India’s Water Crisis Is Already Here. Climate Change Will Compound It.

Droughts and floods have pushed the nation’s leaky, polluted, and half-done water systems to the brink

Saumya Khandelwal is a photojournalist based in New Delhi. These photographs of Indians living along the Yamuna River are from her larger body of work titled “The Dying Life Line,” documenting life on the banks of the nation’s highly polluted water bodies. Photos: Saumya Khandelwal

By James Temple

Severe droughts have drained rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers across vast parts of India in recent years, pushing the nation’s leaky, polluted water systems to the brink.

More than 600 million Indians face “acute water shortages,” according to a report last summer by NITI Aayog, a prominent government think tank. Seventy percent of the nation’s water supply is contaminated, causing an estimated 200,000 deaths a year. Some 21 cities could run out of groundwater as early as next year, including Bangalore and New Delhi, the report found. Forty percent of the population, or more than 500 million people, will have “no access to drinking water” by 2030.

India gets more water than it needs in a given year. But the vast majority of rain falls during the summer monsoon season, generally a four-month window. The country’s other major source is melting snow and glaciers from the Himalayan plateau, which feeds rivers in the north.

Capturing and delivering the water to the right places at the right times across thousands of miles, without wasting or…