:: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Flushing away our precious resource

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Oct.12 : The last few months have witnessed a familiar story of destruction and devastation repeating itself: drought and floods in different parts of the country. If there is one reason why every Indian should hang her or his head in shame, it is the criminal manner in which we as a nation have mismanaged and misutilised our water resources. One manifestation of this negligence is the way in which funds meant for irrigation projects have been stolen to line the pockets of a corrupt few and aggravate the misery of many.

Under the Right to Information Act, a non-government organisation, the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), recently obtained damning data from the Union ministry of agriculture, which should shock most people out of their apathy. In the decade-and-a-half between 1991-92 and 2006-07 (the latest year for which relevant information was made available), the country spent an amount in the region of Rs 1,30,000 crores on major and medium irrigation projects but there was absolutely no addition to the net irrigated area under canals — amazing but true.

Wait. The situation on the ground was actually far worse, if one goes by the statistics compiled by the ministry on the basis of field data obtained from states. Page 36 of the November 2008 publication entitled "Land Use Statistics at a Glance", brought out by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, department of agriculture and cooperation, indicates that between April 1991 and March 2007, the total net area irrigated by all sources (canals, tube-wells, other wells, tanks and ground water) went up by 12.83 million hectares (mha) from 48.02 mha to 60.96 mha.

However, the net area irrigated by canals fell from a peak of 17.79 mha in 1991-92 to 14.04 mha in 2002-03 — a fall of as much as 3.75 million hectares! Between April 1991 and March 2007, the net area irrigated by canals came down from 17.45 mha to 15.35 mha, a substantial fall of over 2 mha. The decline in the net area irrigated by tanks was even higher — by 8.8 mha — from 29.32 mha to 20.44 mha. By way of contrast, in this 15 year period, the net area irrigated by tube-wells rose from 14.26 mha to 24.06 mha — an increase of 9.8 million hectares. (Incidentally, the agriculture ministry’s statistics from 2002-03 onwards has been categorised "provisional".)

In other words, the people of the country have been drawing out increasingly larger quantities of groundwater. Should we then be surprised when satellite data obtained from the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (Nasa) of the United States indicates an alarming fall in groundwater levels, especially in the country’s "granary", namely, Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.

Here’s an extract from an August 12 article on the Nasa website: "Beneath northern India’s irrigated fields of wheat, rice, and barley... beneath its densely populated cities of Jaipur and New Delhi, the groundwater has been disappearing. Halfway around the world, hydrologists, including Matt Rodell of Nasa, have been hunting for it… According to Rodell and (his) colleagues, it is being pumped and consumed by human activities — principally to irrigate cropland — faster than the aquifers can be replenished by natural processes. They based their conclusions — published in the August 20 issue of (the prestigious scientific journal) Nature — on observations from Nasa’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)."

"If measures are not taken to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, consequences for the 114 million residents of the region may include a collapse of agricultural output and severe shortages of potable water", said Rodell, who is based at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.

As a SANDRP publication points out, another wing of the Union government, the ministry of water resources, has claimed that in the 15-year-period between April 1991 and March 2007, the country had created additional irrigation potential of 10.5 mha, of which 7.82 mha of irrigation potential has been utilised — such claims have been put out in official publications like the report on the Working Group on Water Resources for the 11th Five Year Plan period that started in April 2008. Further, the ministry is pushing for investments to the tune of a whopping Rs 1,65,900 crores for ongoing major and medium irrigation projects.

A 2005 World Bank report appropriately titled "India’s Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future" indicated that the money that would be required each year to maintain the country’s irrigation infrastructure — said to be the largest in the world, bigger than China’s — was in the region of Rs 17,000 crores, of which barely one-tenth is actually made available. Out of this amount, much is misappropriated.

The issues relating to water management — sorry, mismanagement — are not new and have been discussed threadbare: siltation of reservoirs and canals, lack of maintenance of dams and embankments, cultivation of water-intensive crops, diversion of water for uses other than irrigation, increased "mining" of groundwater and absence of rainwater harvesting, are some of the principal reasons for the sorry state of affairs.

As many writers have pointed out, out of all the countries on this planet, India gets the maximum amount of rainfall per unit of land area. But the precipitation is concentrated in roughly four months. As Nitya Jacob wrote in the introduction of his book, Jalyatra (Penguin, 2008): "If we walled the country and didn’t let any rain escape into the sea, we would have water one metre deep on the ground each year".

There is enough water for every Indian, if only we were not so wasteful. There is one set of individuals who survive each day on what another set uses up in less than two flushes in a latrine. Despite one of the richest traditions of managing water running into many millennia, today we have a crisis on our hands, a crisis that is entirely of our own making because we failed to learn the lessons that were taught by our grandparents and their grandparents.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator