fertiliser and water use better, integrated plant stress management and using drip irrigation. Improvements in infrastructure (rehabilitation and extension) are most cost effective in the last mile. The lesson is clear: fix things at the farm level rather than embarking on large, grandiose projects.
But farm-level solutions require actions to be scaled in a different way, at the system level. Introducing new methods of farming may require changes in crop patterns, supply chains and distribution chains for farm produce. It will certainly require education and training, something India?s moribund agricultural extension system is ill-equipped to provide. Unfortunately, the resources that should be available to state governments for providing complementary infrastructure and extension activities have been used to provide free water and electric power (the latter used to pump up groundwater from ever-increasing depths). Thus, India?s agriculture is probably as inefficient as it could be in its use of water.
The irony is that farmers are not the main beneficiaries of the current political-economic equilibrium. Take the case of Punjab, the major growing region for water-intensive crops such as rice and sugarcane, where historically neither made economic sense (and still would not, were it not for insanely extreme subsidies of water and power). Sugarcane requires mills to be close by. It is the mill owners who are powerful and determine policy. The sellers of fertiliser and pesticides also wield political power. Punjab?s farmers have only the illusion of political clout. They are not poor but neither are they getting richer. They are stuck in the 1970s.
The WRG report admits that it provides just a partial analysis. The complexities of a political economy and institutional reform are beyond its scope. But it shows what might be achieved with the right kind of investments, if political logjams and institutional inertia can somehow be overcome. Achieving this is not magic; it just requires attention to the details of specific agricultural systems, technologies and incentives.
If the political equilibrium in individual states prevents action, the central government can play a role, just as it has done for education and health. There is now a National Policy for Farmers, as well as a National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture. But like other national policy statements, every action is listed as a possibility, without cost-benefit analysis or prioritisation. This is where exercises such as the WRG report can play a crucial role, at least as a starting point. The water of India must not be allowed to become only an illusion.
The author is a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Views are personal