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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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.