Water and Energy in India

by David Borton (Ghana 65-67)

(David originally wrote this article for the Rensselaer County (NY) Environmental Action Newsletter. He recently returned from a trip to India where he started a solar energy company, Surya Shakti Solar Technologies, Pt. Ltd.)

India like the United States and the rest of the world has water and energy problems. India is not like the US in that she has three times the human population living on one-third of the land area. In the US water and energy are cheap because wages are high and therefore we are wasteful of these resources.  In India wages are so low that water and energy are expensive. These differences provide an opportunity for solar energy in India.

Because solar energy has a labor component that is three times as large as the labor component of fossil fuel energy, solar energy will be cheaper in India than in the US. Transfers of solar energy technologies can provide commercial quantities of steam and electricity from the sun in India at prices competitive with current global energy prices. The low level of development in India makes any manufacturing process, including solar, difficult. It will be exciting if India can make steam and electricity for rupees with sunshine instead of buying fossil fuels for scarce dollars on the world market.

Water was not a problem in the western state of Gujarat when forests covered the land. Now Gujarat's water problems are similar to water problems in states like Texas and Arizona. Native vegetation has been cleared and cash crops have been planted which require irrigation from tube wells that mine ground water at rates much higher than recharge rates. As a result the ground water table gets lower and lower each year and Gujarat and parts of the southwest of the US are listed by the United Nations as areas threatened with desertification.

Here in the northeastern US the forests slow down and collect rain water in the ground, raising the water table above the level of rivers providing year round river flow. Deforestation allows the rain to run off the ground quickly to the ocean causing soil erosion along the way. The water does not recharge the water table and the water table is lowered by irrigation agriculture so that the rivers run dry seasonally as do the Colorado and China's Yellow River for example.

In Gujarat small dams throughout a water shed have shown that rain water can be used to recharge the ground water just as Phoenix has shown that its water table can be recharged by dammed areas around that city. In Gujarat a combination of dams and reforestation can bring back a high steady state water table if the ground water is not mined for world market cash crops. Currently the cash crop is cotton that the industrial world can buy cheaply to provide a healthy US economy with blue jeans. Water and energy are inextricably related by the physics of the global atmosphere. Fossil fuel burning has changed the atmosphere, changing the earth's energy balance. Science may never be able to prove a direct relation between the global atmosphere and specific weather like this year's record high temperatures, but that is just a statement about the level of proof required by science. The exciting news is that India can become locally sustainable in water and in energy. The even greater challenge is that water and energy are global problems.