Type: Article

水资源对亚洲新兴大国构成挑战 ——下篇

班加罗尔：至今年7月，雨季已在这块次大陆的大部分区域驻足很久。在漫长、酷热的夏日，各国往往都屏住呼吸、翘首盼望一场带来清凉和生机的雨，这种渴望已不再那么强烈。不过，这一地区的16亿人们知道，明年夏天这种担忧还会回来。

从根本上说，水是一种有限的资源。对于所有的有限资源来说，我们始终需要对它们进行可持续的、公正的管理，控制需求，改善供应效率，并开发替代品。然而，与这一宝贵资源相关的社会文化信仰和价值观等让上述做法变得复杂。

如今，印度政治中主导的问题是自然资源管理的争议，尤其在土地征用方面。虽然经济自由化已经实行20多年，但是在土地转让的管理和规范框架方面还未曾有任何澄清或达成一致意见。土地转让是不可避免的，是印度从一个以家庭和农业为主的经济转向混合型的全球化经济所必需的。

在印度，土地之争常年都有，到处皆是，然而，重头戏是即将到来的水资源之争。与土地资源 相似，水资源也面临缺少法律和政策共识的情形。在南方的喀拉拉邦（Kerala），一个团体已起诉可口可乐公司，指控该公司过度使用资源，造成土地含水层 枯竭。在北方的查蒂斯加尔邦（Chhatisgarh）的塞奥纳特河（Sheonath River），一份《辐射区水域合同》（Radius Water contract）的签署使得该河流的一段水域被私有化，为此，人们开始了长期的抗议。因为农业用水被用于城市供水，农村和城市的团体陷入了争斗，更不用 说各邦之间因为共享河流水域而出现的大规模冲突。

印度国家规划委员会（The Planning Commission of India）已反复警示说，今后印度的水资源问题会比土地或能源问题更加严重。在筹划印度第十二个五年计划过程中，该委员会会已着手进行广泛的咨询活动， 以期更好地管理水资源。然而，取得共识并且执行措施仍旧是巨大的挑战，因为印度的水资源并不受联邦宪法约束，而是由各邦管辖。

各邦地下水开采情况：条形图显示的是，地下水开采量占地下水补给量的百分比。地图：美国宇航局（NASA）/马特•罗德尔(Matt Rodell)。美工：黛比•坎波利（Debbie Campoli）/耶鲁全球Enlarge Image

与此同时，印度也许需要为长期的淡水短缺做好准备。它是全世界最潮湿的国家之一，年均降 雨量达1170毫升，年总水资源量约四万亿立方米，其中超过四分之一是可利用的。由于人口高速增长，水资源消耗不断增加，人均可用水量——水资源危机的指 标之一——几年来已稳步减少。如果不加选择地对河流和地下含水层进行开采，不对水资源补给和再生进行充分思考，印度在这个十年内会正式成为水资源紧张的国 家，年人均可用水量将跌至1700立方米的通用指标以下。在纯粹的以人为本的立场之外，认识到水本身是大自然中的重要元素这一点是很重要的。

对水的过度开采和过度使用已经对环境造成了毁灭性影响。海洋健康正在恶化，严重污染的水 体已无法让水生生物存活，有些河流再也不能入海，等等。这些后果意味深远。水是经济赖以存在的生态基础的决定性因素。为了保护生态和经济，印度需要有国家 战略，把水资源问题放在发展规划和实施的中心。

正如各国讨论用低碳经济来降低对化石燃料的依赖、减少气候变化带来的威胁，印度必须开创一种低水经济，从而保障未来发展、履行对未来子孙后代的责任。

低水经济的原则应该是，水应当尽量以自然状态留存在环境中。每取用一滴水都必须是合理的。使用过的每一滴水都必须被回收，并且在可重新利用的时候再次利用。

接受这一原则意味着水资源利用的三个主要方面——农业、工业和家庭——面临诸多挑战。而这每一个方面都提供了创造性的机会，让人们在追求经济可持续性的同时，重新定义目前社会与自然世界之间令人担忧的关系。

农业用水如今占用水总需求的80%以上。有多种方式可以使每滴水生产更多的作物，减少水 足迹。这些想法并不是新的，但需要重提，因为需要通过政策、资助和知识生产来更好地实施这些想法。印度必须坚持把农民利益放在核心位置，切断廉价电力和农 田水浪费的联系；激励农田节水技术；合理规划农作物的生产、采购和出口。一些研究表明，目前水以存在于牛奶、丝绸和棉花等产品中的虚拟水的形式，从水资源 稀缺地区转移至水资源丰富地区。这为重新思考虚拟水贸易，以逆转不公平趋势提供了机会。农产企业有经济刺激来提高整个供应链的用水效率，政府政策必须得到 企业的服从。

