Nepal, India's Water Resources And Political Relations Study

The Himalayan country Nepal of the sub-continent is bestowed with abundant water resources and great potential of hydroelectric power. Her lower riparian country India, though belongs to the same water basin, forms sharp contradiction with inadequate water and energy supply, while at the meantime, India experiences serious water-related problems of many sorts, like flood control or irrigation development. The effective governance, utilization and development of water resources in Nepal will help India to see to all such issues. Hereafter, hydropolitics constitutes the core factor of the overall bilateral relationship of Nepal and India, whose successive governments always have such issue high on their agendas. Due to the considerable differences in terms of their respective state power, when dealing with strong India, Nepal's weakness casts shadow on her water resources, which not only deprives her of the advantages stemming from geological position, but also places the whole country under India's dominance. India monopolizes Nepal's water resources development. Such an asymmetrical equilibrium between Nepal and India framed out when Nepal was under the Ranas'autocratic rule and had dominated Indo-Nepalese relations ever since then for more than a century. From the 1960's, with the support of foreign assistance, Nepal began to distance herself with India by asserting Nepalese nationalism and trying to have a free hand in shaping the country's political destiny, during which process water resources play a decisive role. However, influenced by changes in the international system on the one hand, and India's superior presence in Nepal, especially in her power-political framework on the other, the positive effects of foreign assistance is limited and fluctuating in its nature. The fierce fight for power among and within Nepal's political parties since 1990s has also shifted Indo-Nepalese hydropolitics to a large extent.Based upon historic facts and analyses, this dissertation aims to make explosive research about the above mentioned aspects of the bilateral relationship of Nepal and India, displaying their unique relations pattern with the involvement of third part and with hydropolitics being the core. Some relevant conceptions from the Game Theory have been adopted to interpret the characteristics of such a pattern. At present, Nepal is undergoing unprecedented changes, how to make policies towards India and other donor countries with respect to water resources will be a real test for the new government. This is also an important domain of this dissertation.