Reviving the Ganges Water Machine: Potential and Challenges to Meet Increasing Water Demand in the Ganges River Basin

Abstract

The Ganges River Basin (GRB) covers a land area of 1.086 million square kilometers (km2) and cuts across four south Asian countries, with India, Nepal, Bangladesh and China taking up 79%, 14%, 4% and 3% of this area, respectively (Figure 1). Mean annual river flow volume of the entire basin is estimated to be in the order of over 550 billion cubic meters (Bm3). The GRB is home to 8.3% of the world’s 7.3 billion population, and is one of the densest poverty hot spots in the entire world. There were 158 million low-income people, accounting for 26% of the basin population in 2011. More than 450 million (or 80%) of the basin population are under multi-dimensional poverty conditions (Amarasinghe et al. 2016), which means that they lack adequate education, health and standard of living (Alkire and Santos 2011). The majority of the basin population lives in rural areas, and depends on agriculture for food and livelihood security (Sharma et al. 2010), which, in turn, significantly depend on the availability of, and access to, water in the Ganges River.