消费者也可以通过做出明智的选择来支持低水农业。他们可以在一系列健康的、生长过程中耗水很少或非常抗旱的黍类和其他粮食作物中做出选择。在强大的政策支持和领导下，这种意识会像滚雪球那样迅速增强。

工业作为低水经济中的一部分，发挥着关键的作用。工业的用水需求应该来自目前的农业来 源。能源领域是主要的耗水领域，必须为减少水足迹设置明确的目标。其他的工业部门如果污染淡水水体，将不能逃脱惩罚。激励措施必须是一致的，让污染水体或 者把水用于环境、生命和生活以外的用途变得更加困难。低水经济的愿望可有助于开战受到民众欢迎的、保护印度河流的运动。

农村家庭用水几乎没有减少的空间。政府的标准是每天每人使用约55升水，而人们一天至少需要50升水，用于饮用、烹饪和洗澡。总之，每家每户都应该有管道供水和卫生设施，这可以改善公共卫生指标，降低新生儿死亡率。

在市区，重新思考的范围很广。城市对水资源和供应系统管理不善，缺乏公平性、可靠性和供 应的充分性。在德里，人均可利用水量从36升每天到400升每天不等。尽管神圣的亚穆纳河（Yamuna）就在市区附近流淌，首都为了生产更多的水，从数 百公里之外的水源取水进行生产，花费了大量的不可挽回的成本。废水没有得到处理，以便再利用。而且在许多人还在为基本的生活权利做斗争时，德里市也没有对 水源消耗的精英人士进行任何惩罚。

如果国家首都带头对水进行不负责任的管理，其他城市会照样执行。未来三十年，当三亿印度 人涌入城镇时，这些城市将不得不重新设计供水服务。他们必须采用综合性的方法，从源头到水池的整个过程来管理城市用水，在使用外部水源之前先使用当地水 源，确保亲贫政策，采取分散的方式，鼓励在非饮用需求等方面使用回收利用的废水。班加罗尔在有些方面已经领先一步，包括推行一项亲贫政策来确保所有人都有 基本生活用水，按照用量收费的做法，以及对私人挖掘的水井收取额外费用的做法。另外一些挑战是优化雨水，再生湖泊，重复利用废水以降低对外部水源的依赖。

如果不推行积极措施，水会成为制约印度的全面和可持续发展的因素。幸运的是，虽然水是有限的，它却是无限地可再生的。现在印度必须更新它古老的智慧，进行更经济地种植，同时减少水的使用足迹。

PDF
Yale Global

Water Challenges Asia’s Rising Powers – Part II

By July this year, the monsoon has established itself vigorously over much of the subcontinent. The anxieties of the long, intense summer months, when nations hold their collective breath in anticipation of the cooling, life-giving rain, have receded. But the region’s1.6 billion people know that next summer, the worres will return.

Water is ultimately a finite resource. With all finite resources, there is a continuous need for sustainable and equitable management, by capping demand, improving efficiencies in supply and developing substitutes. This exercise is complicated by the sociocultural beliefs, values and affinities around this precious resource.

Currently, Indian politics is dominated by controversies over natural-resource management, particularly land acquisition. Although economic liberalization is more than two decades old, there’s little clarity or consensus on the governance and regulatory frameworks for the inevitable land transfers needed for the transition from a primarily domestic and agricultural economy to a mixed and globalized one.

Widespread and perennial conflicts over land are a curtain raiser to the coming conflicts over water, a sector that faces a similar lack of legal and policy consensus. Already, in the southern state of Kerala, a community has sued the Coca-Cola Company for depleting its aquifers. At the Sheonath River in the northern state of Chhatisgarh, there has been sustained protest against the privatization of a stretch of river through a Radius Water contract. Rural and urban communities battle over diversion of agricultural water for urban water supply, not to mention mega-conflicts among states over sharing river waters.

The Planning Commission of India has repeatedly warned that water will become a more serious issue than land or energy for India in the years to come. Preparing for India’s 12th Five Year Plan, the commission has taken up a wide consultation to better govern water resources. But consensus and implementation remain huge challenges, especially since water is a state and not a federal subject under its Constitution.

Groundwater Withdrawal By States: Bar shows groundwater withdrawals as a percentage of groundwater recharge.Map: NASA/Matt Rodell. Enchancement: Debbie Campoli/YaleGlobal.Enlarge Image
Meanwhile, India may have to ready itself for perennial freshwater shortages. The country is among the wettest in the world, with an average annual rainfall of 1170 milimeters and total water resources of around 4000 billion cubic meters per year. Of this total, a little more than a quarter is pegged as usable. With India’s high rate of population growth and intensifying water consumption, per capita availability of water, one of many indicators of an oncoming crisis, has declined steadily over the years. Thanks to indiscriminate withdrawal from rivers and underground aquifers, without adequate thought to recharge and regeneration, India could become an officially water-stressed country within this decade, dipping below the common indicator of 1700 cubic meters per person per year. Going beyond a merely human-centric position, it’s critical to understand that water is a key element of nature in its own right.

