Shoring up water infrastructure

Water-stressed India needs to shore up its water infrastructure

Much human ingenuity is needed to sustain life in India’s highly variable climate. The highly seasonal pattern of rainfall – 50 percent of precipitation falls in just 15 days and 90 percent of river flows occur in just four months – prompted Indians in the past to develop  great riparian civilizations as well as to forge a plethora of imaginative, community-level methods of water husbandry.   Large as investments in large-scale infrastructure in India have been, by all international comparisons the country remains poorly endowed with such infrastructure. 

India can still store only relatively small quantities of its fickle rainfall. Whereas arid rich countries (such as the United States and Australia) have built over 5,000 cubic meters of water storage per capita, and China can store about 1,000 cubic meters per capita, India’s dams can store only 200 cubic meters per person. Moreover, India can store only about 30 days of rainfall, compared to 900 days in major river basins in arid areas of developed countries.

A review of India’s hydropower infrastructure reveals a similar need for water infrastructure: whereas industrialized countries harness over 80 percent of their economically-viable hydropower potential, in India the figure is only 20 percent, despite the fact that the Indian electricity system is in desperate need of peaking power and despite the fact that Himalayan hydropower sites are, from social and environmental perspectives, among the most benign in the world.

Water, especially in the water-rich northeast of the country, can be transformed from a curse to a blessing only if major investments are made in water infrastructure (in conjunction with “soft” adaptive measures for living more intelligently with floods). Recognizing this, the Prime Minister has recently called for the establishment of “a TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) for the Brahmaputra” which would combine major water infrastructure with modern management approaches to make water a stimulus for growth.

A compounding factor is that there is every indication that the need for storage will grow because global climate change is going to have major impacts in India – there is likely to be rapid glacial melting in coming decades in the western Himalayas, and increased variability of rainfall in large parts of the subcontinent.   With greater variability the need for storage will increase if societal needs are to be met. 

Today India has a capacity to store about 200 billion cubic meters of water, a gross irrigated area of about 90 million hectares, and an installed hydropower capacity of about 30,000 megawatts. These investments in water infrastructure transformed the economic and social development of India. Most obviously and directly, assured supplies of water meant that crop yields on irrigated land were consistently much higher than yields from rainfed agriculture, allowing India to achieve national food security and associated affordability of food.   Hydropower from many of the large dams also provided the underpinnings for Indian industrial growth and groundwater irrigation.

These direct benefits -- irrigation and hydropower -- are only part of the story of the impact of major infrastructure. They, in turn, generate impacts on other industries – through backward linkages with input industries like fertilizer and tractors and through forward linkages with the food processing industry -- as well as fuel the income-linked consumption of general goods and services.

A major study (Economic Benefits and Synergy Effects of the Bhakra Multipurpose Dam, India: A Case Study, Ramesh Bhatia 2005) that assessed the impact of the Bhakra Dam which irrigates 7 million hectares and provides 2,800 MW of hydropower, found that for every 100 rupees of direct benefits, Bhakra generated 90 rupees of indirect benefits for the regional economy and ripples well beyond the region.

And, contrary to widespread perception, it is not the landed few who benefit from these benefits. A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute of the impact of the green revolution in the North Arcot region of Tamil Nadu showed (see figure below) that the biggest winners from the local Green Revolution were the landless whose incomes increased by 125 percent as a result of the large increase in demand for their labor on irrigated lands.

A World Bank study (Indian Irrigation Sector Review, 1991) shows the (figure below) association between poverty and levels of irrigation in 54 national sample survey regions. In irrigated districts the prevalence of poverty is about one-third of that in unirrigated rural districts.

Similarly in Bhakra it was, paradoxically, the landless who were the biggest proportional beneficiaries.  For it was the poor who benefited most from increased demand for labour and from the resulting increases in wage rates.

So at the end of the day, the record is overwhelmingly clear – investments in water infrastructure in India have resulted in massive reductions in poverty, and it is actually the poor and landless who have been the biggest beneficiaries. The appropriate metaphor is not “trickle-down” but a rising tide lifts (almost) all boats”.

It is not just huge water storage infrastructure that is needed; in many parts of the country there are also substantial returns from investments in smaller-scale, community-level water storage infrastructure such as tanks, check dams and local water recharge systems. And there are massive needs for investment in water supply systems for growing cities and for underserved rural populations. India’s cities and industries also need to use water more effectively, and there will have to be massive investments in sewers and wastewater treatment plants.

The need arises also because much of India’s existing infrastructure is crumbling. The implicit philosophy has been aptly described as ‘Build-Neglect-Rebuild’ and so there is an enormous backlog of deferred maintenance. The end result is the familiar sight -- crumbling, rusting, leaking dams, canals and pipes.

However, the water sector is facing a major financing gap. The annual requirements for

rehabilitating existing infrastructure alone is estimated to be around Rs 200 billion while the India Water Vision expects new investments – with very modest allowances for sewage treatment – to cost about Rs 180 billion a year. Annual allocations in the recent past have varied between Rs 90 and Rs 170 billion a year. These needs are amplified by the fact that large proportions of recurrent budgets are spent on personnel, not on real maintenance, and on electricity, irrigation and water supply subsidies. On the “supply side” there are ultimately only two sources of financing – tax revenues and user charges – and both are falling. The resulting financial gap can only be met by a combination of methods which include greater allocations of budgetary resources, more efficient use of those resources, and greater contributions from water users.

But simply building additional infrastructure cannot ameliorate India’s looming water-stress. There is a concomitant need -- described in the recent World Bank report “India’s Water Economy:  Facing a Turbulent Future” -- to ensure that water is managed in a much more flexible, efficient and environmentally sustainable manner.