NEW DELHI/BEIJING: A fight breaks out as student Vikas Dagar jostles with dozens of men, women and children to fill buckets from a water tank truck that brings water twice a week to the village of Jharoda Kalan on the outskirts of New Delhi.
Nineteen hundred miles away, near Xi’an in central China, power-plant worker Zhou Jie stands on the mostly dry bed of the Wei River, remembering when he used to fish there before pollution made the catch inedible.
Dagar and Zhou show the daily struggle with tainted or inadequate water in India and China, a growing shortage that the World Bank says will hamper growth in the two countries. It also is pitting water-intensive businesses such as Intel Corp.’s China unit and bottling plants of Coca-Cola Co. against growing urban use and the 1.6 billion people in China and India who rely on farming for a living.
“Water will become the next big power, not only in China but the whole world,” Li Haifeng, vice president at sewage-treatment company Beijing Enterprises Water Group, said in a telephone interview. “Wars may start over the scarcity of water.”
About 2.4 billion people live in “water-stressed” countries such as China, according to a 2009 report by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit scientific research group. Water scarcity and pollution reduce China’s gross domestic product by about 2.3 percent, the World Bank said in a 2007 report.
Water demand in the next two decades will double in India and rise 32 percent in China, according to the 2030 Water Resources Group, a research collaboration between the World Bank, management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and industrial water users such as Coca-Cola.
China’s 1.33 billion people each have 2,117 cubic meters of water available per year, compared with 1,614 cubic meters in India and as much as 9,943 cubic meters in the United States, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The 1.2 billion people in India, where farmers use 80 percent of available water, will exhaust their fresh-water supplies by 2050 at the current rate, the World Bank estimates.
For Dagar, 21, and the 200 other villagers in Jharoda Kalan, that dearth is already a daily fact of life.
“This is for our drinking and cooking,” he said, pointing to four bucketfuls he won from the fight. “I’ve been waiting for the past hour.”
Southwest China had its worst drought in a century this year, prompting Premier Wen Jiabao to say that the country would face a test to meet its grain output target. The drought affected 24 million people and 16 million acres of arable land, Liu Ning, vice-minister of water resources, said on March 31.
China, with 20 percent of the world’s population and 7 percent of its fresh water, has contaminated 70 percent of its rivers and lakes, while half the cities have polluted groundwater, according to the World Bank. By 2030 China will have a supply shortfall of 201 billion cubic meters unless the government takes steps to control demand, McKinsey partner Martin Joerss in Beijing wrote in an April report.
The Wei river was rated “severely polluted” by the government in 2009, according to a March 2 report in state-run China Daily. That’s forced Zhou to fish instead in pools near the river. The river level has dropped by about three-quarters in some places in the past decade, he said.
The pollution and shrinking rivers are partly a result of China’s rapid industrialization. Economic growth accelerated to 11.9 percent in the first quarter, the fastest pace in almost three years. It is set to reach 10.5 percent this year, according to some estimates.
“China can solve this problem in a way that creates economic value as opposed to economic cost,” said Joerss in an interview. “There is tremendous, though largely untapped, opportunity to meet China’s enormous need for water resources by focusing on better managing demand.”
“Water is a resource under great pressure in China and globally,” said Kenth Kaerhoeg, a spokesman in Hong Kong for Coca-Cola Pacific, which has water recovery systems at its 39 plants in China to reduce consumption. “Economic development, climate change and population growth will increase pressure on freshwater resources in China.”
In March, a panel from the southern Indian state of Kerala recommended suing Coca-Cola bottler Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages for $48 million damages for contamination and “serious depletion” of water in the town of Palakkad. In an April 26 e-mail, the company denied that its plant, shut since March 2004, depleted or tainted the town’s water.
In both China and India, fresh water reserves are unevenly distributed.
Northern China, with cities including Beijing, the capital, has less than a fifth of the country’s fresh water and almost half the population, the World Bank said.
Former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who began trying to address the water issue as early as the 1950s, conceived the South-North Water Diversion Project to carry water along three routes from the Yangtze River to the Yellow River. Construction began in 2003 and has cost more than $5.8 billion so far. The completion date has been pushed back four years to 2014 as costs and environmental concerns mount.
Government proposals in India were no less ambitious. Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2003 appointed a panel to assess building a series of dams and canals that would link rivers to control floods and curtail shortages. The 5-trillion-rupee plan was shelved after protests from environmentalists.
Instead, India has concentrated on conservation. The government has made it mandatory for new houses and condominiums in cities to collect rainwater in water tanks in an effort to curb a decline in groundwater levels.
The Congress-led coalition is also implementing a six-year-old plan to replenish about a million lakes, ponds and water tanks. About 60 percent of India’s arable land still depends on the annual monsoon.
“Water availability has declined to such an extent that many parts of India today face a drought-like situation,” said Sushmita Sengupta, research associate at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
The two countries’ plans don’t always mesh.
When China dammed the Mekong, the largest river flowing into Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all called for greater cooperation to prevent droughts and floods. China also plans a dam in Tibet on the Yarlung Zangbo, the highest major river in the world, which flows into India as the Brahmaputra.
The project would give Beijing control of the water supply to more than 90,000 square kilometers of land controlled by India while China claims sovereignty.
“Water scarcity is probably one of the biggest risks for investors in China and India,” said Lucy Carmody, executive director of Singapore-based investor advisory firm Responsible Research. “There is a lot of potential for border conflicts.”
Arab News - By Bloomberg
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