Indus river

Indus Treaty: India to ‘Assess’ World Bank Setting in Motion Parallel Dispute Resolution Mechanisms

On October 17, the World Bank announced the appointment of Michel Lino as the neutral expert and Sean Murphy as the chairman of the Court of Arbitration regarding the Kishenganga and Ratle hydroelectric power plants.

New Delhi: After the World Bank announced the setting up of two parallel processes to decide the Kishenganga dispute with Pakistan, India on Wednesday gave a guarded response that it will “assess the matter”.

In its first response, India’s Ministry of External Affairs only said it would first look into the implications.

“We have noted the World Bank’s announcement to concurrently appoint a Neutral Expert and a Chair of the Court of Arbitration in the ongoing matter related to the Kishenganga and Ratle projects. Recognising the World Bank’s admission in its announcement that ‘carrying out two processes concurrently poses practical and legal challenges’, India will assess the matter,” said the MEA press note.

As a signatory to the 1960 India-Pakistan Indus Water treaty, the World Bank is the facilitator in establishing the dispute resolution mechanism.

The World Bank’s 2018 factsheet notes that the neighbours disagreed whether the design features of the two 330-megawatt Kishenganga and 850 MW Ratla hydroelectric power plants.

Both the plants are located on tributaries of the Jhelum and Chenab rivers, which are identified as Western rivers to which Pakistan has unrestricted use with some exceptions, per the factsheet. India is permitted to construct hydroelectric power facilities on these rivers, but subject to certain constraints.

After the two countries failed to reach any understanding under the Permanent Indus Commission, Pakistan approached the World Bank to set up a Court of Arbitration to look into its concerns. India, however, asked for the appointment of a Neutral Expert to resolve the dispute.

Unable to reach an understanding, World Bank put a “pause” on the two separate processes “to allow the two countries to consider alternative ways to resolve their disagreements”. “Both processes initiated by the respective countries were advancing at the same time, creating a risk of contradictory outcomes that could potentially endanger the Treaty,” said the multilateral financial institution in December 2016.

Over the next six years, several high-level meetings were convened to find a compromise over a single dispute resolution mechanism, but to no avail.

In March this year, World Bank wrote to India and Pakistan that it had decided to resume the two separate processes. “The World Bank continues to share the concerns of the Parties that carrying out the two appointments concurrently poses practical and legal risks. However, the lack of success in finding an acceptable solution over the past five years is also a risk to the Treaty itself,” it argued.

When announcing the appointment of the experts this week, World Bank reiterated that it “shared” the concern that having two different processes in parallel does lead to “practical and legal challenges”.

It, however, expressed confidence that the “highly qualified experts appointed as Neutral Experts and as members of the Court of Arbitration will engage in fair and careful consideration of their jurisdictional mandate, as they are empowered to do by the Treaty”.

Is the Meghalayan Event a Tipping Point in Geology?

Last week, the International Commission on Stratigraphy approved an additional stage in the geologic timescale overlapping with the Holocene Epoch, called the Meghalayan.

In May 1816, Mary Godwin, her poet husband Percy Shelley and their son travelled to to spend the summer with Lord Byron, perhaps as an antidote to her extreme depression owing to the death of her previous child. The party arrived at Geneva on May 14, and, according to Mary, “It proved a wet, ungenial summer”. She would later remember this as “an incessant rain” that “often confined [them] for days to the house”. It was a year without summer – the final years of the Little Ice Age (LIA), a geological event that had begun around 1,400 CE, coincident with the massive eruption of an Indonesian volcano April 5, 1815. That eruption spewed so much dust into the upper atmosphere that it reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface for the next fifty years, precipitating unusually cold temperatures around the world.

Thanks to climatic vagaries, Mary Godwin, having forced to spend most of her vacation time indoors, was probably in a disconcerting mental state to have written the grotesque tale of Frankenstein while on the banks of Geneva Lake, encouraged from the sidelines by the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. The LIA was the most recent global geological event to have impacted human society. At the final phase of this event, there were famines across the world – including the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, which killed more than 10 million people living in the lower Gangetic Plains.

