Water, wisdom and wars:
when hunger stalks, anger is not far behind
When several parts of the world are facing flood, talking about drought may seem queer. But the fact is that millions of hectares and people have been affected by once in hundred years drought in china, and Vietnam, worst drought in two decades in Thailand, and severe drought in parts of Russia, Algeria, USA, India etc. As a commentator put it, when people are hungry, they also get angry. Water wasted during surplus months and used wastefully in scarce months seems to sum up the current tenor of tragedy.
Imagine when the water problem was much less severe, population pressure was low and the needs were limited, societies had much better ways of conserving water sources as well as reservoirs. It is not for nothing that every mountain peak from which a stream flows is considered sacred almost all over the world. Then why has the desire to conserve water gone down. Buddhist teacher preached the need to conserve even a drop of water more than 2000 years ago, when the issue of scarcity did not arise. No body would have imagined that water will sell costlier than milk in 2010 in many parts of the world. It does. And yet so many people waste so much of it every day.
Economics of resources, which go down in value when they become scarce, is not easy to understand without understanding the culture of myopia that has spread like an epidemic in the world. Why has the time frame become shorter? Why have choices been narrowed down? Let us go in the past and try to understand why institutions of conservation emerged in the first place thousands of years ago, why indigenous common property resource institutions? It seems that people converted problems of risk into uncertainty and tried to reduce their control, by creating randomness in the way resources were accessed. Once I studied the games children play around the world, and most local games tried to teach equanimity in the face of adversity. Why were our elders so keen to introduce a skill of dealing with uncertainties in every day life through such games?
My feeling is that they realized that without creating artificial scarcity of a resources through institutions, they could not justify allocative rules that were fair and just. If communities were to be created, if communication was to be triggered, then water points were one such spot where meetings took place and social and cultural exchanges took place. Shared futures were designed. With individualization of resources, introduction of markets was inevitable that could not factor any other value than immediate consumption preferred over deferred consumption, satiation of all needs at one’s place rather than at communal place became a life style, s statement of power and status. Wasteful use and redundancy in usage was only one step far. Now we have reached a point in which negotiations have become so difficult for any common ground of shared resource use. Wars seem only alternative. But wars are never only alternative. There is always peace possible. And I submit peace is possible through shared use patterns, creation of frugal cultures by artificial scarcity for those who are used to wasteful resource use. Mining water from thousands of feet ( and some times pumping polluted effluents down into those dry wells) below is criminal. We have to create new rituals, new institutions, new fashions and new trends. Water is too precious to be wasted on the altar of consumerist urges gone haywire. Anger will follow, if affection will not be showered through conservation of every drop, same drops will become tears….
Anil K Gupta
