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MAGIZHI, India — MAGIZHI, India —Valan, a rice farmer in a starched white shirt and sarong, walked along the bone-dry canal bed next to his village in the state of Tamil Nadu as though it were a road. The canal should have been full from last June until the end of the year, he said, but it stood dry, except for one month in which unexpected storms flooded the canal and destroyed his crops.
In the past, “we could just use the rainwater,” said Valan, who like many Tamils has only one name. “But the rains are becoming more unpredictable, so certainly the river is becoming more important.”
There are similar tensions on an international level. Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, last week asked China for more openness about its plans to build dams on the Brahmaputra, a vast Himalayan river that flows into India from the Tibetan region of western China.
India’s river disputes “have become more severe, and they will continue to become more severe,” said Ashok Jaitly, who sits on a national government committee that is drafting a law on water management. “Water use is increasing, but the supply is fixed.”
With India ruled by a fractious coalition government, state-level spats can destabilize national politics. The dynastic Congress party, which leads the coalition, controls fewer than half of the country’s 28 states and relies on alliances with regional parties, which often put local and populist causes first. The river disputes are one such example, said Tushaar Shah, a senior fellow at the International Water Management Institute, a research group headquartered in Sri Lanka. “I do think [the disputes] are getting worse. It’s become a political issue, and state politicians are always playing to the galleries.”
One regional party from Tamil Nadu recently left the Congress-led coalition after the federal government refused to alter foreign policy to fit its demands.
India will need 1.5 trillion cubic meters (396 trillion gallons) of water per year by 2030, about double its existing supply and more than a fifth of the projected global demand, according to a 2010 report from the International Finance Corp. and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Yet as the population swells, India’s water supply per person is dropping. The country has an annual average of 1,545 cubic meters (408,145 gallons) of water available per person, according to India’s 2011 census — qualifying it as a “water-stressed” nation under World Bank criteria.
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