Beyond Barrages and Boundaries

A low dam girdles the Ganga about sixty miles beyond Bhagalpur. More than a mile and a half across, the structure is the longest barrage in the world. It has 109 gates, almost twice as many as the Koshi barrage I traveled over near the Nepal-India border. Its name, Farakka, is anathema to people throughout Bangladesh. In India mainly fishermen on the Ganga know much about it. The barrage, which sits just eleven miles from the international border that separates the tiny nation from its big neighbor, has poisoned relations between the two governments for forty years. The story of Farakka is one of the thorniest river disputes on the subcontinent. Whole books have been written about it on both sides of the border as well as by international commentators, not to mention the technical treatises it has engendered. The barrage did not accomplish the task for which it was built and has harmed people in both India and Bangladesh. Farakka offers a warning about how not to handle transboundary rivers to prevent complex subcontinental watersharing problems from becoming crises in the future. Borders fragment the river system in the Ganges basin, creating unique transboundary water management challenges. To visualize the Indian subcontinent’s river-sharing problems, imagine a slice of pizza. Take a bite out of the middle of the bumpy top crust. That’s Nepal. Then take a small bite out of the right, or eastern edge, just below the crust. That’s Bangladesh. The rest of the slice is India. These three nations share the greater Ganges basin. The river spills into the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh after flowing across the wide top part of India. Many of the river’s major tributaries come from Nepal. The smaller slice of pizza to the west would include Pakistan and the Indus River, but that’s another complicated story. Now move the piece of pizza to North America and pretend the United States is the majority of the slice.

The Garland

Bundelkhand is a thirsty land. When I arrived there early in 2008, my skin—already parched from the dry winter air of Kathmandu and Delhi—immediately felt itchy. The cool air hit my sinuses with a prickly thud. They ached, and my eyes smarted as moisture left them. The land was an expanse of beige sand and rocks; beautiful, I thought, save for a dryness so intense it made me feel a little anxious. Most of the trees were not very tall, except for the water-thrifty “flame of the forest,” with its dark green dust-covered leaves, several inches wide. In the spring the leaves drop off and the tree’s bright orange blossoms, shaped rather like bird beaks, pop out to give the tree its other English name, “parrot tree.” Bundelkhand is sometimes called the heart of India. It sits in the center of the broad upper half of the subcontinent and its many ruins from the nation’s Mughal and Hindu past evoke the shifting suzerainty of pre-British India. Most of the ancient kingdom of Bundelkhand is now in Madhya Pradesh, also known as “MP,” or “middle province.” It’s a large landlocked state south of Delhi; Bhopal, the site of the devastating 1984 explosion at the Union Carbide pesticide plant, is its capital. The remainder of Bundelkhand is in Uttar Pradesh, “UP,” or “northern province.” Many would like to see Bundelkhand secede from both and become a separate state. With a population of fifteen million, it would be a sub-stantial state on its own. And some people believe this poor and undeveloped region will have a better chance of progress if it is independent of both MP and UP and their politics. I stayed in Jhansi, a large district in the UP portion of Bundelkhand, at the campus of a nonprofit endeavor called Development Alternatives. The group works to help people in Bundelkhand manage water and develop small industries as an alternative to agriculture. There was a simple guesthouse on the campus with hot showers, which revived me and rehydrated my dry eyes and nose in the evening.

