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VIEWPOINT: KAUTILYA
Discord
Over Waters Of Hope
The economic future of India and Nepal depends crucially on water agreements
By
Jairam Ramesh
 Poor
Nepal. Just five weeks back, it appeared to have won the archaeological
race to lay claim to Kapilavastu, the ancient Sakya capital where Gautama
Siddhartha was brought up in his father's palace. Indian archaeologists
have claimed that Piprahawa in Siddharthnagar district of Uttar Pradesh
was Kapilavastu. Now a team from UK's University of Bradford working under
a UNESCO project has reinforced Nepal's case for Tilaurakot, 6 km across
the border from Piprahawa, being Kapilavastu.
But when it should have been exulting in these
findings, Nepal has been plunged into grief. The royal slayings will enhance
instability in Nepal's politics which, as it is, is very volatile. Our
relations have been very prickly. Nepal considers the 1950 Treaty of Peace
and Friendship with India an anachronism and has often accused India of
denying it rightful trade and transit facilities. India has been very
concerned that Nepal has allowed itself to be used as a haven for Pakistan-sponsored
anti-India activities. India has also been worried that Nepal needlessly
plays China off against it. Strangely, two countries who share cultural
legacies and whose economic destinies are intertwined are far apart. Indian
myopia, which sees any expression of legitimate Nepalese sovereignty through
the "anti-India" lens, has combined with Nepalese paranoia,
which wants to have its cake and eat it too, to produce this result.
 Water
epitomises best the shared heritage of the two countries, reflecting both
the promise and the pitfalls. All of Nepal's major rivers flow into India.
Nepal's hydro-electric power potential has been assessed at about 43,000
MW of which it has exploited a measly 8 per cent. Its hydel resources
just cannot be developed without India as a partner. No permanent solution
to the endemic floods that devastate eastern Uttar Pradesh and northern
Bihar year after year is possible without afforestation in the upper catchment
areas of the wayward Kosi and Gandak rivers in Nepal.
Based on various studies, three specific Indo-Nepal
irrigation-cum-flood control projects with a total installed power generation
capacity of around 20,000 MW have been identified. These are the Chisapani
project on the Karnali and the Pancheshwar project on the Mahakali in
western Nepal and the Barakshetra project on the Saptkosi in eastern Nepal.
There is also a 600-MW Burhi Gandak project and the Nepalese want us to
purchase electricity from their eastern Arun project. Nepal, however,
is sore that the earlier Indo-Nepal projects on the Kosi and the Gandak,
implemented in India in 1950s and 1960s, have not yielded the desired
benefits for them and there are other irritants as well.
That statesmanship is indeed possible on both
sides is demonstrated by the breakthrough that materialised in February
1996 in the form of the Mahakali Treaty. Indeed, 1996 was the golden year
for bilateral relations, for apart from the Mahakali Treaty, the Nepal-India
Trade Agreement also got signed in December of that year. But progress
on implementation of the Mahakali Treaty has been very slow. It is our
bureaucracy that has stymied the establishment of the binational Mahakali
River Commission. Also, India has been critical of the trade agreement
from which Nepal has gained substantially (the pact is up for renewal
in December 2001). No doubt, there are still some vital unresolved technical
and economic issues but after the departure of P.V. Narasimha Rao and
I.K. Gujral, India is being very lethargic in its approach.
Mega projects apart, other avenues of ecological
collaboration like soil conservation, social, farm and agro-forestry and
grassland and watershed management have to be pursued by us. Environmental
degradation and poverty go hand-in-hand in both our countries. One innovative
suggestion made by B.G. Verghese in his Waters of Hope (1990) is that
a joint Indo-Nepal eco-development programme should be taken up by NGOs
and ex-servicemen's cooperatives. The political resistance to this in
Nepal will be lower and might even appeal to King Gyanendra who is known
to be an avid environmentalist. A number of such government-funded but
NGO-implemented projects can proliferate very quickly and less expensively,
while having tangible impact.
When things cool down in Kathmandu, we must
demonstrate some leadership in water resource management and actively
solicit international involvement. To be sure, Nepal does have a psychological
small country hang-up vis-a-vis India but as Ramaswamy Iyer, one of India's
leading water resource experts, puts it, "(Nepal's) Fears may be
exaggerated but they are not absurd." The real problem is that Nepal
comes on India's radar screen only when there is a crisis. We treat it
as a quaint outpost of Hinduism. The onus is really on India to change
both the atmospherics and substance of the bilateral relationship. In
the process, we may well have to give more than we get. Greatness does
not come cheap.
(The author is with the Congress party. These
are his personal views.)
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