Volume 25 - Issue 01 :: Jan.

05-18, 2008 • Contents

INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU

CLIMATE CHANGE

Melting away
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHS: PRAVEEN SWAMI

Glacial retreat in Jammu and Kashmir could plunge South Asia into a crisis.

Buddhist Prayer flags on the Khardung glacier, which supplies water to Leh.

“IN MEMORY,” reads the small stone plaque by the side of the world’s highest road, “of 18 men of the 201
Engineer Regiment who lost their lives fording the Khardung La.”

Back in 1976, when soldiers began to blast their way through the 18,200-foot (5,460 metres) la, or pass, the
road beyond the plaque opened out on to a wall of ice. Trucks and cars moving northwest from Leh to villages
in the Nobra valley had to traverse a bridge across the Khardung glacier. Through much of the winter, road-
maintenance crews had to battle against the snow to keep the road open for military convoys making their way
to the ring of frontier outposts that support Indian troops on the Siachen glacier.

For the past five years, though, Ladakh has seen unusually mild winters and low snowfall. The Khardung glacier
has thinned to the point where the bridge that traversed it has been dispensed with. “Over the years,” says
Pinto Norbu, Nobra’s representative in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, “I’ve watched this massive river of
ice disappear. It’s bizarre.”

In a region that sees less than 50 millimetres of rain each year, glaciers are a key source of water – and Ladakh
residents are beginning to fear that they will count among the victims of global warming. If those fears prove well
founded – and a growing body of scientists suggests they might – it would have serious consequences for much
of Pakistan and India, both of which depend on river systems fed by Ladakh’s glaciers for much of their water
needs.

Ladakh residents’ fears are founded on the evidence before their eyes. Mountaineering guides, for instance,
say that glaciers on the high mountains, which once needed sophisticated ice-craft to traverse, can now be
negotiated by trekkers. Local residents note that the region has also seen freak weather in recent years,
including flash foods which swept through Leh and the Nobra valley last summer, for the first time in living
memory.

Science appears to bear out what Ladakh residents fear. Measurements of one glacier in the Karakoram range,
conducted by paleo-climatologist Bahadur Kotlia using a Global Positioning System, showed it had retreated by
15 to 20 metres a year between 2001 and 2003. “This rate is chaos,” Kotlia said in a recent interview, “this
should not be happening.”

Kotlia’s findings have been borne out by a study of 466 glaciers in the Chenab, Baspa and Parbati river basins,
published by the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Anil Kulkarni and six other scientists in January
2007. Writing in the journal Current Science, Kulkarni and his co-authors reported an “overall reduction from
2,077 square kilometres in 1962 to 1682 square kilometres at present, an overall deglaciation of 21 per cent.”

Of the consequences of these developments, Kulkarni and his colleagues left little doubt. “The observations
made in this investigation,” they wrote, “suggest that small glaciers and ice fields have been significantly
affected due to global warming from the middle of the last century. In the future, if additional global warming
takes place, the processes of glacial fragmentation and retreat will increase, which will have a profound effect
on the availability of water resources in the Himalayan region.”

Scientists disagree on the causes of glacial retreat. Some have attributed the receding of glaciers to human
interventions, like heightened vehicle activity on the Khardung La or Siachen. Others have argued that the
retreat could be, at least in part, a periodic cycle. Whatever the truth, its consequences could prove too horrific
to imagine.

Just why this might be so in fact requires little imagination: glacial retreat could provoke a meltdown of the
India-Pakistan peace process. Speaking on the World Day for Water in 1999, Executive Director Klaus Toepfer
of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned that as water “becomes increasingly rare, it
becomes coveted; capable of unleashing conflicts. More than over land or oil, it is over water that the most bitter
conflicts of the near future may be fought.”
Back in 1947, when Major-General Akbar Khan ordered the first Pakistani irregulars into Jammu and Kashmir –
sparking off a conflict without apparent end – water occupied a central place in his strategic vision. Pakistan,
General Khan wrote in his memoirs, Raiders in Kashmir , simply could not afford to allow India to have control of
its irrigation head-works at Mangala, and of the sources of its most important river system, the Indus.

In the event, India and Pakistan hammered out a treaty to regulate their use of the rivers which head west from
Jammu and Kashmir. While Pakistan has protested against what it claims are Indian violations of the Indus
Waters Treaty (IWT), and some in India have called for an abrogation of the agreement to punish Pakistan for
sponsoring terrorist groups, the accord has survived three wars and two insurgencies. Glacial retreat, though,
has begun to erode one of the pillars of a future India-Pakistan peace.

Put simply, retreating glaciers mean less summer waters in rivers both countries depend on for survival, and
that at a time when their needs are growing.