Over-extraction and abuse of water has had a devastating impact on the environment. Ocean health is deteriorating, badly polluted water bodies can no longer support aquatic life, some rivers no longer reach the sea, and so on. Such setbacks have many implications. Water is a defining factor of the ecological base on which the economy rests. To protect both the ecology and the economy, India needs a national strategy to place water at the heart of development planning and implementation.

Just as countries talk of a low carbon economy to reduce fossil fuel dependency and reduce the threats of climate change, India must create a low-water economy to secure its future and fulfill responsibility to future generations.

A low-water economy should rest on the principle that water be left in its natural state in the environment as much as possible. Every drop extracted must be justified. Every drop used must be recycled and reused whenever possible.

Accepting this principle poses many challenges for the three major sectors of water use – agriculture, industry and domestic. Each sector offers creative possibilities to help redefine society’s troubled relationship with the natural world alongside the pursuit of economic sustainability.

In agriculture, which currently accounts for more than 80 percent of the water demand, there are several ways to produce more crops per drop and generally reduce the water footprint. These ideas are not new, but bear repetition as they require a deeper commitment through policy, financing and knowledge generation. Keeping farmer interests at the core, India must sever the link between cheap power and water wastage on farmland; incentivize water-saving technologies on the farm; and rationalize production, procurement and export of crops. Some studies have shown that water currently moves from water-scarce regions to water-rich regions through the virtual water embedded in products such as milk, silk and cotton. This provides an opportunity to rethink virtual water trade to reverse inequitable trends. Agro-businesses have economic incentives to increase water efficiency throughout their supply chain, and government policy must pursue compliance.

Consumers, too, can make intelligent choices to support low-water agriculture. They can select among an array of healthy millets and other food crops grown with little water and remarkably drought-resistant. Awareness could snowball with strong policy support and leadership.

Industry has a crucial role as a partner in a low-water economy. Industry’s water needs should come from current agricultural sources. The energy sector, a major water guzzler, must set clear goals for reducing its water footprint. Other industrial players can no longer pollute freshwater bodies with impunity. Incentives must be aligned, making it more difficult to pollute or draw water away from environmental, lifeline and livelihood needs. The popular movement to protect India’s rivers can be fuelled by the vision of a low-water economy.

The rural domestic sector has little room for cutbacks. The government’s own norms suggest about 55 liters per capita in use per day, and people need at least 50 liters a day for drinking, cooking and bathing. If anything, all homes should have piped water supply and sanitation, which could improve public-health indicators and reduce infant mortality.

In urban areas, the scope for rethink is huge. Cities mismanage water resources and supply systems with little equity, reliability or adequacy of supply. In Delhi, per capita availability can vary from 36 to 400 liters per day. Notwithstanding the mighty Yamuna flowing in its backyard, the capital incurs a huge unrecoverable cost of production for additional water sourced from hundreds of kilometers away. Little is done to treat wastewater for reuse. Nor does Delhi penalize water-consuming elites as others struggle for basic lifeline rights.

If the national capital leads in irresponsible water management, others will follow suit. When 300 million more Indians pour into 5000 cities and towns in the next three decades, municipalities will have to redesign water services. They must adopt an integrated approach to urban water from source to sink, using local water before making demands on external water, ensuring a pro-poor policy, taking a decentralized approach, encouraging use of recycled wastewater for non-potable needs and so on. Bangalore has led in some areas, including the introduction of a pro-poor policy to ensure that no one is denied access to basic water, together with volumetric tariffs and a surcharge on private bore wells. The next set of challenges is to optimize rainwater, regenerate lakes and reuse wastewater to reduce dependence on external sources.

If initiatives are not pushed forward, water will become the constraining factor in the quest for inclusive and sustainable growth. Luckily, water, though finite, is infinitely renewable. India must now renew its ancient wisdom to grow economically while reducing its water use footprint.

Yale Global
PDF

Skills vs. Passion: The Challenges for Corporate Professionals Who Move into the Social Sector

Professionals “are very impatient to scale, and don’t realize that in the social sector, what to scale is more critical than how to scale,” says Rohini Nilekani, philanthropist and founder of Arghyam, a Bangalore-based NGO. Corporate professionals, Nilekani adds, tend to have a strong and mistaken belief in the power of the markets to solve social problems. “But both the market and the state have failed, and that is why the philanthropic and the social sectors are there in the ?rst place,” she points out.

