Aral Apocalypse

The Aral Sea has shrunk to a fourth of its size. Neha Mungekar travels to Uzbekistan and recounts how it remains a living sample of a monumental human-made ecological catastrophe

- Neha Mungekar

IN MODERN times, the health of an economy is deemed far more vital than that of the ecology. Re-routing rivers, realigning water bodies, focusing on mono culture cultivation, creating cities next to transport corridors and then transporting water to places with scarce groundwater has become the norm across the world. Sudden prosperity may validate this development pathway, but the irrevocable damage to nature is catastrophic. Aral Sea is one such story.

In the 1960s, the Aral Sea region used to support a thriving fishing industry. Even earlier, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya river basins, which used to feed this inland lake, provided water to the oasis towns that gave birth to the historic Silk Route. During the Soviet rule, Uzbek towns near the Aral Sea were forced to shift their livelihood to cotton mono culture farming. Ill Conceived Soviet irrigation schemes reduced the water flow from the rivers needed to replenish the Aral Sea.

Today, the lake—which was called a sea due its sheer size and salinity—has reduced to a mere 25 per cent of its original size. From being as big as the state of Punjab, it is now smaller than the size of Goa because of the re-routing of Amu Darya and Syr Darya to give impetus to cotton production. Although the Aral Sea disaster—a human made environmental catastrophe—was realised in the late 1990s, its consequences are becoming even more evident today.

In the 1960s, the depth of the lake was 68 metres. Today, it is less than 10 metres. A relatively shallow water level spread across a large surface area has led to faster evaporation. This has caused over 90 per cent loss in the volume of water in the last six decades. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, it now hosts travellers who visit to witness the apocalyptic landscape.

Layered problems