RE: FW: Hydrocratic dreams

May 17, 2011

Dear colleague

Thanks for the congratulations.

Looked at it from Indian perspective, I don’t blame the Indians. It is natural for them to want to do so to Nepal in their national interest. By what gets my goat is the attitude of the people in Nepal wanting to perpetuate what you have termed, appropriately, resource colonialism of India. I call it reverse colonialism: people of host country eagerly wanting to be colonized in this age and time. I know many people in Nepal who treat Indians as their masters, make themselves available at Indian beck and call in their eagerness to oblige. A nasty word that comes to my mind, begging your pardon, is intellectual prostitution.

I agree with you that as an upstream country Nepal is providing environmental services which are valuable to India without her asking. But the beneficiary is a modern imperialist who doesn’t believe in all this. The problem is further aggravated by the people in Nepal who, far from demanding recompense for such benefits accruing to India, want to go about mindlessly building huge dams in Nepal just to provide flood control services during wet season and irrigation services in the dry season free of cost which are generated at huge cost in terms of inundation of valuable land and involuntary displacement of the inhabitants.


With best regards,

Sincerely,


Ratna Sansar Shrestha, FCA
Senior Water Resource Analyst
http://www.ratnasansar.com/

From:
Sent: Saturday, May 14, 2011 7:40
To: Ratna Sansar Shrestha
Subject: Re: FW: Hydrocratic dreams

Ratna,

nice one.. I am particularly pissed off with what is now resource colonialism... a sort of energy factory farming. Is like Nepal doesn't have any intrinsic value other than as a supplier for India.. which gets us back to historically nasty patterns of Patron client relationships and unequal contacts....one could be forgiven for thinking the objective is to progress not fall back on old exploitive models.. so congrats.. What you didn't consider and may be the topic for your next treatise is the environmental services value of the rivers, valleys and forests by just being there.. ie dams versus cost to the city of clean water etc..
I am trying to put a case to stop a nasty dam on the mainstream Irrawaddy.. Its not I am anti dam, but scale, location, seismology, geology, hydrology, alternative land use, climate change and glacier melting etc.. are not considered.