The Koshi’s Revenge

The Koshi spoke during the monsoon of 2008. She opened a new path, just as Dinesh Mishra predicted. The river breached an apparently ill-constructed and certainly ill-maintained embankment. A photo taken as the flood began shows the ridge of sand dissolving as water poured through a widening gap in the embankment and flowed southeast. In both Nepal and Bihar, villages and farms that had not seen a flood for the past half century were devastated. The embankments on the Koshi had already breached seven times at various spots downriver. This time the entire river below the Siwalik range in Nepal, where the land flattens, had essentially jumped out of its straitjacket and returned to one of its old channels—one it had flowed down two centuries ago. In Nepal the Koshi River is known as the Saptakoshi, or “seven Koshis,” because seven Himalayan rivers merge to create it. The Tamur flows down from Kanchenjunga in eastern Nepal near its border with Bhutan and India; the Arun comes down from Tibet. Out of the Khumbu comes the Dudh Koshi, the milky blue river that entranced me on the way up to Gokyo. The Dudh Koshi joins the Sun Koshi, which is also fed by the Tama Koshi, which in turn receives water from the Rolwaling Khola and Tsho Rolpa, the threatening glacial lake I visited during the monsoon of 2006. From farther west, toward Kathmandu, come the Likhu and the Indrawati. The latter receives the as yet undiverted waters of the Melamchi Khola. These seven tributaries of the Saptakoshi drain more than a third of the Nepal Himalaya, the wettest and highest of the great range, which includes the Khumbu and Ngozumpa glaciers. The Koshi drains almost thirty thousand square miles. It is Nepal’s largest river and one of the largest tributaries of the Ganga. Less than ten miles above the plains, three of these great rivers come together in a final merging: the Sun Koshi from the west, the Arun from the north, the Tamur from the east.

Belji of Dhulikhel

I first heard of Bel Prasad Shrestha five years before I met him. An article in the Nepali Times lauded his efforts to establish a water system in the town of Dhulikhel while he was its mayor. I clipped it and set it aside. Fifteen miles from Kathmandu was a municipal utility that put Kathmandu’s to shame. I wanted to know more. Perhaps I saved Bel Prasad for last, expecting the visit to Dhulikhel to be a pleasant excursion—a hopeful encounter that would show me that the break down of urban management I saw every day in Kathmandu was not an inevitable part of development in Nepal. After all those discouraging discussions about Melamchi and about Kathmandu sewage and water supply problems, perhaps I was going to meet a Newar who had a gift for water like his ancient forebears. I went to Dhulikhel the day before May Day, 2010, when Nepal’s Maoists were planning to outdo their usual May Day celebrations with protests all over the city. They were massing their cadres in Kathmandu, ostensibly to pressure the prime minister of another party to resign. On a Friday morning I set out with my friend Ram, a Kathmandu taxi driver who was always available when I needed to venture out on a longer excursion. The shocks on his little white Maruti Suzuki were shot, as they were on most taxis in Kathmandu, but Ram was a good driver who knew all the roads and backroads. Aside from worries about being able to return to the city in the face of demonstrations and roadblocks—or perhaps the complete countrywide shutdown that the Maoists were threatening—Dhulikhel was a green and quiet escape, a fine place to wait out urban riots if any were to materialize. And I found a charming host in Bel Prasad, a unique and now elderly gentleman who had straddled the wide gulf between the rural Nepal of his childhood and the world he had seen in visits to Europe, America, and Japan.

Melting Ice Rivers

From a remote outpost of global warming, a summons crackles over a two-way radio several times a week: . . . Kathmandu, Tsho Rolpa! Babar Mahal, Tsho Rolpa! Kathmandu, Tsho Rolpa! Babar Mahal, Tsho Rolpa! . . . In a little brick building on the lip of a frigid gray lake fifteen thousand feet above sea level, Ram Bahadur Khadka tries to rouse someone at Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology in the Babar Mahal district of Kathmandu far below. When he finally succeeds and a voice crackles back to him, he reads off a series of measurements: lake levels, amounts of precipitation. A father and a farmer, Ram Bahadur is up here at this frigid outpost because the world is getting warmer. He and two colleagues rotate duty; usually two of them live here at any given time, in unkempt bachelor quarters near the roof of the world. Mount Everest is three valleys to the east, only about twenty miles as the crow flies. The Tibetan plateau is just over the mountains to the north. The men stay for four months at a stretch before walking down several days to reach a road and board a bus to go home and visit their families. For the past six years each has received five thousand rupees per month from the government—about $70—for his labors. The cold, murky lake some fifty yards away from the post used to be solid ice. Called Tsho Rolpa, it’s at the bottom of the Trakarding Glacier on the border between Tibet and Nepal. The Trakarding has been receding since at least 1960, leaving the lake at its foot. It’s retreating about 200 feet each year. Tsho Rolpa was once just a pond atop the glacier. Now it’s half a kilometer wide and three and a half kilometers long; upward of a hundred million cubic meters of icy water are trapped behind a heap of rock the glacier deposited as it flowed down and then retreated. The Netherlands helped Nepal carve out a trench through that heap of rock to allow some of the lake’s water to drain into the Rolwaling River.

