India’s water crisis now getting worse and worse

The water crisis across India is assuming humongous proportions as the southwest monsoon plays truant on the west coast. India’s sixth largest city, Chennai, was staring down the barrel as it got its first rainfall after 196 days on Thursday, but barely sufficient to wet the ground and far from slaking the thirst of a city used to consuming around 800 million litres daily. Chennai is emblematic of India’s existing water management problem rather than water shortage, but that too isn’t far off. A Niti Aayog report claims India has only four per cent of earth’s  free water while it hosts 15 per cent of the world’s seven billion-plus population. While all of India is yet to get access to basic water, most urban centres depend on supply by water tankers that are exploiting the crisis to make unconscionable profits for their owners, many of whom being leaders.

India’s tragedy of India isn’t so much the diminishing rainfall in the past few years, but the cycles of drought that seem to follow the rain. We have long lost touch with Nature, whose bounty was tapped in ancient India via lake and pond management and small check dams. For a nation of bursting demographics, fresh water flowing into the sea is a criminal waste. And yet that is what happened in 2018’s southwest monsoon when Kerala was flooded and Tamil Nadu dams could not hold all the Cauvery water flow from Karnataka. Ancient agricultural practices like flood cultivation of rice and sugarcane and the rising toxicity of water resources, as polluting industries defy environmental norms, have worsened the problem: retrieving ground in water management will be India’s nightmare.

The ambitious scheme of providing tap water to all by 2024 is most laudable even if its fruition seems like a pipedream. What is required is a gigantic imagination to make it all happen — from making crucial changes to agricultural practices that use up about 80 per cent of national water resources, water management at the village level in tending to water bodies and vigilance to stop the indiscriminate exploiting of groundwater to slake the thirst of a rapidly urbanising India. It’s human cruelty when Chennai’s Metro stations have to switch off airconditioning to save water, leaving commuters stifled. The interlinking of rivers, whose costs may have shot up to around $100 billion for the scheme to be meaningful, may be unaffordable. The least that can be done in the short term to Chennai’s bone dry reservoirs, for instance, is to remove the plastic and other waste and desilt them to add storage capacity, which is vital as the monsoon rainwater has to be captured and stored to get past the summer. The challenges are phenomenal, but nothing is impossible if thoughtful management of resources is attempted and enforced.