Food, Water, Energy Shortages Threaten India Security

By Gopal Ratnam and Abhay Singh

Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- India’s future is threatened by shortages of food, water and energy and these should be addressed on a priority basis, the Prime Minister’s security adviser said.

“These are part of a broad national security plan, and defense is only one aspect of it,” Shekhar Dutt, India’s deputy national security adviser, said in an interview in New Delhi yesterday. “We think water is going to be a very severe determinant of prosperity and well-being.”

Inadequate rainfall has led to a drought in as many as 278 of India’s 626 districts, according to the farm ministry. This has sparked concern over food shortages and rising prices, prompting authorities to raid wholesalers hoarding commodities. Raw sugar futures have soared 90 percent this year.

“Unless we drive in the fear of god among hoarders, the man on the street will suffer from rising prices,” Ashok Das, principal secretary of food, civil supplies and consumer protection in the central Madhya Pradesh state, said in a phone interview from Bhopal today. Authorities seized 480 metric tons of sugar in the past week, he said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year imposed stockpiling limits on food items such as wheat and sugar to curb hoarding as inflation surged to a 16-year high. The government ended import taxes on edible oils, banned exports of rice and halted futures trading in commodities including soybean oil and potatoes to cool prices and avert riots that broke out in more than 30 developing countries including Haiti and Pakistan.

Water Harvesting

This year’s drought has underscored the need for India to improve collection of rainwater. With dam-based irrigation having nearly reached capacity of about 50 million hectares, additional water storage can be possible only with harvesting, Dutt said.

“In the next 20 years water harvesting will become the most important feature to generate groundwater storage more effectively than major dams,” he said.

Three northwest Indian states lost a volume of water from underground supplies equal to more than twice the capacity of Lake Mead, the biggest U.S. reservoir, between August 2002 and October 2008, scientists said in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Nature.

Without measures to curb demand, dwindling groundwater supplies may cause drinking-water shortages and erode crop production in a region inhabited by 114 million people, the authors said. Water harvesting involves collecting rain from rooftops and local catchments and capturing seasonal floodwaters.

Internal Security

With more than 70 percent of India’s population living on less than $2 a day, the government is addressing internal security including jobs, infrastructure and literacy in addition to defense. In the next five years India plans to invest as much as $35 billion on weapons to modernize its military.

Power shortages impede development in India as more than 400 million people lack electricity and supply falls short of peak demand by 16.6 percent, the World Bank said in June.

An agreement with the U.S. that gave India access to nuclear technology and fuel for power generation also fits into the national security energy mix, Dutt said. The accord signed last year ended India’s nuclear isolation dating back to 1974, when it tested its first atomic bomb.

In 2008, India’s installed capacity in wind-energy was the fifth largest after U.S., Germany, Spain and China, according to the Global Wind 2008 report by Brussels-based Global Wind Energy Council. The government is also putting the final touches to a national plan aimed at boosting solar energy.

To contact the reporters on this story: Gopal Ratnam in New Delhi via gratnam1@bloomberg.net; Abhay Singh in New Delhi at abhaysingh@bloomberg.net