“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 La, or pass, the road beyond the plaque opened 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, maintenance crews had to battle 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 of dispensing with the bridge that traversed it. “Over the years, I’ve watched this river of ice disappear. It is bizarre,” says Nobra’s representative in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, Pinto Norbu. In a region which sees less than 50 millimetres of rain every year, glacial melt is the principal source of water — and Ladakh residents fear that they will count among the victims of global warming. If the fears prove well founded, the consequences will be various for much of Pakistan and India, both depending on river systems fed by Ladakh’s glaciers for much of their water needs.

The Ladakh residents’ fears are based on what they have seen. Mountaineering guides, for example, say glaciers which once needed sophisticated ice craft to traverse can now be negotiated by trekkers. The 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.

Science appears to bear out their concerns. Measurements of one glacier in the Karakoram Range, conducted by paleo-climatologist Bahadur Kotlia using a Global Positioning System, showed it had retreated between 15 and 20 metres a year between 2001 and 2003. “This rate is chaos; this should not be happening,” he said in a recent interview. Mr. 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 Anil Kulkarni and six other scientists in January 2007. Writing in the journal Current Science, Mr. Kulkarni and his co-authors reported an “overall reduction from 2077 square kilometres in 1962 to 1682 square kilometres at present, an overall deglaciation of 21%.”

Of the consequences of these developments, Mr. Kulkarni and his colleagues left little doubt: “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 availability of water resources in the Himalayan region.”

Glacial retreat could provoke a meltdown of the India-Pakistan peace process. In a report for the international science organisation Pugwash, environmental scientist Erin Blankenship has pointed out that retreating glaciers mean less water in the rivers both countries depend on — and this at a time when their needs are growing. Back in 1960, India and Pakistan hammered out the Indus Waters Treaty, or IWT, to regulate their use of the rivers which head west from Jammu and Kashmir. Despite three wars since, the agreement has held. Glacial retreat, though, could erode this keystone of India-Pakistan peace.

Dr. Blankenship has recorded that Pakistan, dependent on the Indus for an estimated 90 per cent of its irrigation needs, 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 an alarming level in over half of Pakistan’s 45 canal commands. Worse, silt deposits in Pakistan’s major Indus dams means they can store less water for the months when it is most needed. By 2010, experts estimate, Pakistan may lose over half of its water storage capacity.

India, too, has been moving inexorably towards a water crisis. In 1950, per capita availability stood at over 5,000 cubic metres; in 2005, it was 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 to 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 policy-makers to use more water than what the IWT allows could well grow. Punjab’s 1994 decision to abrogate water agreements with other States, though symbolic, involved a repudiation of the IWT — and it also provides a glimpse of the future. While water shortages alone put a serious strain on the IWT, Dr. Blankenship argues, “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.

Within Jammu and Kashmir, politicians cutting across party lines have already begun making precisely such demands. The IWT permits the construction of hydro-electric dams storing 3.6 million acre-feet on the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab rivers, and irrigation of only 1,21,000 hectares of land. The IWT restrictions, Dr. Blankenship argues, “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 MW hydro-electricity potential, and has been able to irrigate only 10 per cent of its farmland, as opposed to 80 per cent in Pakistan.

Solutions do exist — and have been pushed with increasing urgency by experts. Writing in The Tribune in 2005, B.G. Verghese called for a revised ‘Indus-II’ treaty, built on “joint investment, construction, management and control” of the three western rivers. He 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.”

The former Union Water Resources Secretary, Ramaswamy Iyer, has also called for a reworking of the IWT. In a recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly, he 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 not be just enough water to go around.

For some in Pakistan, that fear has been enough to justify war. 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 India having control of its irrigation headworks at Mangala, and of the sources of its most important river system, the Indus. Last year, Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders pointed to the same concerns to justify calls for a renewed jihad against India.

Speaking in 1999, UNESCO Director-General Klaus Toepfer 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.”

Panic, though, isn’t a response Leh District Magistrate Mandeep Bhandari believes will be useful. Leh’s groundwater levels, he points out, are excellent: handpumps 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. “It is not as if there is a crisis staring us in the face,” Mr. Bhandari says, “but we need to start thinking hard whether 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 on 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. This, “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 handpumps, 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 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.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/19/stories/2008011953491000.htm