Climate change is a popular term now but is generally associated with global warming caused by humans. However, geological history shows us that the climate has warmed as well as cooled, motivated by natural forces. For example, the LIA was a change in the climate regime following the previous Medieval Warm Period (MWP), which had lasted for several centuries and during which Earth was warmer. Such natural forces include changes in solar irradiance and changes in the orientation of the Earth in relation to its orbit. A combination these factors led to a long ice age further back in time, about two million years ago.

On the geologic time scale (GTS), this period is called the Pleistocene Epoch. It was succeeded by the Holocene, the epoch in which we live, starting from about 11,000 years ago to the present. Events like the LIA and the MWP are relatively smaller climatic incursions in the Holocene, an interglacial period marked by receded glaciers.

Also read: ‘A Brief History of Earth’ – A series exploring the natural history of our planet

The GTS, sometimes named after some type stratigraphic sections, stretches all the way back to Earth’s formative years, and is a system that defines the timing and relationship of events that have occurred during our planet’s 4.6-billion-year history. British names were more dominant GTS terms in the early period of its development but gave way to more global representation as geological prospecting spread far and wide. For example, the Jurassic (named for rocks deposited 200 million years ago in which dinosaurian fossils were preserved) refers to some type of section reported from the Jura Mountains on the France-Switzerland border.

Generally, the GTS is divided into four great chunks known as eras: from the oldest to the youngest, they are the Precambrian, the Palaeozoic (meaning ‘old life’), the Mesozoic (middle life) and the Cenozoic (recent life). These four eras are further into numerous subgroups called periods, or systems, and sometimes more finely as stages or ages. Last week, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) approved an additional stage, or a phase, in the GTS overlapping with the Holocene Epoch, the current stretch of geological time, called the Meghalayan. The name is from the northeastern state of India, where a stalagmite within a cave was found that purportedly contained the type evidence for a major global climatic incursion around 4,200 years ago.

This new addition is to appear in all official charts of the GTS, along with two other new phases – the Greenlandian (11,700-8,326 years ago) and the Northgrippian (8,326-4,250 years ago), marking the sudden outbreak of freezing temperatures within the Holocene – identified based on ice cores recovered from Greenland. The proposal to divide the Holocene Epoch into several smaller phases has been in the works for the last decade or so. Several formal bodies of geologists have whetted this proposal in the past before it could become part of the formal GTS scale.

The late Holocene subdivision called the Meghalayan Stage marks the beginning of a mega-drought that impacted Eurasia and affected several ancient societies as a 4.2-kiloyear event. The art of finding this golden spike on the stalagmite, a calcium carbonate column formed from water drops trickling down from cave roofs, depends on the ability to interpret the oxygen isotope values from precisely dated slices of the specimens (using the uranium-thorium method). The ratio of oxygen isotope reflects the ups and downs of rainfall: the more rainfall there was, the less oxygen-18 isotope there would be in the sample.

For example, in a scientific paper published in 2012, geologists studied a high-resolution stalagmite oxygen-isotope record (spanning the early and mid-Holocene) from northeast India and suggested that the most dramatic of these events – i.e. shift in rainfall patterns – occurred about 4,000 years ago. They could conclude thus because the isotope amounts rose abruptly and remained at this level state for almost two centuries. This event appears to have been synchronous with climatic changes documented in a number of proxy records across North Africa, the Middle East, the Tibetan Plateau, southern Europe and North America. It is likely that these changes may have led either to the deterioration or the reorganisation of the Indus and Nile civilisations.

Also read: A story of monsoons and the Indus civilisation, teased out of ancient rock

It has also been suggested that the de-urbanisation of the Indus Valley took place around 3,900 years before today, more as a consequence of the multiple monsoonal shifts before the rains returned to their stable mid-Holocene state. Jared Diamond, who analysed human societies in his book Collapse (2005), has written, “In many historical cases, a society that was depleting its environmental resources could absorb the losses as long as the climate was benign but then driven over the brink of collapse when climate became drier, colder, hotter, wetter or more variable.”

