Concerns over India rivers order

India's population has exploded over the past century, and that means that the basic resources they will require is also growing exponentially against an ever-finite bank.  To combat the anticipated shortage, India has been proposing a $120 billion project that would divert water from upstream rivers into India's low-water regions.  However, this obviously means that there will be a shortage of water in Southern countries, such as Bangladesh and New Delhi.  The fact that there could be potentially harmful environmental impacts in the locations that the streams have been diverted from seems to be a surprise to most people involved in the endeavor, however. This is shocking to me, since most people would have to know that if you change the environmental conditions of a location there will be environmental repercussions.


The question of justice becomes ever more prevalent here, though.  India is only attempting to help their citizens get the water they need to thrive.  But in doing so, they're diverting necessary resources from other citizens who do not share their nationality.  Is this a case of environmental racism?  If those people were citizens of India and the watersheds they are diverting from were in the country of India, would they be attempting to change Earth's natural systems in the same way that they are?  Can international issues be cases of environmental racism? Or is this simply a case of environmental injustice?  Are they entitled to do whatever they need to to rivers and other geologic formations in order to best serve their people? Or do countries need to realize that there are environmental ramifications that fall beyond borders, since Earth technically has no real borders (minus the deep down tectonic borders).

This article also brings up another interesting point:  According to United States intelligence agencies, by the year 2022 South Asia will be a region in the world where "water would be used as a weapon of war or a tool of terrorism."  I realize that all is fair in love and war, but is the shift from nuclear and biological warfare to environmental warfare an acceptable shift?  We said we'd never use Atomic Weaponry again,which is why some people have said we're more prone to wide-scale warfare of a "moderate" form.  What would happen if we started contaminating our rivers and damming up our resources in order to deliberately harm opponents of war?  When would we realize that the effects of those actions can have a global impact?