Raining on India & China’s Parade

Newspapers , magazines, blogs, op-ed pieces cannot say enough about how much progress China and India have made over the last two to three decades. While China had a head start, India is now being compared to the proverbial tortoise. Like everybody else I have been sending messages to my friends (both Indians and others) how this time is for real and how they should all move here. That is until I read two articles (one in the Financial Times and one in the Wall Street Journal) which brought me down to earth.

The Financial Times article was about how farmers in Punjab ( the bread basket of India ) were committing suicide at a alarmingly high rate, because of high debt incurred due to the high cost of inputs required to increase yields to earn a decent living off the land.

At the same time there has been concern about the seepage of pesticides into the ground water and the land getting exhausted due to the increasing use of fertilizers.

Ironically this at the time when the government is providing free electricity to the farmers to irrigate the land and the subsidies on fertilizers are continuing to blow a hole in the governments budget.In addition, the government has just finished a loan forgiveness program for small farmers.

Punjab is not the only one. Over the last two years there have been other articles about farmers in other prosperous states also taking their lives due to their inability to live off the land and repay their debt. Last year’s drought made the situation worse.

The Wall Street Journals article was about how drought is creating a similar situation in Yunnan province. The drought in Southern China is supposed to be the worst in the last 80 to 100 years. While the situation is bad the farmers have fortunately not had to resort to the desperate measures as their Indian counterparts,they face a similar problem in their inability to pay pack their debts..

Over the years because of the growing population, the size of the farm holdings has been on a declining trend. In the sixties India was saved by the Green Revolution.The high yielding crops and excessive use of fertilizers led to production going up significantly. It has reached a situation where India was exporting food crops. China experimented with collective farming, but as is now apparent it has not been terribly successful.

Over the next decades the situation is likely to get worse. The growth in population, the exhaustion of the land due to excessive use of fertilizers, land devoted to agriculture getting reduced as urbanization continues at a rapid pace. To cap it all, with the global warming, the glaciers in the mountains which are the sources of the some of the mightiest rivers in the world, will gradually not be able to replenish themselves.

At this time the focus of both the countries seems to be to divert the water flow to generate power to feed the hungry furnaces of the steel and cement mills. Not enough attention is being paid to the husbanding of water resources. This is going to lead to tension between the neighbors. Already the neighbors of the two countries are beginning to make noises. This is going to get worse.

The 1800’s and the early 1900’s was the race of commodities among the western countries plus Japan. The second half of this century is going to be the race (without trying to sound alarmist and saying wars) will be about water. These issues need to be addressed and agreements fair to everyone, taking the long term view should be entered into now !!