View PDF

Freedom At High Noon – The great leap created wealth for some. Public policy must spread it evenly.

INDIA’S shift towards a market economy was like a volcanic eruption, the lava of which is still spreading through society. Its impact, along with globalisation, has greatly benefited many people, but especially those who already had significant advantages created for them by the erstwhile^ more socialist regime The urbanising middle class of the 1960s and 1970s had schools, hospitals, roads, energy services, even cultural institutions—all created by the state, or under its aegis.

View PDF

Microfinance, Macro Trends

The macro crisis in the microfinance sector may not get resolved anytime soon. But it is a symptom of a much larger trend moving through the country.

The Indian microfinance model developed differently from that in its original home in Bangladesh. It took root with self-help groups (SHGs) set up in Karnataka by Myrada, with NABARD’s support, back in the early 1980s. These affinity groups created a social glue among poor women which allowed them not only to offer their mutual guarantee as collateral against their borrowings, but enabled them to work collectively for other causes in their communities. There are hundreds of documented stories of how the SHG movement has generated social change and political empowerment, in addition to accessing more finance for the poor than ever before in independent India.

As the fledgling sector began to attract notice from banks and markets for its excellent repayment rates, well into the high 1990s, a lot of things began to change. From a vision of creating slow and steady small fortunes ‘for’ the bottom of the pyramid, some microfinance players moved to selling a glittering story of quick and large fortunes ‘from’ the bottom of the pyramid.

Within a short span of five years, the microfinance sector in India, built around carefully nurtured affinities and an appropriate pace of scaling up based on capacities, has turned into a chaotic marketplace with little regulation. It now has diverse offerings from multiple players and scant regard for proper group formation. An estimated Rs 30,000 crore is chasing the poor and being collected from them, whether they are ready for it or not.

A movement that was based on the hope that women working closely together could create for all of them some economic and social value has been overrun by the idea that loose coalitions of joint liability groups can enable individuals to escape poverty. This subtle shift rides on high theory. When we the elite do not need to form groups and prove our book- keeping skills to access bank services, how long should we expect that of the poor? Hence the sector has moved to many financial products designed for individuals. Fair enough, so long as there is informed consent of the risks of indebtedness.

But the strategy shift also surfs a wave in the current polity. We are witnessing the march of socio-economic rights in India. We have had the right to information, to education and to work. We will soon have the right to food and maybe to water. Each day, someone thinks of a new entitlement to frame as law. This rush to secure individual rights seems to suit everyone.

For rights-based activists, every success brings a heady sense of power and progress. Compared to the hard and long struggles undertaken by NGOs for sustained collective action to preserve the commons, for example, the rights movement has seen relatively quicker policy wins. And it seems they plan to continue on that path.

For market players, who deal with citizens mainly as consumers, the emerging sense of entitlement is useful to consolidate messaging around high individual aspirations. As India becomes the newest focal point for all the world’s leading brands, Indian consumers will be able to satisfy any whim, if they can afford it, or can access ‘buy now, pay later’ services.

And for a government committed to a market economy and struggling hard to deliver to a growing population all the public infrastructure that the urban elite takes so much for granted, the individualisation of demand creates an easy way to channel resources into individual citizen pipelines. Clearly, this is simpler than creating the public school education, health care services, roads and energy and communication services that the urban middle class has enjoyed and built its future on. All those services were created by the state in its more socialist avatar. Today, many governments across the country talk of public-private partnerships as the only viable model for infrastructure development. These are powerful though subtle shifts in the economy that arguably could put India on a path to more human dignity and prosperity.

But is there something we are missing, something we are losing out on, in this splitting up of the collective for the benefit of the individual? To those organisations struggling to pull people together beyond their individual or caste and creed based identities, the answer is obvious. The focus on the individual takes away the focus from work that requires collective action. Individuals cannot preserve water bodies. Individuals cannot protect forests. Individuals cannot prevent coercive states or uncaring corporations from taking away lands and livelihoods. All of these require continued and creative united efforts.

Perhaps the old institutional forms may never return; they have lost their moral power. Some cooperatives that collapsed on greed, some Gandhian groups that compromised on truth, some communists who took to extreme violence, all have made 21st century Indians wary of old paradigms and formations. And there is no denying the arrival of legitimate individual ambition in a young and economically stronger India.

Yet, if we want to belong to a nation where poverty is history and nature’s power to nurture and sustain is restored, we have to find viable new models of cooperation. Otherwise, the securing of individual ambition may remain a mirage.

Some homegrown ideas and forums are emerging. There is also hope in the innovative way in which technology commons are being used to build virtual bridges across physical divides. But, as the serious distress in the microfinance sector warns us, we must not undermine the models we already have.

Times of India
PDF