Digging Deeper podcast | What about water?

And the World Water Day ensures that we get water status reports from around the world every year around March 22. This year, the Environment Agency raised a red flag over England of all places! In spite of being one of the relatively overcrowded nations in Europe, England is also one of the wettest. The Environment Agency has said, ahead of this year’s World Water Day, that if England doesn’t count its water drops, the increasing population and global warming could see it running out of water in 25 years!

Of course, we have all been treated to threats and warnings about “water wars” – it’s just a matter of time, has been the refrain – they certainly are coming was the warning. Especially for a rain-fed– or, more precisely, monsoon-fed – country like India, the availability of water has traditionally depended on the three-month period of the monsoon. One bad monsoon would worry people. Two would alarm them. Three would see them facing massive disruption brought about by prolonged drought, ending in water and food shortage, disease, and little social tensions.

The north-east and the western coast, especially Kerala and south Karnataka – have been luckier. The north-east monsoon in October-November brought a second essay of rains. On the other hand, the eastern part of the peninsula – the Coromandel coast, and especially Tamil Nadu, which falls on the leeward side of the Western Ghats, has only the lashing rain from the north-east monsoon to come to its aid.

The lower Himalayan plains and the Punjab region have always fed on the numerous perennial rivers that flowed down from the mountain glaciers. Once you move westwards, the land tends to get drier, till you meet the Thar desert in Rajasthan.

Today’s water scarcity in India surely has the country’s large and still growing population as one reason behind it. But another, more important, reason is perhaps our attitude towards water and its usage. After all, we have a wonderful system of dams and barrages that hold and store water, and then distribute it to the corners of the country. And then we have a system of canals, which take the water right to the edge of the Thar desert. All this was something that did not exist, say, before Independence. So, how exactly did they all survive the vagaries of the monsoon, unexpected dry spells, especially in the drier parts which saw little water, or had availability restricted to a short part of the year?

Traditional societies around the world have, over the centuries, been acutely aware of the problems with water availability and supply, and come up with ways and means to deal with them. None of them, perhaps, more industrious and ingenious than in India. It is worth mentioning that piped water has dealt a real blow to the traditional methods of water storage. In today’s scenario, it disturbingly has also voided the need for them. Still, a journey to the hinterlands anywhere in the country would enable one to see lakes, ponds and tanks, streams and channels, household and community wells. Villages used to have designated tanks or lakes for bathing and for household water; where rivers ran, the second kind was of course unnecessary. Essentially, communities were built around water, and not the other way around. Sustainability was practised, also because it was crucial.

Today, not just in the cities, but also in villages, it is common to find wells that have become convenient garbage dumps. Lakes have been forgotten and left to die, or encroached upon and killed for the sake of development. It is instructive to compare maps of, say Bangalore, across about 40 years. A glance at a Geological Survey of India map from the Seventies, still available at the GSI office, would show just how many lakes have been filled up and constructed over. The sad truth is the neglect of the resource of water, a taking for granted, almost as if we expect it to be around.

A word about the floods and the water situation in Chennai. Tamil Nadu has always had the concept of “poromboke”. Though the connotation today is negative and the word is used to describe a useless person, this was originally meant to be land that was left fallow to act as flood plains, to mention just one use. A similar map comparison of Chennai would show how much of the “poromboke” land has been gobbled up for development. Chennai has three running-water bodies – the Cooum and Adayar rivers and the Buckingham canals. People used to swim and bathe in the Cooum in the Sixties; the Adayar saw dhobis washing clothes on its ghats less than 20 years ago. The Buckingham canal was used as a waterway. Today, all three are just extra-large drains, their black waters spreading their sulphurous stink around them.

A river like the Palar, which flows – or flowed – 40 km south of Chennai and supplied water to the city, has been bone-dry for three decades or more. The condition is similar of the Vaigai, which runs through Madurai, home to more than 2 million people. Sections of the Vaigai in the city have been converted into car parks. The revival of these rivers has also been jeopardized by extensive illegal sand mining. At places in the Cauvery, sand has been mined to a depth of over 50 feet. The consequences of this for the river and the people who depend on its waters are likely to be long-term even if the exploitation is stopped immediately and remedial steps are begun.

