8.1 Chapter 8 SOUTH ASIA

316

317

chapter 8

SOUTH ASIA▶

318

GEOGRAPHIC INSIGHTS: SOUTH ASIA

After you read this chapter, you will be able to discuss the following geographic insights as they relate to the five thematic concepts:

1.

Environment:

Climate change puts more lives at risk in South Asia than in any other region in the world, primarily due to water-related issues. Over the short term, droughts, floods, and the increased severity of storms imperil many urban and agricultural areas. Over the longer term, sea level rise may profoundly affect coastal areas and glacial melting poses a threat to rivers and aquifers.

2.

Globalization and Development:

Globalization benefits some South Asians more than others. Educated and skilled South Asian workers with jobs in export-connected and technology-based industries and services are paid more and sometimes have better working conditions. Less-skilled workers in both urban and rural areas are left with demanding but very low-paying jobs.

3.

Power and Politics:

India, South Asia’s oldest, largest, and strongest democracy, has shown that the expansion of political freedoms can ameliorate conflict. Across the region, when people have been able to participate in policy-making decisions and implementation—especially at the local level—seemingly intractable conflict has been diffused and combatants have been willing to take part in peaceful political processes.

4.

Urbanization:

South Asia has two general patterns of urbanization: one for the rich and the middle classes and one for the poor. The areas that the rich and the middle classes occupy include sleek, modern skyscrapers bearing the logos of powerful global companies, universities, upscale shopping districts, and well-appointed apartment buildings. The areas that the urban poor occupy are chaotic, crowded, and violent, with overstressed infrastructures and menial jobs. These two patterns often coexist in very close proximity.

5.

Population and Gender:

In this most densely populated of world regions, population growth is slowing as the demographic transition takes hold. Birth rates are falling due to rising incomes, urbanization, better access to health care, and the fact that women are finding more opportunities to study and work outside the home, and thus are delaying childbearing and having fewer children. However, a severe gender imbalance is developing in this region due to age-old beliefs that males are more useful to families than are females. As a result, adult males significantly outnumber adult females.

The South Asian Region

South Asia (Figure 8.1), like so many of today’s world regions, began its modern history as the result of European colonization. During that time, economic, political, and social policies rarely put the needs of South Asian people first. Toward the end of the colonial era, major upheavals precipitated by departing colonists left the region with a legacy of distrust and difficult political borders that still lingers.

Figure 8.1: Regional map of South Asia.

The five thematic concepts highlighted in this book are explored as they arise in the discussion of regional issues, with interactions between two or more themes featured, as in the geographic insights above. Vignettes, like the one that follows, illustrate one or more of the themes as they are experienced in individual lives.

GLOBAL PATTERNS, LOCAL LIVES

Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the state of Gujarat in western India (see Figure 8.1), is passionate about securing water for his state. In 2006, draped in garlands by well-wishers, he embarked on a flamboyant hunger strike to protest a decision by India’s national government in New Delhi to limit the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River. Four Indian states lie in the drainage basin of the Narmada. Modi wanted to trap more water behind a higher dam so that as many as 50 million of his constituents in Gujarat would have more access to water, primarily for irrigation. Gujarat produces much of the food needed by India’s west coast cities.

At the same time as Modi’s hunger strike, far away in New Delhi, Medha Patkar, the leader of the “Save the Narmada River” movement, was in day 18 of her hunger strike protesting against the same dam. As water rose in the dam’s reservoir, 320,000 farmers and fishers in Madhya Pradesh, the state in which the reservoir is located, were being forced to move. Although Indian law requires that these “evacuees” be given land or cash to compensate them for what they had lost, only a fraction had received any compensation. Some of the evacuees demonstrated their objection by forfeiting their right to compensation and refusing to move even as the rising waters of the reservoir consumed their homes. Many were forcibly removed by Indian police and have since relocated to crowded urban slums.

Environmental and human rights problems have been at the heart of the Sardar Sarovar Dam controversy since the project began in 1961. The natural cycles of the Narmada River have been severely disturbed. Once a placid, slow-moving river—and one of India’s most sacred—the disruption of flows and the flooding upstream of the dam have caused massive die-offs of aquatic life, resulting in high unemployment levels among farmers and fishers. Many people have also lost their homes to the rising reservoir waters (Figure 8.2A).

Figure 8.2: The Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada and other major dams around the world. The Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River is only one of hundreds of thousands of dam projects throughout the world that together have displaced between 40 and 80 million people. The map shows some of the major dams around the world. (A) Before they were displaced by the reservoir of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, rural people stand outside homes that are now submerged.