We still do not know how the Anthropocene – the yet-to-be formalised new geological era in which the human species becomes the dominant force of change – overlaps with the Meghalayan Stage. While the year 1950 (in the post-nuclear-testing period) could be considered to be a marker beyond which accelerated human impact is evident and is therefore likely to be the start of the Anthropocene era, critics think that such a perspective exposes a “western, white-male, elite-technocratic narrative of human engagement with the environment”. It is well-known that human activities over the past 10,000 years caused mass extinctions and changed the distribution of fauna and flora (e.g. the woolly mammoths were driven to extinction by human hunting).

Rather than being a mere branch of the Darwinian evolutionary tree, the Homo sapiens are becoming central to the evolutionary and environmental future of Earth itself. One point of view is that the sub-divisions of the Holocene Epoch should have been made after we reached a more transparent definition of the ‘Anthropocene’. Critics believe now that the ICS has trivialised the Anthropocene by cutting the Holocene up into smaller pieces. There will be more fireworks, for sure, at the 36th International Geological Congress to be held in Delhi in March 2020.

Or does it matter… because what’s in a name? Remember what Juliet told Romeo.

C.P. Rajendran is a professor of geodynamics at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru.

India a ‘Hotspot’ of Freshwater Overuse, Satellite Data Says

A NASA report noted that groundwater extraction for irrigation of wheat and rice crops has caused a rapid decline in available water in India’s north.

The overuse of water resources has caused a serious decline in the availability of freshwater in India, according to a study that used an array of NASA Earth-observing satellites to reach its conclusion.

Scientists led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US used data on human activities to map locations where freshwater is changing around the globe.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that Earth’s wetland areas were getting wetter and dry areas were getting drier due to a variety of factors, including human water management, climate change and natural cycles.

Areas in northern and eastern India, the Middle East, California and Australia were identified as ‘hotspots’ where the overuse of water resources had set the availability of freshwater back, The Guardian had reported.

In northern India, groundwater extraction for irrigation of wheat and rice crops has caused a rapid decline in available water, despite rainfall being normal throughout the period studied, the report noted.

Its authors said, “The fact that extractions already exceed recharge during normal precipitation does not bode well for the availability of groundwater during future droughts.”

Also read: The Indus and Ganges-Brahmaputra basins are drying up faster than we’d like

They used 14 years of observations from the US/German-led Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft mission to track freshwater trends in 34 regions around the world.

“This is the first time that we have used observations from multiple satellites in a thorough assessment of how freshwater availability is changing everywhere on Earth,” Matt Rodell, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, said.

On land, freshwater is one of the most essential of Earth’s resources, for drinking water and agriculture. While some regions’ water supplies were relatively stable, others experienced increases or decreases. “What we are witnessing is major hydrologic change,” said Jay Famiglietti, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.

“We see a distinctive pattern of the wet land areas of the world getting wetter – those are the high latitudes and the tropics – and the dry areas in between getting dryer. Embedded within the dry areas we see multiple hotspots resulting from groundwater depletion,” he continued.

While noting that water loss in some regions, like the melting ice sheets and alpine glaciers, is clearly driven by warming climate, Famiglietti said more time and data will be needed to determine the forces driving other patterns of freshwater change.

Water for Over 50 Million in Pakistan Contains Dangerous Levels of Arsenic

‘It may be the size of the Asian rivers, large because they drain the Himalayas, that makes the pollution so prominent.’

“It may be the size of the Asian rivers, large because they drain the Himalayas, that makes the pollution so prominent.”

The Indus river in Kashmir – not so pristine? Credit: maxos_dim/pixabay

Lakshmi Supriya is a freelance science writer based in Bengaluru.

