The resurgent Taliban is on the victory march to Kabul. It has already taken provincial capitals as well as Afghanistan’s third-largest city of Herat. As the Taliban appear at the gates of Kabul again after two decades, fears have grown about what their conduct will be towards life and livelihood, the economy, systems, institutions and even towards cultural artefacts.
One of those apprehensions is about the Taliban’s water policy. After the Taliban took over Herat August 12, 2021, fears have grown about the fate of the internationally financed Afghan-India Friendship Dam, formerly the Salma Dam, on the Harirud River. It is the main source of electricity and irrigation water for hundreds of thousands of people in western Afghanistan.
Given the grim precedent of the Taliban bombing the statues of the Buddha in the Bamyan Valley in 2001, amid global outrage, the world is justified in being concerned.
Water, or the lack of it, is an issue in Afghanistan today. In their December 2020 paper Sustainable Irrigation: Karez System in Afghanistan, Abdullah Azami, Zhanay Sagintayev, Sayed Hashmat Sadat and Hejratullah Hejran wrote that Afghanistan, a semi-arid country, was losing its northern and central mountain glaciers due to climate change.
These glaciers provide meltwater to people, especially in rural areas. The authors say this is done through three types of water management and irrigation systems in Afghanistan: Surface water or canals, underground water or borewells and Qanat / Karez.
The last system had the potential to be the answer to many problems of water in Afghanistan, the authors noted. But would it survive the second stint of the Taliban?
Qanats / Karezes were at the root of a diplomatic fiasco in May 2009 between the US forces and locals, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Americans blew up a series of Karezes in the country in order to expand a military base and accommodate more troops.
The locals protested and the Taliban took advantage and started propagandising against the US and the Afghan government whom they supported.
What is a Qanat / Karez?
This system of underground vertical shafts in a gently sloping tunnel that is built from an upland aquifer to ground level, is in fact present in several countries.
Some historians and archaeologists have attributed people in the southeast Arabian Peninsula as the first developers. Others, however, ascribe it to the ancient Persians.
The Qanat / Karez system, wherever it was developed, soon spread to many Persian, Arab and Turkic lands. It even came to the Indian Subcontinent during the 800-year-old Islamic Period.
Some 9,370 Karezes were operating in 19 Afghan provinces, according to the authors of the 2020 paper, “with the majority of them concentrated on the eastern, southern and western flanks of the Hindu Kush mountains.”
They also noted that the system was more widespread in the southwest and south, “with fewer Karezes in the north”.
Several Karezes have been destroyed in the more than 40 years of war in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in December 1979. Farmers have begun to abandon them and have shifted to mechanised borewell systems.
The importance of the Qanat / Karez was so much that their destruction was impossible. The system was brought in the Indian Subcontinent during the Bahamani Sultanate, founded by Alaudin Bahman Shah. It later broke into five other Sultantates: Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Berar.
The Bahamani Sultanate was Persianate in nature and encouraged many things Persian, among them, the Karez.
The Karezes of Karnataka, described the beauty of the first Karez system in India that was built in the city of Bidar during the reign of Bahamani Sultan Ahmad Shah Wali (1422-1436), who shifted the capital from Gulbarga to Bidar.
The entire system is a planning and execution of the forces of a watershed. The rulers used to execute the city plan within the watershed. They made sure that wastewater never mixed with drinking water. By the 15th century, Bijapur city had a network of pipelines. Everyone got 24×7 supply of water. It also worked as confidence-building measure between the Sultan and his subjects since the Karez was built the state.
Karez being the only water supply in certain provinces of Afghanistan is very important considering that these places are in the south and southwest of the country according to the paper.
These are part of the ‘Pashtun Crescent’, the heartland of the Pashtuns, the main ethnic group in the Taliban and the country’s largest ethnicity. Kandahar, the traditional Pashtun capital, where the Taliban emerged in 1996, is also located in this area.
And if that is not solace enough, here are some more points of the system’s importance that the paper mentions. Karez systems cover eight per cent of irrigated land in Afghanistan.
They are the only source of water in the majority of rural communities in southern and southwestern regions of Afghanistan.
They are energy efficient and green since they use the force of gravity rather than any machines running on fuel.
Water in them does not evaporate and is also filtered till it comes to the surface. There is no depletion of the aquifer since excessive use is impossible. Its maintenance is also low-cost, say the authors.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.