Crisis has started in Asia in terms of water and electricity. The Soviet-era system has five countries of the region that share their resources but have broken down. This resulted in water shortages and severe power cuts. In a few cases there were also a instances of small-scale unrest that already occurred but some of them have warned that this can be just the beginning of a crisis.
January 2009, saw a power cut on a freezing night through the Tajik capital Dushanbe in to darkness. Another severe crisis came when one of the city’s maternity hospitals back-up went down and all the important breathing equipment shut and left the doctors battling to keep new born baby girls alive. Father of one of the baby girls, Saymuddin Dustov was desperately trying to find an alternative power source.
Four about two hours he and his friends were trying to drag a 200 kg generator up in five flights of stairs in pitch darkness. Dustav sat in a cold ward as he watched his daughter struggling to breathe. Saymuddin said, “I could see that she just didn’t have enough strength to keep going”. The daughter lost her battle with life at 2 am in the morning. That was not the only child who died in Tajikistan as the temperatures in winter went down like never before while the country’s power supply network collapsed.
The crisis showed the complex network of shared power and water supplies that served all the five Central Asian republics in Soviet times. The supply was affected when the mutual understanding between the regions fell apart in terms of sharing electricity and water. Most of the time the misunderstandings were solved by Moscow but in 1991 the USSR fell apart and every country was left to face its problems on its own.
Photo Credits: worldbank
