A World Thirsts for Leadership

With water supplies at risk as the planet warms and economies grow, the College of Engineering leads in preserving and protecting the most global of engineering systems.

High atop the Siachen Glacier in the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan, a young Indian soldier stands guard. Far below his position, soldiers from the Pakistani army are dug in. The Pakistanis cannot climb and the Indian troops cannot descend, and the soldier is more likely to die from exposure than from Pakistani fire. But the standoff may not last: the Siachen Glacier—ultimate source of the Indus River, lifeline of the Punjab breadbasket, and Pakistan’s main source of drinking water—is melting.

In the parking lot of a restaurant just north of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, a young American agricultural engineer watches a pipe from an outhouse dump raw sewage into the Aragvi River, headed toward the Caspian Sea. But the sight is common to watersheds throughout the former Soviet republic, regardless of ultimate destination, and most Georgians don’t see it as a problem. Meanwhile, Black Sea fishermen sail out ever farther for their catch: fish stocks are nearly exhausted in the polluted zones close to shore.

Half a world away, the mayor of Tucson gazes out his office window. It’s only June 1, but today the mercury will hit 104 degrees—one shy of a record. The American Southwest has been scorched by drought for seven years, and there will be no rain this day either. The mayor jokes about “going to war” with California over dwindling supplies of water from the Colorado River. But this isn’t Kashmir. Not yet.

1965: Iowa comes to India
Ramesh Kanwar knows these places. The chair of Iowa State’s Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (ABE) was born in the Punjab region, just south of Kashmir. There, after his father’s death, his family farmed a small plot of land without benefit of mechanization, fertilized solely from the composted manure of a water buffalo.

A top student, Kanwar won scholarships at key stages of his education. In 1965, he earned a scholarship to the Punjab Agricultural University, which recently had partnered with Ohio State University to develop a program in agricultural engineering, a discipline unfamiliar to Kanwar at the time.

He knew even less about Iowan Norman Borlaug, who in 1965 was sowing the seeds of his “Green Revolution,” nearly doubling harvests and staving off famine in both Pakistan and India. But along with Borlaug’s seeds came a massive increase in the production and application of synthetic fertilizers, as well as the construction of huge irrigation facilities to enable multiple crop cycles, and Kanwar could scarce imagine he would one day make his career in Iowa, helping to mitigate the darker aspects of Borlaug’s revolution.

The young engineer quickly made a name for himself. Only 21, in 1970 Kanwar sought to determine water requirements for rice production in the sandy loam of Punjab, where the lack of scientific water management had discouraged cultivation of paddy crops. Kanwar’s advocacy of precision irrigation techniques dramatically increased yields while conserving water. The result was an equally dramatic increase in Punjabi farmers cultivating rice, from almost none in 1970 to more than 35% today.

In 1975, Kanwar’s research resulted in a breakthrough in water hydraulics, offering engineers a cost-effective tool for determining the capacity of aquifers to store and transmit water. Then, as part of his doctoral work at Iowa State, he developed a computer simulation model to predict nonpoint source pollution from nitrates. From this research platform in the world’s most productive agricultural region—the “belly of the beast,” so to speak, of Borlaug’s Green Revolution—Kanwar and his colleagues developed a regimen of practices to protect water resources not only for Iowa, but for the world as well.

Diminishing resources, growing demands
It is, however, another challenge altogether to implement those practices. Kanwar understands the fragility of the world’s hydrological infrastructure—and, therefore, agriculture and the larger superstructure of civilization it supports. Fully 70% of the planet’s water is saline, he notes, and 97% of what remains cannot be used by humans.

“The water we can actually use for social benefit is about 2.8%,” Kanwar says. “The water we do use is less than 1%. It’s just like gasoline: there’s not adequate water to serve all of our needs.

Today, with global warming rapidly diminishing the glacial origins of many of the world’s freshwater resources, the sheer unpredictability of future supplies demands the protection of those remaining. Yet between large-scale agricultural production in developed nations, explosive industrial growth in developing nations, and hungry populations in underdeveloped states, the struggle to safeguard resources from urban, agricultural, and industrial pollutants is increasingly difficult.

“Go to any country—the good water supplies are almost depleted,” Kanwar observes. “There are few rivers with safe water to drink. Deeper groundwater systems are mostly OK. But in Iowa, go 100 to 150 feet deep—most of the water is contaminated.”

The contamination, moreover, has spread beyond groundwater to despoil growing areas of coastal waters as well. From the Black Sea to the Baltic to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond, the flow of industrial and agricultural pollutants into seas and oceans has leached coastal waters of oxygen, decimating local economies by creating massive hypoxic zones in which no marine life can live.

For 15 years, Kanwar has worked to conserve the Earth’s remaining water by taking lessons learned in Iowa to a global classroom. Equally important, he is an internationally recognized authority on water resource conservation, serving as a consultant with the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and different United Nations programs to governments in China and India, as well as the Black Sea riparian nations of Turkey, Romania, and Georgia.

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