It is not just in the urban areas that this has happened. Unsustainable use of water is evident in the rural areas too. A curious manner in which the rural areas around Chennai have lost their groundwater is by selling to Metrowater, the city’s governmental supplier!

Our agricultural practices are still extremely wasteful with water. We produce a fraction of food using much more water when compared to a country like Israel – our farming practices are less than 2% as efficient as that of Israel. On top of that, a good deal of land along rivers like the Cauvery, have been given over to cash crops, that too, water-intensive ones like sugarcane.

And, our attitude to groundwater has been callous. Till a decade ago, there was hardly the concept of rainwater harvesting. Even today, this is at best sporadic and far from optimal. Most areas of the city are covered by water-resistant paving and a good portion of rainwater ends up filling the drains.

As is evident, allowing for the vagaries of nature, most of the water problems faced routinely are manmade. It is not just the drought resistance of our lands that has been destroyed; so has the flood resistance. Some of this owes to the centralization of water storage and supply.

Between the multiple issues in areas of farming, food preparation and wastage, recycling, manufacture, bad usage habits, and a general lack of sense and sensibility, we have come to a situation where water sufficiency can be identified by its absence.

But if the problems are manmade, solutions too can – and do – lie there. While tackling climate change is another matter altogether, there are plenty of things that we – meaning, the government and the people – can, and should, do.

One of the important things to do here is the decentralization of water. While dams are extremely useful, they cannot be treated as the be-all and end-all where human use of water is concerned. Local communities need to be given control over and responsibility for their own water resources. This is true especially of rural India. The conditions prevalent in different localities are often unique and the locals have the best understanding of them. An example from a village in the deep south exemplifies this. The state government set about constructing a new bridge across the river there and part of the endeavour was also the levelling of the road. They did this by lowering the height of the bridge and by raising a depression in the road that was meant for flood waters to flow across the road to the lowlands. Against local advice, they provided pipes for the waters to cross the road. The next monsoon brought the customary flood and, this time, the crops on one side of the road was destroyed by the stagnant water since the pipes clogged up in a matter of minutes. The bridge – well, when the river is in spate water routinely flows over the new bridge and the only way to go across the river is by walking across the old bridge now in disuse!

Back to the topic, traditional storage mechanisms need to be revived on something of a war footing. Empower communities in this and encourage traditional methods of problem-solving, with central intervention restricted to being a last resort.

In the cities, it is essential to build and maintain systems to replenish ground water. When Jayalalitha was chief minister of Tamil Nadu, she had made rainwater harvesting compulsory in Chennai; not only that, she had also had borewells dug along roads so that rainwater could seep in. The result was evident in just one year after a good monsoon; the brackish seawater stopped percolating inwards, and areas that had resigned themselves to salty and yellowish groundwater, saw clear and substantially pure water after years. The situation seems to have deteriorated to an extent since then because of lack of maintenance and adequate follow-up.

It is also important to ensure safe drinking water. This of course lessens the chances of disease among the poorer sections of society, but it also saves humongous amounts of water. Reverse osmosis systems, which are now used by virtually every household, routinely waste 75% of the water that runs through them, and most households just let this water from the RO exhaust pipe run straight into the sink. A single household can waste up to 20,000 litres of water every year!!

In this age, it is imperative that technology be used to best effect, and this includes farming. Farming as an enterprise will always use massive amounts of water. Following better farming practices can result in important savings. If we can double efficiency, there will be enough water left over to serve the needs of millions annually.

Even without taking a political tack, promoting vegetarianism can result in manifold savings, and there are international movements that advocate this, with one of the main impulses being the consumption of water. A conscious – and voluntary – move to vegetarianism can save water to a factor of ten.

It all boils down to a matter of will. And the will, when it comes from awareness and an identification with both the resource and the problem, can ensure that it is sustained. The immediate and overarching need would probably be a movement to educate the nation on a large scale.