Our vulnerability and dependence on natural resources is even more obvious when nations, and powerful interest groups within nations, confront each other over, for instance, the distribution of river waters. In many cases, the rights of riparian, upstream states compete with those of riparian, downstream ones. Water is not just a critical input to sustain agriculture and feed populations. It has the force to be a powerful political issue, especially when communities and nations feel deprived of what is perceived as their ‘just’ rights, of water needed for irrigation, fishing and energy requirements. One of the best examples of this in recent years has been the political struggle between India and Bangladesh over sharing the waters of the Ganges river.

The dispute here was between a water-controlling country, India, and a weaker, lower riparian, Bangladesh. The Ganges emerges from a Himalayan glacier at Gaumukh in northern India and flows through the heavily populated states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal before moving into Bangladesh. It later joins the Brahmaputra to form the vast Padma. Through its course in India, the Ganges is tapped by millions of farmers and tens of thousands of villages and towns for a variety of purposes, including irrigation, bathing, and household as well as industrial use. In the process, it has become one of the filthiest and most bio-degraded rivers in the world, receiving the untreated garbage, industrial and agricultural effluents, as well as human and animal waste (including human corpses and animal carcasses) before flowing into Bangladesh. The water is a health hazard in places, leading to fish kills, where tens of thousands of fish are poisoned by its pollution. In other places, the world’s holiest river harms the skin, causing ailments to villagers, for example, in Uttar Pradesh.3

In the 1970s, India completed the Farakka Barrage which diverted water from the Ganges to Calcutta, to help flush the silt from its port. This reduced the flow to Bangladesh, which anyway was the last in the line to receive the water. An argument can be made that Calcutta anyway did not need this water because it was a dying port, incapable of taking in deep draught vessels. This in turn forced the large ships to follow the cumbersome procedures of transferring their cargos out at sea to smaller boats for carrying into the city. Calcutta’s silting has not eased and the condition of the port has not improved over the past twenty-five years.

Indeed, as B.G. Verghese, a specialist on water resources, has said, Calcutta should have been maintained as a river port, as in the British days and pre-colonial times. Indian planners should have set in place a network of other ports in the hinterland of Bengal, Bihar and broadened this to include Bangladesh. Such a strategy would have enabled Calcutta to play a bigger economic role. Instead, it drained water from the Ganges and still failed to redevelop as a great port.