Recently an India-China meeting of water resources officials concluded with the usual: promises to share time series data on river flows in the Himalayas. While they grapple with this simple transaction, the problem has magnified in the last few years. Because of lack of reliable data on the Himalayan region, the chances of knowing the impact of climate change on these areas is remote. As a result, the planning for projects downstream continues on faulty premises and outdated data. It pretends that climate change does not exist.

At a recent seminar in the capital on the Rivers of Great Himalayas organised by the South Asia Chair of the Global Water Partnership, one of the presentations made by a World Bank expert put forward a slide that had plotted stations that record hydrological data. While the plains lit up with dots almost overlapping, there was darkness in the Himalayan region. This is the area where nine major rivers originate in the Greater Himalayas.

Nearly 1.3 billion people live in these basins and three billion depend on these rivers for their food, power and electricity in India, China, Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal. Considering half the world is dependent on water flows from there, experts find this ambiguity scary.

In India, 500 million people live in the basin of the Himalayan rivers. Though there is huge variation within the country, we are undoubtedly moving towards water-stressed status. It is important to know the exact behaviour of these rivers as it is estimated that 750 million people are vulnerable to floods and 960 million are vulnerable to droughts. Last year itself, 57 million were affected by floods and 3,000 people lost their lives.

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