Damming the Rivers — I: The Irrigation Imperative

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We examine the irrigation imperative in this chapter in the context of two transboundary river basins in the South Asian region — the Indus basin located in the region’s western sector and the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin in its eastern sector. We focus, for illustrative purposes, on the bilateral relations of three of these basins’ riparian states — India and Pakistan in relation to the Indus river system, and India and Bangladesh in relation to the GBM river system. In this chapter, we are concerned with the problem of allocating water shares of transboundary rivers among co-riparian states in the face of compelling agricultural needs — with the critically important link, in other words, between transboundary freshwater resources and food security. Faced with hefty and rapidly growing populations in the Indus and GBM basins, the governments of these three states have had no choice but to give food security high priority on their policy agendas; and, given the exceptionally high importance of irrigated agriculture in the rural economies of all three states, this meant that high priority had also to be given to water availability for irrigation. As we will soon take note of, water availability for irrigation is substantially affected by a variety of water management practices, not only by water storage and diversion capacity (the building of dams and barrages). It is such capacity, however, that has been given central importance by many of the region’s economic planners.