Jayanta Bandyopadhyay

This article in Economic and Political Weekly is a review of the edited book Handbook of Climate Change and India: Development, Politics and Governance by Navroz Dubash. The author of the article states that the book is an important addition to the body of knowledge on the subject of climate change. The articles in the book are written from diverse view points by authors who are activists, researchers, diplomats, policymakers, and politicians.

This article by Jayanta Bandyopadhyay in the Economic and Political Weekly deals with the Government of India’s proposal for addressing the twin problems of floods and water scarcity by interlinking rivers.

The problem

(as posed by Sunjoy Joshi, Director and Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)

Author: Jayanta Bandyopadhyay

This article published in the Seminar 626, October 2011 argues that our current state of knowledge of water systems and ecological modelling related to flows of water, which includes projecting a single quantitative figure of water requirements, is inadequate. Such a unilateral prescription of environmental flows or water requirements of aquatic systems as a method for the resolution of water conflicts may actually become the source of many new conflicts.

This document by Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, highlights the importance of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin as an important source of water for many of the countries in South Asia, and the crucial role of negotiations in the context of the impending water crisis threatening the basin with the phenomenon of climate change.

The document argues that traditional water engineering has been found to be highly reductionistic and ineffective in bringing about development in the GBM basin and the continuing poverty in the GBM basin can be linked to the absence of a holistic ecological perspective, use of an incomplete framework for economics and ignoring of long-run economic costs of the actions proposed.