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Brief
The River Brahmaputra and its basin is home to 130 million people and out of these, over 6 lakhs live in the riverine islands. The River basin impacts habitation in four countries namely Tibet, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh. The complexities in River and its basin management has multiple dimensions, ranging from geopolitics, socio-economic, socio-political, socio-cultural, sustainable development, climate change and more. The underwater domain, offers substantial resources and means for intense commercial and strategic interactions across vast geographies.
The Brahmaputra River and its basin is extremely critical due to its trans-boundary characteristics and also the ongoing geostrategic developments. The aspirational young population in the basin, requires rapid economic growth to ensure meaningful employment and source of livelihood. The lack of mature governance mechanism, also exposes the vulnerability to sustainable development, climate change risk, strategic security and internal security events. The opportunities on the other hand are also very attractive to encourage large scale investments and infrastructure development.
The recent past has seen mega projects like the Inland Water Transport (IWT), multiple Hydro-Power projects, storage dams and more. The floods have been a perennial problem in the plains of the River. The strategic initiatives by China as an Upper Riparian along with the Climate Change phenomenon could be strategic risk to the mega projects and also water security of the region. There is potential for unimaginable industrial growth and huge employment opportunities for the local population, however these vulnerabilities needs to be addressed to ensure sustainable economic growth in the long term.
The attempts to import technology and knowhow from the west has not been able to provide desired outcomes. The tropical characteristics of the region needs to be recognized and customized solutions with site specific field experimental research is inescapable. The local youth are completely aloof from the mega opportunities and they have not invested at all, on skilling and knowledge enhancement to present themselves as viable candidates.
The project deals with identifying the specific gaps with respect to IWT, Freshwater Management and strategic security perspective. The gaps will include policy & technology intervention along with the acoustic capacity & capability building, driven by the UDA framework. The IWT has multiple dimension related to navigability (sediment management) both in India and Bangladesh. The freshwater management will include water resource and water quality, whereas the strategic security will include projects being undertaken in China that could impact water availability and combined with the climate change phenomenon, it could be a critical issue. The aspects of flood management, drought relief, ecosystem degradation and various other freshwater related challenges and opportunities will be addressed. A consolidated UDA framework could probably address all the three aspects in an effective and efficient manner.