Perennial Floods in South Asia: Need for Environmental Diplomacy

Talking in terms of the vocabulary of contemporary international relations, this cooperation must necessarily be pre-emptive as well as preventive. This can be done in many ways. One way can be to expand the mandate of SAARC to prioritise greater cooperation on the issue of environment. SAARC had initiated such a process by convening a meeting of the member countries’ Environment Ministers in 1997, but little progress happened on ground. States in the region must realise the urgency of the issue and initiate necessary cooperation. Another way of doing it is by setting up monitoring committees for resource management. Still another way to foster environmental cooperation could be to expand knowledge and data sharing mechanisms. India can also help Nepal in construction of dams to manage floods that hit parts of the country year after year and these dams could also generate hydropower that could be shared between India and Nepal. These investments will help in creating employment in dam building, and also help in water supply for industry, domestic consumption and for agriculture. The power generated could be used for expansion of economic activities in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and also in Nepal. Elements in Nepal have opposed the Kosi Treaty as it exists. A new agreement can be drawn in order to incorporate the aspirations and grievances of both parties, given the fact that the present regime in Nepal is fundamentally different from the pervious one. This issue becomes important especially because there are warnings of repetitions of similar deluge in the next decade.

Environmental changes have long been listed as national security threats in research on International Relations, beginning with Richard Ullman when he expanded the definition of threat as “.... anything which can degrade the quality of life of the inhabitants of a state, or which narrows the choices available to people and organizations within the state”. Thus, Ullman’s definition calls for considering direct as well as indirect effects of environmental changes. The after-effects of environmental problems are equally damaging. For example, if rehabilitation measures are not adequate, environmental disasters can encourage migration and lead to conflict between migrants and hosts. Therefore, management of environmental stresses needs comprehensive planning and they must be considered in a ‘threat to security’ framework. Effects of environmental problems are unequal and they tend to increase the pre-existing social inequality in a country. Given the fact that India has a large number of people below poverty line, environmental damages will harm not only their interests, but also, more often than not, impact their survival itself. Similar effects are inevitable on other social indicators like ethnicity, gender, caste and so on.

        As India stakes claim to being a powerful state in the international order, it is necessary that it should be able to manage its own environmental problems so as not to appear hapless and helpless in the face of a natural calamity . There would be nothing more paralysing for India’s power projection than a deluge of the kind recently experienced in Bihar. Therefore paying greater attention to environmental threats in order to better manage and avoid catastrophes is called for. Here, there is a lesson to learn from China, which has long regarded the floods that have hit the country as instances of national shame and the Three Gorges Project on Yangtze resulted from this realisation. One can also recall the anger expressed at the lacklustre response to hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

        Environmental issues will predictably dominate the India’s national concerns simply because of the scope of damage that they can inflict. Climate change warnings for India, and for the South Asian region, present a grim picture for the coming decades. Water stress, and increased regional and trans-border migration, will be the most serious of these issues. It is surprising that they have not received much attention for engendering greater cooperation, even as acts of terrorism that involve a small number of victims dominate Indian policy-making . One is not trying to argue for favouring one ahead of the other, but only highlighting that environmental cooperation must form a part of India’s regional policy agenda soon, and in a meaningful way.

 

 

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views either of the Editorial Committee or the Centre for Land Warfare Studies)