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.

Financial Express, April 11, 2013

Rebuilding Punjab

 The state of Punjab in India represents an important case study of development gone awry. Partition in 1947, which wreaked havoc on the region, was followed by surprisingly rapid recovery and progress. An infrastructure of roads and market towns was created in the 1950s, followed by the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which saw Punjab become the breadbasket of India. Punjab became the richest state in India, measured by per capita income.

More recently, Punjab’s growth has lagged the rest of India, and it has slipped down the league table of states. This is not worrisome in itself, since the state’s growth has not stopped, and it remains one of India’s better-off states. The bigger worry is looming ecological disaster that will harm Punjab irretrievably, and with it, the whole nation of India.

Last month, Inderjit N Kaur and I organised a conference on rebuilding Punjab at UC Santa Cruz. Participants such as Rajinder Sidhu of Punjab Agricultural University emphasised the criticality of the groundwater situation in Punjab, with rapidly falling water tables, and the distortionary policies, such as free power for farmers, that have accelerated the problem. Upmanu Lall of Columbia University noted that drinking water pollution has also become alarming, so a health disaster will accompany the desertification that comes with groundwater depletion. Lakhwinder Singh of Punjabi University discussed a range of issues, including poor governance, falling investment, monopolistic middlemen, poor educational outcomes, and lack of adequate modern infrastructure, with many of these points coming out in presentations by Dr Sidhu as well.

Pritam Singh of Oxford-Brookes University and Jugdep Chima of Hiram College brought out the complexities of interactions among economics, politics and society, and there was often agreement that state-level politicians have been failing on the job. Poor revenue effort, high fiscal deficits and corruption have been taking their toll on the economy. There were mixed views on the legacy of the militancy and repression of the 1980s and 1990s, which still looms large in many lives. In a separate analysis, Swaminathan Aiyar has dismissed this history as an excuse or explanation for the current crisis of Punjab, preferring to focus on the more recent failings of state governance, but perhaps the two are connected. At the conference, Pritam Singh argued that the lack of an effective opposition party in Punjab has hampered the workings of normal politics as a mechanism for responding to constituent needs and wants.

It is certainly plausible to argue that the political economy of the Green Revolution model has trapped Punjab in an unsustainable and undesirable equilibrium of depleting its natural resources and neglecting its human resources, to keep growing grain for the country’s public distribution system. The seeds of the Punjab crisis, which included issues of water needs amplified by adoption of new varieties and cropping patterns of wheat and rice, perhaps were sown along with the technological innovations of the 1960s.

Swaminathan Aiyar, in his work that emphasises economic freedom and a reform agenda firmly rooted in allowing more room for markets to flourish, pushes for fiscal consolidation and a better environment for doing business. On the other hand, some of the perspectives at the conference emphasised the role of the government in providing the infrastructure and complementary inputs for private sector success. Aiyar notes the distortions of markets in the current Punjab economic system, but perhaps not enough the crisis of drug use and similar problems of societal values. One only has to look at the US to see that economic growth does not automatically translate into a society with greater general well-being.

One of the goals of the conference was to examine the larger, more global, cultural, societal and historical factors that feed into the current state of Punjab’s economy and polity. Pashaura Singh of UC Riverside, Gurinder Mann of UC Santa Barbara, Harpreet Singh of Harvard, Van Dusenbery of Hamline, Supreet Kaur of Columbia, and Inderjit Kaur of UC Santa Cruz discussed various aspects of these factors, and the role of the Sikh diaspora, in particular received some attention. How one creates a social vision, aligns the interests of the leaders and the led, and creates space and momentum for change were all questions that were raised, if not fully answered.

Answers are urgently needed, though. The sense of the conference discussions was that there is no more scope for muddling through—Punjab has to go up or else it will go way down. This is a small state in India, one that often gets lost in the shuffle of national policymaking, but the repercussions of a collapse of Punjab’s economy will have huge implications for India. Already, it is clear that the national food policy is inefficient and even destructive. It should be clear that changing that policy will benefit energy and water security as well. The national government should be making the Punjab economy a national priority.