India's Security: Food, Water and Energy

Financial Express, May 14, 2013

India's Security: Food, Water and Energy

The conventional notion of national security refers to a country’s capability to defend itself against, or to deter, military aggression. The central idea of security, though, is protection against downside risk, and that concept applies to a range of variables, though all of them ultimately feed into material well-being. In the modern world, risks come not just from deliberate attacks, but also from withdrawal of access (e.g., to goods, resources or technology) and simply from the forces of nature. 


What is the state of India’s security in this broader perspective? This is the right question to ask, rather than the more headline-grabbing one of India’s superpower status. A report from the London School of Economics a year ago asked the question “India: The Next Superpower?” seemingly as a straw man to criticise all that is wrong with India internally. Recently, The Economist magazine cautioned that India is about to become the world’s fourth military power, but lacks a plan to live up to this status. These are useful but fragmentary inputs into the question of India’s security. 

A better starting point is the perspective provided by Professor Upmanu Lall of Columbia University. For several years now, he has been explaining the water-energy-food nexus, and its implications for material security. Essentially, without an integrated and focused approach to water, energy and food security, India will face severe challenges in the near future. While the links between these three things are common across the globe, India’s situation is especially dangerous, for two reasons—one beyond the country’s control, the other very much a function of policy failures. 

The first reason for India’s exceptional security challenge in water, energy and food is a relative lack of natural endowments in water and energy resources. Per capita water availability in India is much lower than in other large, populous countries. Its ability to generate energy from domestic fossil fuels is also relatively poor. On the other hand, India has addressed its past food security problems by relying on water and energy-intensive agricultural techniques to increase yields. In regions such as Punjab, these techniques are leading to ecological disaster, which will destroy food security. 

The problem is not so much with the techniques, as with completely irrational and destructive pricing of water and electricity: an enormous and avoidable policy failure. Free electricity to farmers has led to excessive groundwater depletion, bringing underground aquifers close to irreversible collapse. The water that is pumped is also not priced, being treated as a free good by farmers. The problem is not just in Punjab. Professor Lall has been describing similar problems in states such as Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, with different cropping patterns and different participation in the central government’s food procurement system. Hence, while foodgrain procurement policy is partly to blame, and is particularly a problem in Punjab, the deeper problem is an almost complete lack of attention to the provision of sensible incentives for the use of water and electricity. Areas in Gujarat are depleting groundwater unsustainably to grow vegetables and dairy fodder, for example. 

Of course, there is more to India’s energy security than the wasting of scarce electricity for excessive groundwater pumping. Development of renewable energy sources, as a way of cutting down on problematic fossil fuels, is an area where India is lagging, relative to where it needs to be. And the management and development of fossil fuel resources for energy production in India is also well known to be inefficient. Food security policy, too, has other dimensions, including deficiencies in pricing, infrastructure, and marketing. 

Still, there is something particularly striking about policies that threaten to simultaneously destroy food and water security, while making a significant dent in energy security. I have not been able to find a clear discussion of these security issues at the national policy level, where it belongs. Professor Lall’s voice comes from a base in American academia, and he is well positioned to discuss, as he has in public forums, the potential technological and institutional solutions that might emerge from the US or other developed countries, for more efficient agricultural water use, in particular. But there has to be a receptive situation in India for such solutions to be evaluated, adapted and implemented. 

India’s policymakers are certainly right to worry about its global status, military security, macroeconomic stability, and so on. A country the size of India is going to matter more as it continues on its economic growth path. But it is easy to lose sight of problems that are accumulating in multiple locations, mostly in barely visible ways, as a result of decades of poorly chosen policies. The biggest threat to India’s security may be the looming problems in water availability and food production, and the associated drain on energy resources, from current policies. Ignoring this threat will not just risk India’s possible superpower status, but its very being.