In vintage crime novels, there is often somebody murdered by slow poisoning, and arsenic has been a common weapon of choice. It works the same way in your body – slowly killing you – if it is present in the water you drink beyond a certain threshold. This is why it’s disturbing that, according to a new study, the groundwater along the densely populated Indus river basin in Pakistan is severely contaminated with arsenic, putting the health of over 50 million people at risk.

Arsenic occurs naturally in Earth’s crust. It is used by humans in some alloys in car batteries and semiconductors, as well as to make some pesticides and herbicides. Certain inorganic compounds that contain arsenic are highly toxic. Exposure in small doses causes headaches, dizziness, diarrhoea and changes in skin colouration. When the poisoning becomes acute, convulsions, vomiting and muscle cramps can be caused. Prolonged exposure to arsenic affects various organs – including the lungs, skin and the kidneys – leading to various types of cancers and ultimately death. Arsenic in the soil accumulates in plants, especially in leafy vegetables and apples, and may inhibit plant growth. However, it is at its deadliest to humans when it pollutes groundwater used for drinking or irrigation. It has been estimated that about 200 million people worldwide use such arsenic-contaminated water.

Investigations into the quality of groundwater from the previous decade have revealed that the large river basins in South Asia contain harmful levels of arsenic. The Ganga-Brahmaputra delta in India and Bangladesh and the Red River basin in Vietnam are greatly affected.

The effects of drinking arsenic-contaminated water in India emerged most prominently in the early 1980s in West Bengal and, over time, in other states in the Gangetic plains, such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and in the Brahmaputra basin, including in Assam and Manipur.

The areas usually affected are low-lying, where the movement of water is slow and its flow carries a large amount of sediments. This reduces the amount of oxygen available in the water, which forms the stable and more water-soluble compound arsenite. Once the oxygen levels begin to drop, arsenic is released from the sediments and into the water, and increasing its concentration in groundwater. “It may be the size of the Asian rivers, large because they drain the Himalayas, that makes the pollution so prominent,” John McArthur, a geochemist at University College London who has been studying arsenic contamination around the world, told The Wire.

While several small-scale studies have found that the groundwater in several areas in Pakistan is loaded with arsenic, the full extent of the problem has remained out of focus. “The original motivation for the country-wide sampling campaign came about from wanting to identify the full scope of the arsenic contamination problem in the country, which is what our study has accomplished,” Joel Podgorski, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Switzerland, and the lead author of the new study, told The Wire.

Between 2013 and 2015, the researchers collected more than 1,100 water samples throughout the country from both household pumps and municipal and agricultural tube wells, and analysed these samples for arsenic and other elements. Using this and previously published data, along with hydrological and topographical data for the country, they were able to visualise the full extent of the problem.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 10 micrograms of arsenic per litre of water is hazardous to health. Pakistan’s official guidelines recommend an upper limit of 50 micrograms per litre of drinking water.

Podgorski and colleagues found that the water was heavily contaminated along multiple points of the Indus. As it made its way across the length of Punjab (especially along the banks of the tributaries Ravi and Sutlej), entered northern Sindh and emptied into the Arabian Sea south of Karachi, arsenic levels frequently crossed the 50 micrograms mark. In northern Sindh, a cluster of samples showed more than 200 micrograms of the metal per litre of water. Beyond the plains watered by the river and its tributaries, the arsenic levels were within safe limits.

According to Podgorski, there are several reasons the Indus basin is so plagued by arsenic – apart from the river’s sluggish flow in the plains, which causes arsenic to accumulate in aquifers. The sediments being washed out from the Himalayas are still relatively young, less than 10,000 years old. Compared to older sediments that would have already leached out their arsenic from the sediments, these have been exposed to the environment only recently, and are still in the process of releasing their arsenic into the water.

Specifically, they found a strong correlation between high arsenic concentrations and the pH of the soil. A higher pH causes arsenic to be released easily from the sediments and into the water. It may be possible that in the arid central plains of Pakistan, the highly alkaline soil (corresponding to higher pH) enhances the release of arsenic from the sediments, especially to water near the surface, which could then migrate to deeper sources.

