India is likely to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2025. Accordig to the US Census Bureau forecast, released in the last week of previous month, India would have 1.396 billion people in 2025, surpassing China, whose population growth is more modest. China’s one-child policy since 1980, thogh controversial, has created a more sustainable populaion. However, the population policy in India has been a neglected sector. The sceptre of Emergency excesses in implementing family welfare programmes and the resultant electoral reversals in 1977 still haunts almost all political parties thereby preventing them from taking stringent measures to curb uneven growth in population. Keeping in view the finite resources and shrinking natural resources and exigencies of climate change, some one has to bell the cat some time.
India can learn from the Chinese experience in population control. The average Chinese woman now has 1.5 children in her lifetime, compared with 2.7 children for the average Indian woman, although the so-called fertility rate has also been declining in India due to rising education and urbanization. In a world that is increasingly connected by the forces of cultural, economic, and environmental globalization, the future of the United States is intertwined with that of India. Much of this shared fate stems from international resource scarcity. New population-driven demands for food and energy production will increase pressure on the world’s power-generating and agricultural capabilities. But for a crowded India, domestic scarcity of one key resource could destabilize the country in the decades to come: clean, fresh water.
Water resources are being burdened as never before in human history from Africa’s Nile Basin and the deserts of the Middle East to the arid reaches of northern China. There may be more or less the same amount of water held in the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, surface waters, soils, and ice caps as there was 50 — or even 50 million — years ago, but demand on that finite supply is growing alarmingly.
India is growing weaker with each passing year in its ability to withstand drought or other water-related climate shocks. India’s water outlook is cause for alarm not just because of population growth but also because of climate change-induced shifts in the region’s water supply. Depletion of groundwater stocks in the country’s key agricultural breadbaskets has raised water worries even further. Water scarcity is not some abstract threat in India.
How India manages its water scarcity challenges over the coming decades will have repercussions on food prices, energy supplies and security the world over — impacts that will be felt here in the United States. And India is not the only country wrestling with the intertwined challenges of population growth and water scarcity.
Many of the world’s most strategically important aquifers and river systems cross one or more major international boundaries. Disputes over dwindling surface- and groundwater supplies have remained local and have rarely boiled over into physical conflict thus far. But given the challenges faced by countries like India, small-scale water disputes may move beyond national borders before the end of this century. A recent report by the World Economic Forum wanrs that looming global water shortages will “tear into various parts of the global economic system” and “start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue” in the ensuing decades. A country’s inability to meet population-linked water demands runs the risk of becoming a failed state and potentially providing fertile ground for international terrorist networks.
– Dr Arvind Kumar, President, India Water Foundation, New Delhi.