More River Blues

It was not entirely clear to me why Ngawang Lama and his group wanted the intake point—the head of the Melamchi tunnel—moved to the spot that was proposed back in the early 1990s, when the World Bank was funding the revamping of Kathmandu’s water supply. But I learned that Norwegian engineers, who were then consultants on the project, had originally placed that intake upstream to provide for a hydropower plant. They saw the Melamchi project as a good opportunity to get more for the same investment of money. The Norwegians had proposed to place the intake several miles above the spot that Cholendra and I almost reached as we walked up the damaged access road. Using that intake point, called Nukute, would have allowed for a twenty-five-megawatt hydropower plant in Sundarijal, where the tunnel ended. The higher intake could give an additional three hundred meters of “head”—water pressure to generate electricity. When the Asian Development Bank took over the project, they scuttled the hydropower component. After this, the Norwegians pulled out. The proposed twenty-five megawatts of electricity would have been welcome in a country that is likely to see power outages for at least another decade. Now, with the planned intake point lower on the river, hydropower is not possible because there would be insufficient water pressure. The ADB’s reasons for dropping the hydro component are a little vague. Ratna Sansar Shrestha dismisses the economic and environmental costs the organization cites as its rationale for dropping hydropower. Ratna is a water resources specialist who is well known for wanting the Melamchi project to include hydropower. He is one of three members of the Regulatory Commission for Water Supply that oversees tariffs and quality of service throughout Nepal. To be charitable to the ADB, he says, “working with Nepal’s bureaucracy is not easy.” Hydropower projects require negotiating with an entirely different ministry from the one that oversees water supply. Cutting out the hydropower component also cut out half the administrative red tape on a project that has been drowning in it for years.

In the Valley of Dhunge Dhara

The Kathmandu Valley was once a lake. Ancient stories tell us the valley was created when the Boddhisattva Manjushree came to worship a divine lotus planted in the lake long before by a messenger of the as yet unborn Buddha. Manjushree could not reach the lotus because of the deep waters, so with a sword he smote the rocks in a narrow gorge and drained the lake. Geological evidence supports the mythic lake that Manjushree is said to have emptied. The Kathmandu Valley is a basin at an altitude of approximately 4,000 feet between the lower and the middle hills of the Himalaya. As the Himalaya were shoved north into the Tibetan plateau, many valleys were created between the folds of the hills. If a landslide were to block the main exit from such a valley, it might begin to fill up with water from rivers and springs. Around two million years ago, it seems a large lake formed in this fashion in the Kathmandu Valley’s bowl of wooded hillsides. Long after, perhaps because of a big earthquake, or a series of jolts over many years, a channel opened a gorge at the west end of the valley. What would later be called the Bagmati River spilled out, finding its way down to what is now the Ganga and leaving the valley dry by around 10,000 years ago. There were, as far as we know, no people living in the path of any such Bagmati flood, so none were harmed. Instead, the draining of the valley led to the superb conditions the earliest settlers would eventually exploit: terraces and knolls, rich soil, springs, rivers, and shallow aquifers. It is enticing to imagine that the myth captures some distant human memory of the events that helped to create this perfect valley. We know these hills and mountains have been a crossroads for restless mankind since before any recorded history. Perhaps even for thousands of years before the oldest inscriptions give us hints about settlements and rulers in the valley, people were peacefully going about their business here.