“The fact that irrigation correlates highly with arsenic contamination in the Indus valley leads us to speculate that it may be contributing to – but not exclusively causing – the problem by raising the pH of the soil through evaporation and transporting the released arsenic to the aquifer depth,” Podgorski explained.

The study estimates that the high level of contamination puts about 50-60 million people living along the Indus basin in the Sindh and Punjab provinces, including the densely populated cities of Lahore and Hyderabad, at risk of drinking toxic water.

“For those living within the Indus Plain, their water supply should be tested for arsenic, since not all wells in this area are contaminated,” Podgorski said. “In fact, contamination can be so heterogeneous that wells within the same village can have both safe and unsafe concentrations of arsenic. Only once all of the wells have been tested is it possible to know from which wells it is safe to take drinking water.” Once toxic wells have been identified, either that well should be closed or arsenic filters should be installed.

But despite the scale of the problem, both Podgorski and McArthur agree that the contamination will not spread to any new areas, as rivers only flow downhill. However, McArthur said that arsenic-rich water can spread to more areas within the same basin at a rate of a few sq. metres per year in the big delta and alluvial plains.

The extent of the problem today is significant and affects a large number of people, and McArthur says that the first step in helping the affected people is for the government to recognise that there is a problem. Once it does, then it could help ensure that people get piped water from local arsenic-free wells or from contaminated sources that have been treated.

Modi Should Not Play Politics With the Indus When the Basin Faces Ecological Problems

The region’s river dolphins and mangrove forests are suffering as India and Pakistan plan projects to maximise their water usage.

South Asian river dolphin, found in the Indus basin. Credit: Youtube screenshot

While making a speech in poll-bound Punjab, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “the fields of our farmers must have adequate water. Water that belongs to India cannot be allowed to go to Pakistan… [the] government will do everything to give enough water to our farmers”. He then went on to say, “we formed a task force on [the matter of the] Indus Water Treaty (IWT) to ensure [that the] farmers of Punjab and other states get each drop of water due to them”. This task force was formed after tensions between India and Pakistan escalated in the aftermath of the Uri attack. The government has since taken steps to maximise its use of the water drawn from the three western rivers – Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – included in the treaty. In order to achieve this, the government will accelerate its implementation of a plan to provide irrigation for 1.3 million acres of land, as allowed under the treaty. It will also renew efforts to harness hydroelectric power from the rivers, which have the potential to produce 18,600 MW in Jammu and Kashmir.

India and Pakistan’s planned water usage

According to India’s Water Resource Information System website, the utilisable quantity of the Indus basin’s surface water in India is 46,000 MCM, out of which the water resource ministry’s report states that the current live storage capacity is 16568.43 MCM. The same report also states that there are 70 existing or ongoing major and medium irrigation projects, half of which are in Jammu and Kashmir. Additionally, at present, the basin has 55 hydro-electric projects, 39 dams, 13 barrages, 18 weirs, 18 major and 43 medium command areas and canal networks.

Although, the above-stated information was in a chapter titled ‘Surface Water Resources’, the report made no mention of surface water biodiversity. In fact, most of the speeches, articles and reports which present figures on the unharnessed potential of hydropower or irrigation projects say nothing about the corresponding potential of ecological harm or biodiversity loss.

Pakistan also suffers from a similar problem. So intense is the network of dams, reservoirs, barrages and canals in the country that the amount of freshwater that flows from the Indus into its delta has steadily dwindled and now struggles to meet even the minimal quantity needed for the region. When the IWT was signed, the Indus’ freshwater flow amounted to 150 million acre-feet (MAF) per year, then it fell to 20 MAF in 1991 and was then further reduced to 10 MAF under the 1991 inter-provincial water accord.

