Water and Boko Haram

Water scarcity is often a factor in conflicts, but is India ready to cope with limited water resources?

Most of us in India are only dimly aware of what has been going on in conflict-ridden zones in the world, and even less aware of the underlying reasons for conflict. It took Soli Özel, a Turkish professor from Istanbul who was speaking at a conference organised in Delhi last week by the Ananta Centre, to point to water as an important underlying issue that gave birth to Boko Haram, the violent Islamist group in Nigeria that has resorted to kidnappings and mass killings.

Specifically, Lake Chad used to be the size of Israel. Over the last two or three decades, 95 per cent of the lake has dried up, depriving communities around its periphery of their traditional sources of income from fishing and farming. Refugees from poverty-stricken northeastern Nigeria, which borders the lake, began streaming away from the area years ago, in search of work and a livelihood. That is the area where Boko Haram (which means “Western education is forbidden”) was born, replacing a more moderate version of Islam that had prevailed till then.

Prof Ozel referred also to the role played by successive droughts in Syria, which has been torn by conflict since March 2011. As it happens, the country suffered four droughts in a five-year period to 2010, and various scholars have pointed to the connection between water scarcity and political/military strife.

Peter H Gleick, in a paper for the American Meteorological Society (Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria), refers to “challenges associated with climate variability and change and the availability and use of freshwater” in a list of the causes underlying the Syrian conflict. 

It goes without saying that water scarcity is by no means the only reason for the strife of recent years in Nigeria, Syria and elsewhere, but it has been an important contributory factor that is usually ignored. The question is, what is happening here at home? The unexpected damage done to the standing rabi crop by unseasonal March rain has already caused a crisis in millions of farming families.

Cloudbursts and floods have ravaged the economies of Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir in recent years. Inter-state water disputes have become ever more intractable – between the states of north-western India, including Delhi; Karnataka and Tamil Nadu; Tamil Nadu and Kerala; Telangana and Andhra Pradesh; and so on. Think also India-Pakistan and the Indus waters. 

That the conflicts have a sharper edge in the peninsular part of the country reflects the fact that water resources in the southern states have been more fully used than in the north, while demand for water continues to grow. But, equally, Punjab faces a groundwater crisis that will become more evident over time.

For the country as a whole, per capita water availability has dropped to a third of what it was at Independence – because the population has trebled and we have done little to augment water resources. From being water-abundant, the country is now classified as water-stressed. By the time the population peaks and stabilises in a couple of decades, India will be water-scarce – like Morocco is today. Are we ready for what that might mean?

Most of the water goes into farming, but India has unsustainable cropping patterns that do not reflect limited water availability. There is no (eco)logical reason why water-hungry sugarcane should be one of the principal crops in Maharashtra, or why paddy should be grown in Haryana. India has become the largest exporter of rice in the world, and sees sugar exports as a solution to the domestic glut. But exporting rice and sugar is like exporting water.

If we are to cope with the coming water crisis—an existential challenge if ever there was one—Indian agriculture will have to change. While the Green Revolution was born out of improving the supply of assured irrigation water, in the future crop technology will have to focus on how to grow more with less water.