The Shrinking Third Pole

Dig Tsho is another glacial lake high in the Himalaya of Nepal. On a summer afternoon in 1985, the lake’s waters burst from their bowl of ice and rock. An inland tsunami flooded the valleys below, sweeping away potato fields, yaks, and a hydropower plant. It was a Buddhist festival day in the Sherpa village of Thamo. Thamo’s residents are descendants of families that five hundred years ago came over the mountains from nearby Tibet to settle the region known as the Khumbu, below what Westerners call Mt. Everest. People were drinking chang, laughing and having fun. At four o’clock in the afternoon one woman, standing on a ridge above the Bhote Koshi, heard a sound like the roar of an airplane, then felt the ground begin to shake. The woman yelled to the other villagers, who came down to see a wall of water approaching from upriver. Those who lived on the slope closest to the river ran into their houses, grabbed religious items—portraits of monks, statues from family chapels, and Buddhist texts—along with leather trunks holding money and family jewelry. Some ran uphill to neighbors’ houses and waited, while others carried images of Buddhist deities down to the riverbank and pointed them at the advancing flood, pleading for the river to change its course. Elderly men and women in Thamo and nearby villages believe they know what caused the flood. They say a Sherpa man was tending his yaks in the high, sparse pastures near Dig Tsho that August. The morning of the flood, a stray dog ate his bowl of curd. The herder was so angry he grabbed the dog, tied its legs so it couldn’t swim, and threw it into the lake. The act of cruelty angered a local deity, who caused a big chunk of the glacier to break off and fall into the lake. The water surged out. There were no human casualties in the Sherpa villages high in the Khumbu, but lower down the channel, along the Dudh Koshi, people drowned in the churning river.

Dirty, Sacred Rivers

I wanted to see the source of what we in the West call the Ganges. Here in South Asia people call it Mother Ganga, Gangaji, the Great Ganga. At the edge of the icy river that flows from the Gangotri glacier I scooped Gangajal—Ganges water—into plastic soft drink bottles. I planned to take some of this water to friends in Kathmandu, practicing Hindus for whom the drops of glacial melt would have spiritual meaning. Along with its tremendous religious and ritual value, the water of the Ganga has been shown to be both antimicrobial and richer in oxygen than that of other rivers. Revered beyond all others, this river is now abused in equal measure: harnessed for hydropower near its holy mountain source, polluted with every imaginable waste as it runs its course for more than 1,500 miles across the widest part of the Indian subcontinent. One of the Ganga’s main and equally sacred tributaries, the Yamuna, flows through Delhi. Delhi, a city of more than fifteen million, owes its existence to this river, which is now dead at its doorstep. Industrial effluents pour in upriver, then Delhi adds its sewage. During my first trip to Delhi in January 2007, I went down to the edge of the Yamuna. I wanted to see just how bad the river’s reputed pollution might be. First I saw the barren ground along the riverside, strewn with rubble from the construction of a nearby bridge. There was little to tell me that this area was also the site of regular religious practice where people come to do puja, take a little of the water to splash on their heads, throw some flowers into the river. Bunching up in the eddies under the bridge pylons were stray bits of colored plastic and plastic shopping bags bloated with garbage, floating like sagging baloons half filled with air. They mingled with broken yellow marigolds scattered in the water and bright red flowers set afloat in little cups by those who had come to worship by the river.

Introduction

Red, hand-painted letters in Devanagari script inscribed on a yellow background tell visitors, in Hindi, “This water is as pure as the water from Ganga. Please keep it clean.” The sign is painted on a wall near the entrance to a spring housed in a small temple in the Indian town of Almora. A shiva lingam painted red sits atop the tile roof that shelters a rectangular pool of clear water, embraced on three sides by white stucco walls below street level. Most of the people who come to this spring in the Himalayan foothills of eastern Uttarakhand obediently remove their shoes before descending the stairway to the stone pool. The spring, called a nola in this part of India, is several hundred years old, locals say. Until fairly recently all the water used in this area came from hundreds of springs; some are small ponds like this one, others are spouts or dhara from which water flows. Now many of the springs are contaminated by trash and sewage. New construction destroyed some of them or blocked the sources that fed them. The river that flows at the bottom of the valley below Almora does not have enough water both to support the region’s agriculture and to supply household water for the city of more than forty thousand, where many people are now accustomed to water piped into their homes. Besides, it’s expensive to pump water uphill into the town. Almora will soon have a full-blown water crisis. Already people go to the old springs that are still functioning. They need water because the supply in the city pipes sometimes dwindles; and many still prefer the taste and coldness of the spring water and believe it’s good for their health. The nola and dhara of Almora suggest some of the contradictions in South Asia’s growing water crisis. Traditional systems have been neglected or abandoned, even abused, in favor of the promised convenience of modern ones. But those twentieth-century replacements have sometimes turned out to be unreliable and have left many people unserved.