Cleanwaterforum : A forum to discuss how to achieve universal access to safe, physically accessible, sufficient and affordable, clean water.

We set up this blog to discuss issues surrounding universal access to safe, physically accessible, sufficient and affordable clean water. These issues include, but are not limited to: 1) whether access to clean water should be enshrined as a fundamental human right; 2) how to respond to the increasingly prevalent treatment of water as a commodity rather than a public good (corporate social responsibility and water); 3) clean water as global health issue; 4) clean water as a poverty issue; 5) clean water as a global security issue; 6) clean water as a gender issue.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

India-China Water Stress - Potential Conflict

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Editorial/TOP_ARTICLE__Beware_Of_Water_Wars/articleshow/3747837.cms
This Times of India article describes the potential for conflict between India and China over water.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently visited China and discussed with his counter-part water that flows out of the Tibetan Himalayas to feed India. China's control over the Tibetan plateau means that it controls the source of most of the river systems that sustain south and southeast Asia. The Indus, Gang-Bramapurta, Yangtze, and Mekong rivers all originate in the Himalayas - and 1.3 billion people live in the drainage basin of the Himalayan rivers.

China and India, the two most populous countries in the world are already water-stressed and China has embarked on massive water diversion projects.

"China is toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects. Its Great South-North Water Transfer Project is an overly ambitious engineering attempt to take water through man-made canals to its semi-arid north. The diversion of waters from the Tibetan plateau in this project's third leg is an idea enthusiastically backed by President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist by training."
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