IN THE 1980S THE FULL PROPORTIONS OF ASIA’S WATER CRISIS BECAME manifest—including its vertical dimension. In that decade, satellite images and remote sensing data revealed to scientists how fully human activities had transformed the physical environment, reaching from the underground waters to the upper atmosphere. Much of the impact was visible without the aid of sophisticated technology. It became viscerally clear in the quality of the air that people breathed and the water that they drank, in the strangulation of the rivers they lived by and lived from. In 1984, the chemical pollutants that coursed through the holy Ganges reached such concentrations that a stretch of water caught fire: it became a river of flames.
Asia’s waters were subject to unprecedented demands that came from the convergence of two large processes. The first, which began in the 1950s, was population growth. India’s population grew from just under 370 million people in 1950 to 684.8 million in 1980, an increase of 185 percent; through the 1970s alone, India added 131 million new citizens. China’s population grew more slowly, but from a larger base: from 562 million people in 1950 to just under 988 million by 1980, and with an absolute increase of close to 166 million people in the 1970s. Although the rate of population growth in both India and China had slowed considerably by the 1980s, not least because of coercive population “control” measures in both countries, the cumulative impact of the previous decades’ growth has been manifest. Belying the fears of the Malthusian prophets, the effects of this expansion on the biosphere were initially limited by very low levels of income per capita—and limited, too, by deliberate efforts by both the Indian and Chinese governments to hold back consumption to generate savings for future investment in industrial development. But then arrived the second major transformation, which began in the 1980s: the rapid economic growth of Asia’s two largest countries, China and India, both of them following a path forged by other countries in East and Southeast Asia a decade or more earlier, but on an altogether different scale.