Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [65]
Lal’s specialty is the monsoon system, and he is a crucial player in the IPCC. He says the monsoons are “exhibiting increased variability” with a slight increase in overall precipitation, but in such an erratic fashion that, in combination with bad land management and inadequate attention to water harvesting, the general direction is toward increased desertification and drought despite more rainfall. “Ten years ago I predicted the decline of the winter rains in the north, and already that’s happened,” said Lal in sad exasperation.15
The US intelligence community has also noticed. In February 2010, National Intelligence Director Adm. Dennis C. Blair told Congress, “For India, our research indicates the practical effects of climate change will be manageable by New Delhi through 2030. Beyond 2030, India’s ability to cope will be reduced by declining agricultural productivity, decreasing water supplies, and increasing pressures from cross-border migration into the country.”16
The core issue is water, both its quantity and quality. When the rain comes and how it falls is almost as important as if it falls. In other words, monsoon variability is bad news for Indian farmers. It has a negative effect on crop yields beyond what aggregate and average precipitation data can reveal. In social terms, monsoon variability manifests as increased debt, immiseration, migration, and social conflict.
India’s other source of water is the Himalayan ice pack—the so-called third pole—and it is melting fast. The Himalaya’s 46,298 glaciers hold water in frozen reserve for hundreds of millions of people in Asia. 17 If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase unabated, and world temperatures continue to rise, and these masses of ice completely disappear, the Ganges, Indus, Yamuna, Brahmaputra, and other rivers that traverse the northern Indian plain will become mere seasonal waterways flowing only when the monsoons unleash.18
For example, the Ganges—or Ganga Ma, Hinduism’s most sacred river, the water source for some 500 million people—has a dry-season flow that is 70 percent meltwater from the Gangotri Glacier, a vast channel of ice 5 miles wide and 15 miles long. The Gangotri is shrinking at a rate of 40 yards per year, nearly twice as fast as it was two decades ago.19 This is typical of the “super-rapid decline in the glaciers of the region.”20 The Ganges is now in such serious decline that it is considered among the 10 most endangered rivers of the world.21
In the short term, this Himalayan melting will lead to increased runoff, but in the long term, Asia’s glacier-fed rivers will largely vanish.22 Meanwhile, population and water demand increase: by 2050, India will likely have a population bigger than China’s, and some 900 million of these people will still be working the land.23
Hydraulic States—in Theory and Practice
Back in the village of Jaamni, in Adilabad District, the talk still turns on the issue of water. Some farmers here irrigate from small wells, some from a local river, but most depend primarily on rain, nothing more. They live by the mercy of the monsoon, much of which is kept off the Deccan by the Western and Eastern Ghats. Not far from the village is the almost completely dry river, which the locals simply call the Big Stream. It flows into the Sathnala reservoir, which is the product of a dam built in decades past.
In such a climate, rainwater harvesting and irrigation are essential parts of the landscape. In Andhra Pradesh and Tamul Nadu, most agriculture has traditionally been dependent on water impoundment and storage; “rainfall is diverted, captured, stored, and controlled in a large number of reservoirs,” known locally as tanks, formed by blocking the drainage of natural depressions with