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Attitudes to Water in South Asia
Executive Summary and Recommendations
Discussion about water in South Asia – in particular the shared rivers of the region – is vociferous, antagonistic and increasingly associated with national security. Renewable water resources in the region have fallen dramatically on a per capita basis since the 1960s. India hit the ‘water stress’ mark around a decade ago, Pakistan slightly earlier. Groundwater is fast depleting in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and there are few feasible options for increasing supply. Management and governance of water have not adapted to the escalating pressures of demography.
With the population of South Asia projected to rise by 32 per cent in three decades – from 1.68 billion in 2010 to 2.22 billion in 2040 – the outlook under current trends is for greater competition over water between agriculture, urban centres and industry, and between countries which share rivers.
This report explores attitudes in five South Asian countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. It lays out the evidence based on almost 500 interviews conducted in 2013 as part of a Chatham House project by five local institutes with a range of water experts, policy-makers and decision-makers from NGOs and the private sector. It focuses on two river systems: the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna and the Indus-Kabul basins. All the countries face similar challenges relating to these rivers. For instance, both basins are reliant on the summer monsoon as well as some upstream mountain snowmelt, leading to concerns about seasonal supply, flooding and water storage.