Dependent on the Indus for an estimated 90 per cent of its irrigation needs, Pakistan saw per-capita water
availability decline from 5,600 cubic metres in 1947 to just 1,200 cubic metres in 2005. Groundwater reserves
are reported to have fallen to alarming levels in over half of Pakistan’s 45 canal commands. Worse, silt deposits
in Pakistan’s major Indus dams mean that it can store less water for the months when it is most needed: by
2010, experts estimate, Pakistan may lose over half its water storage capacity.

India, too, has been moving inexorably towards a water crisis. In 1950, per-capita water availability stood at over
5,000 cubic metres; in 2005, that figure stood at 1,800 cubic metres. Some states have reported per-capita
water availability below 1,000 cubic metres, the crisis threshold used by the World Bank. Farmers in States
critical for Indian agriculture, such as Punjab and Haryana, have responded to the shortage by overusing
groundwater, leading to precipitate falls in the water table. In time, pressures on Indian policymakers to use
more water than the IWT allows them could well grow.

Hemis village in Ladakh. Low snowfall has raised fears about water security among the mountain
communities in the region.

Within Jammu and Kashmir, politicians cutting across party lines have already begun making precisely such
demands. The IWT permits the construction of hydroelectric dams storing 3.6 million acre-feet on the Indus, the
Jhelum and the Chenab, and the irrigation of only 121,000 hectares of land. “These restrictions,” the scholar
Erin Blankenship has recorded, “act as a chokehold on Kashmir’s capacity for progress.” Jammu and Kashmir is
treaty-bound to use only a fraction of its 15,000 mega-watt hydroelectricity potential and has been able to
irrigate only 10 per cent of its farmland, as opposed to 80 per cent in Pakistan.

While water shortages alone place serious strains on the IWT, Blankenship has noted, “to add the projected
human population growth is to raise the stakes to an entirely different level”. India’s population in 2025 is
projected to rise to 1.3 billion, thrice that of the time when the IWT was signed. Pakistan by then is expected to
have 270 million residents, more than six times its original population. Substantial sections of these populations,
dependent as they are on Himalayan rivers, are likely to be in a near-perennial state of drought.

Solutions do exist – and have been pushed with increasing urgency by experts. Senior journalist B.G.
Verghese, for instance, has called for a revised “Indus-II” treaty, built on “joint investment, construction,
management and control” of the three west-flowing rivers. Verghese has argued that Indus II “should be fed into
the current peace process as a means both of defusing current political strains over Indus-I and insuring against
climate change”. In his view, it could “reinforce the basis for a lasting solution to the Jammu and Kashmir
question by helping transform relationships across the Line of Control and reinventing it as a bridge rather than
a boundary”.

Former Union Water Resources Secretary Ramaswamy R. Iyer, one of the region’s most respected experts,
has also called for a reworking of the IWT. In a recent article, Iyer succinctly argued that the IWT “was a
negative, partitioning treaty, a coda to the portioning of the land”.

While politicians debate whether or not to explore new possibilities, the stark fact is that time is running out.
With the glaciers in retreat, there may just not be enough water to go around.

Panic, though, is not a response Leh District Magistrate Mandeep Bhandari believes is useful.

Leh’s ground-water levels, he points out, are excellent: hand-pumps installed to meet villagers’ needs hit
aquifers at six metres or less, and farmers report an abundant flow of water from glacier-fed mountain streams.
Ladakh’s use of non-conventional resources to minimise fossil-fuel demand has been exemplary; solar panels,
small river-powered electricity plants and windmills dot the landscape.

“It’s not as if there is a crisis staring us in the face,” Bhandari says, “but I do think we need to start thinking hard
about the future. We need to consider if we’re using water in ways that are appropriate to our environment.”

Part of the problem is a consequence of well-meaning efforts to improve the economy. With road links to
Himachal Pradesh and the rest of Jammu and Kashmir severed for several months a year, farmers in Ladakh
have been encouraged to cultivate vegetables. While the high-altitude desert now meets a significant part of its
vegetable needs locally, cultivation in its dry soil demands constant irrigation. Trees planted to meet the rural
need for firewood, too, have created new demands for water. “People are pumping too much water,” says
Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council Chief Executive Tsering Dorjay, “which, in practice, means
using our glacial reserves without care for the future.”
Tourism, too, has created new problems. While most rural Ladakh and old-town Leh residents make do with
buckets filled from hand-pumps, the growing influx of tourists has spurred the creation of modern hotels which
draw copious quantities of water to feed showers and baths. As tourism expands in the region, so too will the
number of hotels – and other water-intensive facilities for the upmarket tourists Ladakh hopes to draw, like
swimming pools and golf courses.

Ladakh, then, faces an anxious future. Its fate will be shared by all of South Asia’s peoples.

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