Rally for Rivers plan to plant trees to get rivers flowing has little scientific proof
Isha Foundation’s "Rally for Rivers" campaign began with much fanfare earlier this month. Along with the support it has gathered from chief ministers, movie stars and ex-cricketers, it has also gathered some critique for the way it is being organised and the lack of science backing the whole idea.
The Wire posted that the rally will further worsen the problem that it aims to solve, Prerna Bindra at DailyO lists many issues that are ailing our rivers from an ecological sense, which the rally is simply not addressing. The Quint tries to simplify the problem to the simplest arithmetic they think YouTube watchers can follow and come up with a number of 8 lakh trees needed to offset the carbon footprint of the cavalcade of the Rally for Rivers campaign alone. Isha Foundation has been quick to respond and has published a response to the critiques on FirstPost.
Yet none of the above posts actually elaborate on the science that Rally for Rivers is actually based on. One could do a quick Google search and find hundreds of papers, but if Rally for Rivers is actually asking for a missed call to show my support, it should also show me what they are supporting. To be honest, there is a section on the Isha website that talks about the science behind the rally and it lists exactly three papers, one from Nature, one from Global Environmental Change and one from Journal of Hydrology as the science behind the campaign. Let’s quickly review these scientific papers one by one.
The Nature paper published in 2016 starts by talking about the trade-off theory where planting more trees leads to reduced water levels, while cleared forests give higher water yields. However, after citing limited evidence of the trade-off theory in the tropics, the authors move to their own experiments to arrive at an “optimum” level of tree cover that can deliver maximum groundwater recharge. The paper summaries their work as “open areas close to trees not only had a higher yearly accumulated drainage at 1.5m soil depth compared to those further away from trees, but they received the first wet season water earlier”.
The second paper in Global Environmental Change published in 2017 is a multinational collaboration but essentially a review of the impact of trees, forests and water on a world affected by global warming. This paper mentions the biotic pump theory which calls for a continuous forest cover from coast to the interiors of a continent to ensure a good amount of rainfall (something we have not even heard from the Rally for Rivers camp). Further, it visits the trade-off theory mentioned in the Nature paper and after calling it biased, lists tree root architecture, tree density, and catchment preferences as factors to consider when making decisions regarding these plantations.
It also states that “few studies investigate the impacts of tree cover on water yields in the tropics, and data from the (semi-) arid tropics is scarce”. To conclude, the paper says that “sound conclusions concerning net tree cover effects on infiltration, dry season flows, and groundwater recharge cannot easily be drawn from current evidence”. It is important to note that the paper does not speak about the effect of trees in drought-affected areas, something that the rally is claiming to attend to.
The third paper published in Journal of Hydrology and the only one which includes a detailed study about streamflow conducted in the Indian tropics includes the following in one of its many conclusions “occurrence of overland flow may have increased as a result of long-term forest degradation”. This is quite the opposite of what is being shown in the campaign that the rivers do not flow and hardly meet the sea.
At this point, it is also important to note that none of the papers actually talk about what area of land needs to be covered for receiving a good streamflow and recharging groundwater tables and by what kind of trees. So, the whole idea of 1km-wide plantation that should include fruit trees on private lands and native trees on government owned land seems quite arbitrary and not based on any scientific evidence at all. Or Rally for Rivers does not wish to make the source public.
To summarise, the three papers listed on the website as the scientific basis for the entire campaign are quite vague and give no clear direction to proceed. How the Rally for Rivers team has come up with its plant trees solution is simply not clear. An alternative explanation, could be that three references were hurriedly put there sometime during the initial few days of the campaign and nobody has bothered to review them.
The Rally for Rivers website also showcases some time-lapse images of areas near rivers that have been deforested and the reduction in flow of major rivers across the country. While the images give us a glimpse of what has happened over the past 30-40 years, we must also take into account the factors that have contributed to this change.
Given below is a simple chart of the annual average rainfall that India has received since Independence until 2014 as available on the Data.gov.in website.
Barring years, 1965, 1972, 2002 and 2009, the country has received an average rainfall 1,000mm annually. This basically means that there has been no shortage of inflow to these rivers. Then the question is how are they drying up?
The answer can be found on the website of the Central Water Commission, which maintains a National Register of Large Dams, which was last updated around 2015. As per the data available in this record, India has built the following numbers of dams until the year 2000 since Independence.
Dam Category | Number of dams built |
10 -15 m | 1476 |
>15 m | 2445 |
>50 m | 118 |
Considering that irrigational needs of the country against the growing population base, it was pertinent that successive governments took this step or they would be called irresponsible. But how much water is being held back by the dams and has contributed to the loss of streamflow of major rivers is never mentioned on the Rally for Rivers website.
While this is an issue, what irks me the most is the lack of transparency in the actual plan that will be submitted to the government at the end of the campaign. The entire rally across the country was a great opportunity to discuss local issues in implementing the plan and then making changes to the original draft before it was submitted to the government. But people who have shown support for the idea and rallied for rivers, actually do not know what is it that they are supporting, because nobody has seen a draft yet. According to Sadhguru, a team of 27 experts is preparing a 700-page draft policy which will be submitted to the government in three-four months. According to the RfR website, this draft was to be submitted on October 2, at the end of the campaign but now will be submitted later.
Throughout the campaign, people have been asked to pledge their support by giving a missed call to a certain number. The target number of missed calls that the campaign wants to collect is 30 crore. But how many missed calls has the campaign generated is not revealed in the public domain. For a campaign that is capable of hosting live streams of its events in different cities of the country, displaying a small missed call counter on the website should not be difficult and yet it does not exist.
It seems like a lot of information is being held back from the public because of the complexity and the enormity of the entire plan. But this very holding back of information defeats the purpose of a nation-wide campaign. The plan is complex because it needs to be implemented nationally and must include all stakeholders instead of being devised behind closed doors. Exclusion of people from the planning of the project will lead to more opposition later and further delays in implementing an idea that has true potential.
Yes, despite all its flaws, Rally for Rivers is a great idea and initiative. It can be the foundation stone of many future projects geared towards environmental protection and preservation, only if the draft policy can bring in some accountability on part of the parties involved. As the rally has progressed in the past month, a lot of state governments have shown support to the cause. These are the same governments that have announced multiple plans to safeguard the rivers flowing through their states in the past but have not shown much progress.
Whether it is Uma Bharati’s plan to plant 4 crore saplings along the Ganga or Raman Singh’s vision to make Chhattisgarh greener by 2015, revival plans for drying Yamuna, government inaction over Narmada, addressing calls for insurance against climate change, reviving fisheries on dammed rivers, or removal of concrete that is choking the Godavari, there is a lot of action missing from the government's end and while sharing the dais with very governments, the Rally has a unique opportunity to question them and which they should duly exercise.
Rally for Rivers can be called a success, if and only if, it can bring accountability to the government and private bodies involved in the many crises surrounding our rivers. Even 125 crore missed calls would be useless if Rally for Rivers’ policy does not put the responsibility where it belongs and that includes you and me.