British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Water and the quest for sustainable development in West Bengal
Professor Graham Chapman (University of Lancaster) on behalf of the British Association for South Asian Studies
The major rivers of Bengal inundate the country, eroding tracts of land and dispossessing local populations, with national and international ramifications and generating hotly-debated contradictory policy conclusions.
Technical support for this research was provided by the Society for South Asian Studies (now the British Association for South Asian Studies).
For further information, visit: www.britac.ac.uk/institutes/SSAS/about.htm
Summary
The Bengal delta is the world’s biggest and most active, receiving from the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers huge quantities of sediment every year. The rivers shift their courses, frequently in terms of geological and historical time. 
By virtue of alluvium, precipitation and temperature, this is a highly productive ecosystem, the majority of it converted to agriculture. It is now one of the most densely settled areas on earth, still mostly rural and extremely poor. It is the greatest area of absolute poverty on earth - there being more poor peoplehere than in the whole of Africa. Urbanisation and industrialisation is occurring and roads and railways are being developed in preference to water transport.
The governments of Bengal want security and certainty in an area prone to major flooding and major river avulsions. But roads, railways and urban embankments exacerbate flood problems by blocking lines of drainage, and by spasmodic collapse at unpredictable places. An alternative policy would live with the fluctuating water levels - in fact replicating in a modern form the pre-industrial way of life. There are of course additional complicating factors. One is the high level of naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater, which suggests that surface water should be preferred (again), and the other is the possibility of massive transfers of ‘surplus’ water from Assam (Brahmaputra) across the region to peninsular India. This presentation will discuss different policy options and chart different possible approaches to poverty alleviation and sustainable development in this complex region.