The majority of India’s water sources are polluted. A lack of access to safe water contributes to a fifth of its communicable diseases. Each day in the booming, nuclear-armed nation, diarrhea alone kills more than 1,600 people.
The regional scenario is even more grim given the projected impact of population pressures and global warming—which aggravates the flood and drought cycle of the monsoon, and the melting of Himalayan glaciers that serve as a natural water reservoir used by a billion people. Northern India may run out of groundwater within a decade, leading to a collapse of agriculture in regions like Punjab, the country’s “breadbasket.” Pakistan is already on the brink of water scarcity. Meanwhile, a rash of environmentally questionable dam building along the nuclear rivals’ shared rivers is further stoking geopolitical tension.
From India to Bangladesh and Nepal, this project explores the role of local innovators and international actors in aggravating or alleviating the region’s water crisis. The reporting takes them from the slums of Delhi to parched rural deserts, and from monsoon-ravaged Bangladesh to the Himalayas.
Below, reporter Anna-Katarina Gravgaard, introduces the project from the field in Nepal.
Scroll through the featured reporting excerpts below and click “Continue Reading” to read the full report. The excerpts are listed with the most recently published at the top.
For ALL “South Asia’s Troubled Waters” reporting, click here.
For ALL “South Asia’s Troubled Waters” blog posts from journalists, click here.
For ALL “South Asia’s Troubled Waters” video “Share Your Stories”, click here.
Article: “The Kashmir Question,” GOOD Magazine
By: William Wheeler and Anna-Katarina Gravgaard
July 29, 2009
Victory in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has decided, will require stability in Pakistan. Seeking help in the fight against militants along the Afghanistan border, Washington has sought to de-escalate the simmering tensions between India and Pakistan so Islamabad can redeploy troops from its eastern border to the lawless mountain regions in the west. But putting an end to 60 years of mistrust is a tall order, as Obama’s “Af-Pak” envoy Richard C. Holbrooke was reminded again last week during his fourth visit to the troubled region. And now, an emerging environmental threat is complicating the political dialogue: water. …Continue Reading
Article: “The Water’s Edge,” GOOD Magazine
By: William Wheeler, July 13, 2009
Reprinted in The Quietus July 28, 2009
Through two wars and a half-century of suspicion and resentment, the Indus Waters Treaty has governed the sharing of a strategic river between the bitter nuclear rivals eager to control and to profit from it. But will India and Pakistan’s treaty survive the emerging water crisis?
Halfway between Islamabad and Peshawar, the Indus River dips beneath the smooth six-lane blacktop of Pakistan’s National Highway. One day last month, I stood on the shoulder and watched the river ripple beneath the bridge. It was an olive ribbon half as wide as the riverbed, where standing puddles glinted in the afternoon sun. It looked like a creek. Or a dying river. …Continue Reading
Video: South Asia’s Troubled Waters: Reflections from the field
July 14, 2009
Blog: The Nepali Rain God
June 18, 2009
In the last parched weeks of the dry season before the monsoon arrives– an eight month drought that has starved the fields, wells, and power generators on which Nepal depends– the villagers of Pattan take the hulking figure of a rain god from his temple home and parade it through the streets in a plea for better hydrological fortunes.
Watch video here.
Blog: From the Himalayan Hot Zone
Anna-Katarina Gravgaar, for the Pulitzer Center
June 6, 2009
Imagine a collaboration between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal and Afghanistan. It sounds nearly impossible, but they all seek help to solve a common problem: The Himalayas are changing and everyone fears the consequences. … Continue Reading
Blog: Drastic Moves Against Urbanization
Anna-Katarina Gravgaar, for the Pulitzer Center
June 2, 2009
The streets of Kathmandu yesterday looked like a set of a western movie just before the high noon showdown — shuttered and quiet at midday in the June heat. The reason: Nepal’s dominant ethnic group had called for a general strike to press for their demand to declare Kathmandu an autonomous region. … Continue Reading
Article: “Letter from Mardan: the fight for the Swat Valley and the future of Pakistan”
By W. G. Wheeler, Foreign Affairs, May 28, 2009
One day this month, Faridun Karimdad, a 36-year-old farm worker, was lying on a cot in a gloomy hospital ward in Mardan, a town in Pakistan’s northwest. He inched onto his right side to show me the splatter of dried blood above his left hip. The day before, as Karimdad and his family prepared to flee the village of Khot in the Swat Valley, a mortar exploded outside his home, shattering his hip and killing his son and two daughters. He could live with his loss, he told me, if he believed the Pakistani military’s offensive would bring peace — if only the brief peace his village enjoyed after the Pakistani government negotiated a cease-fire with Taliban fighters last February.
Karimdad, like many of the refugees fleeing the fighting in Swat, blames both sides for violating the terms of the deal. … Continue reading
Blog: While the Tap is On (Video from Delhi)
Anna-Katarina Gravgaar, for the Pulitzer Center
May 20, 2009
A couple of days ago we got a powerful glimpse of the psychology of water. Jyoti Sharma, President of the water related ngo FORCE invited me to witness the situation in and around the C sector in Vasant Kunj, South Delhi. Here, everyone stocks up on water. But whereas the slum dwellers only manage to fill their buckets and small containers from a public water tanker with little more than the 20 liters a human needs per day, the rich acquire thousands of liters during the one hour of running water the Government provides for them -just in case there will be no water tomorrow.
Watch video here.
Photo Slideshow: Refugees Flee Swat Fighting
Published at World Politics Review, May 15, 2009
MARDAN, Pakistan — Zeeshan Khan, a 17-year-old engineering student, says he knows who Pakistanis blame for what has become the largest migration in their country’s history. “These people are coming due to the bombing,” he said, gesturing to the thousands of refugees milling around the Mardan refugee camp. “Due to the jet artillery, the F-16s, the heavy weapons. All our houses are destroyed.”…
Continue reading and view photo slideshow
Blog: In Nepal, Environment is Hostage to Political Crisis
W.G. Wheeler, for the Pulitzer Center
May 12, 2009
A few days after my colleague and I arrived in Nepal, the Prime Minister resigned. Since his departure, street protests have brought the potential for violent clashes and the derailment of a nascent peace process that ended a 10-year Maoist insurgency in 2006. When I showed up at the World Bank office in Kathmandu last week asking about climate change, my interview subject seemed pleasantly surprised… Continue reading
