The authorities have established the country as a major exporter of the resource, and are now looking to diversify the sector towards other minerals. A caveat: a large part of the Indus river basin population would be located in the Punjab and Sindh regions of Pakistan.With the world’s largest known reserves of phosphates, mineral resources have traditionally played an important role in the Moroccan economy. The two most populous basins-Ganga and Indus-suffer significant-to-severe levels of water scarcity for 7 and 11 months in a year, respectively. Due to this reason, the WFN database classifies river basins by scarcity levels for different months in a year.ĭata for India shows that except for Brahmaputra and Mahanadi, all river basins with a population of more than 20 million experience water scarcity for a major part of the year. There could be excess flow on account of rains for a couple of months, whereas the rest of the period can witness abysmally low levels. This is because water flow situation can be extremely skewed over a year.
Water scarcity is measured for each month. The WFN database recognizes four kinds of water scarcity situations: low (ratio2). So, even a ratio of 1 denotes moderate scarcity. But ideally speaking, averting water scarcity requires that not more than 20% of the water that flows on the ground is used by human beings. If the ratio is 1, it means that available surface/groundwater is being fully utilized.
Water scarcity is defined as the ratio of total surface/groundwater footprint to surface/groundwater availability in a given river basin. The WFN database gives data on water scarcity for more than 400 river basins in the world. Rudimentary trade theory suggests that a country should be exporting things which it has in abundance and importing those which are scarce.īy that logic, India should be a virtual importer of water, especially so, when its report card of water scarcity looks very grim. One policy implication: While the country strives to increase manufacturing exports, care should be taken to maximize water use efficiency lest it ends up virtually exporting more water. In contrast, India is a large virtual net export of water because of agricultural products. But China ends up exporting more water than importing because of its overseas sales of industrial products. How does it compare with China, which is the only other nation with a comparable population size?Ĭhina is the eleventh largest country in the world in terms of virtual water imports and it runs a virtual water trade surplus in crop and animal products, that is, it has higher virtual water imports. In these times of global climate change, water is the one commodity where you don’t want a trade surplus (i.e, exports higher than imports).Īccording to the Water Footprint Network (WFN) database, India had the lowest virtual imports of water in the world.
At least one-fifth of this would have been surface/groundwater. To put it another way, India virtually exported 10 trillion litres of water. To export this rice, the country used around 10 trillion litres of water. In 2014-15, India exported 37.2 lakh tonnes of basmati. These numbers become all the more important when you consider exports.