The problem of anthropogenic intervention

Undoubtedly the states are not acting in a vacuum. Agriculture is a water intensive activity in both the states and with falling groundwater levels the demand for surface water irrigation is increasing and has to be met through river water. The increasing population, coupled with rapidly developing urban centres that is resulting in a rise in domestic water consumption is also concerning. Add to this the skyrocketing demand for energy and the urge to ‘harness the hydroelectric potential’ appears highly lucrative.

The core problem is not the anthropogenic intervention in itself, but how those interventions have been, and are still, being made. Himanshu Kulkarni and Mihir Shah, who authored an article titled ‘Punjab Water Syndrome’, observed that “Punjab water syndrome can be seen as a classic case study of the consequences of the engineering-construction-extraction-centred approach, based on control over nature, which has dominated India’s water resource development since Independence.” Academicians such as Daanish Mustafa and Majed Akhter, who write on hydro-politics in Pakistan, have also noted that the state machinery believes that “megaprojects are a solution for the state’s water woes”, “water gets wasted by being allowed to flow out to the sea” and “political meddling on purely engineering issues are unnecessary”. Clearly, a one-dimensional engineering-centred approach appears to be the hallmark of water governance in India as well as Pakistan.

Public figures such as Ashish Nandy and Vandana Shiva have alluded to the violence of science in the past and those references need to be recalled here. Shiva has argued that while science offers ‘technological’ fixes for social and political problems, it always delinks itself from the new ones it creates in their place. This de-linkage elevates science above society’s level. Nandy has argued that this protection of science from social criticism is achieved by creating a division between science and technology. This frame of thought continues to persist even now and so one technological failure is replaced by yet another technological solution without anyone asking basic questions about the process or its impact. This proliferation of technological solutions creates a smog that obscures the ecological impacts of such projects.

The neglected ecological issues in the Indus basin

Given the ecological neglect under both governments, I present here three issues related to the Indus and its larger ecosystem to shed more light on the ecological condition of the Indus waters.

Indus River dolphins which were once common throughout the Indus river system, primarily in Pakistan, have become the second most threatened river dolphin species in the world. The fragmentation of their habitat is widely attributed to the construction of numerous dams and barrages on these rivers. Over the years, extensive fishing and water pollution have added to the dolphins’ misery and now they can only be found in a very narrow zone in Pakistan, with some rare sightings in Indian Punjab.

The region’s wetlands have been considered an important part of the complex river ecosystem for providing the habitat to support the region’s biodiversity, assisting in flood control, mitigating climate change and so on. The wetlands in Kashmir used to be interlinked and connected with the Jhelum river and were instrumental for storing excess water and preventing floods. However, over the last century half of the water bodies in and around Srinagar have disappeared. Urban planners‘ treatment of wetlands as wastelands and their disregard for the hydrological stability the wetlands provide has not only impacted the region’s biodiversity but has also contributed to higher instances of inundation, a compelling example being the 2014 Kashmir floods.

Mangrove forests have played a critical role in providing a habitat to support the rich biodiversity of the area and subsistence to local communities. However, as a result of the fall in freshwater flows due to the damming of rivers and other practices of diverting water, these have been severely damaged. The area occupied by the mangrove forests continues to decline, with the current rate of disappearance being 2% per annum, making the forests a critically endangered ecosystem. One immediate result of this is the visible increase in seawater intrusion, which has eroded the rich plant diversity of the forests.

Policymakers need to understand that the environment has an intrinsic value for which it needs to be preserved. More importantly, it has immense instrumental value as it maintains ecological balance and is a source of livelihood for local communities. While the challenges emerging for the polity and society in the form of an agricultural crisis, low food security, water scarcity and climate change are daunting, prioritising engineering solutions over solutions that emerge from other critical viewpoints might only prove useful in the short run. Both India and Pakistan urgently need to reorient the institutional structure of water governance in both countries and instead seek integrated and holistic solutions to such problems. In this light, Modi’s comment about water usage really ought to ring alarm bells for those concerned about the environment in the Indus basin.

Raj Kaithwar is a research associate on a joint project of the South Asian University and WWF Pakistan on transboundary water governance between India and Pakistan.