319

In addition to cost overruns that are more than three times the original cost estimates, the ultimate benefits of the dam have been called into question. A major justification for the dam was that in addition to irrigation water, it would provide drinking water for 18 million people in the greater river basin as well as 1450 megawatts of electricity. But the demand for irrigation waters to serve drought-prone areas in the adjacent states of Gujarat and Rajasthan is now so strong that there will not be sufficient water to generate even 10 percent of the 1450 planned megawatts on a sustained basis. Furthermore, 80 percent of the areas in Gujarat most vulnerable to drought are not yet connected to the project by the necessary canals. Therefore, 90 percent of the water planned for irrigation still flows into the sea.

Concerned that the economic benefits would be small and easily negated by the environmental costs, the World Bank withdrew its funding of the dam some years ago. Ecologists say that far less costly water-management strategies such as rainwater harvesting, intensified groundwater recharge (artificially assisted replenishment of the aquifer), and watershed management would be better options for the farmers of Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Minister Modi quickly ended his hunger strike when the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the Sardar Sarovar Dam could be raised higher (it now stands at 121.92 meters, or 400 feet). The following day, Medha Patkar ended her fast as well, because, in the same decision, the Supreme Court ruled that all people displaced by the dam must be adequately relocated. Furthermore, the court decision confirmed that human impact studies are required for all dam projects. Up to then, no such study had been done for the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Nonetheless, by September of 2012, the dam project was 8 years behind schedule and had stalled again in court. Both sides used the Internet to promote their positions. Meanwhile, Narendra Modi achieved national prominence and began an unsuccessful campaign to be elected prime minister of India. [Sources: India eNews; Frontline; Friends of River Narmada (http://tinyurl.com/bhhanz3); Environmental Justice, Issues, Theories, and Policy; and Wall Street Journal. For detailed source information, see Text Sources and Credits.]

320

The recent history of water management in the Narmada River valley highlights some key issues now facing South Asia and other regions that have developing economies. Across the world, large, poor populations depend on increasingly overtaxed environments. Improving the standard of living for the poor nearly always requires increases in water and energy use. Often, misplaced efforts to meet these urgent needs make neither economic nor environmental sense, but are driven to completion by political and social pressures. In the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the wealthier, more numerous, and more politically influential farmers of Gujarat have tipped the scale—over the protests of the evacuees along the Narmada River—in favor of a project that may be creating more problems than it is solving.

The role of water in South Asian life, including the ways water use intersects with other central issues, is a recurring topic in this chapter.

What Makes South Asia a Region?

The countries that make up the South Asia region in this book are Afghanistan and Pakistan in the northwest; the Himalayan states of Nepal and Bhutan; Bangladesh in the northeast; India (including the Indian territories of Lakshadweep, Andaman, and Nicobar Islands); and the island countries of Sri Lanka and the Maldives (Figure 8.3; see also Figure 8.1). Physically, these countries occupy territory known as the Asian subcontinent—the portion of a tectonic plate that joined the Eurasian continent nearly 60 million years ago (discussed below). Historically and culturally, these modern countries have a shared patchwork of religious, social, and political features linked to ancient conquerors from Central Asia, explorers and traders from the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia, and more recent colonizers from Europe. This region can be compared to a patchwork, as its extensive history of internal and external influences has left it with a fragmented and overlapping pattern of religions, languages, ethnicities, economic theories, forms of government, attitudes toward gender and class, and ideas about land and resource use.

Figure 8.3: Political map of South Asia.

Terms in This Chapter

Because its clear physical boundaries set it apart from the rest of the Asian continent, the term subcontinent is often used to refer to the entire Indian peninsula, which includes Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (the term usually does not include Afghanistan).

subcontinent a term often used to refer to the entire Indian peninsula, including Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

South Asians have recently adopted new place names to replace the names given them during British colonial rule. The city of Bombay, for example, is now officially Mumbai, Madras is Chennai, Calcutta is Kolkata, Benares is Varanasi, and the Ganges River is the Ganga River.

THINGS TO REMEMBER

  • The Sardar Sarovar Dam and similar dams throughout the world are created primarily for irrigation and power generation, but they have side effects that often create more problems than they solve.

  • The management of water—where it is apportioned and whether there is too much or too little of it—has been a feature of South Asian life for a long time. Climate change now makes water management more problematic.

  • Improving the standard of living of poor populations in many parts of the world nearly always requires increases in water and energy use.