Zooming into India’s water bubble
After developing an understanding of living in the water bubble of our world, I decided to zoom into the bubble of my country India. According to the Composite Water Management Index report published by NITI Aayog in August 2019, India is facing its worst water crisis in history and demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 2030 if steps are not taken. Nearly 600 million Indians face high to extreme water stress and about 200,000 people die every year due to inadequate access to safe water. 21 cities including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad will run out of ground water by 2030, affecting 100 million people.
It appears that city dwellers irrespective of where they live, slums or high-rise buildings, either do not have any information about the grave situation or do not bother at all. “It is the Government’s failure”, is the normal reaction. Major water bodies (lakes & rivers) around many Indian cities are either getting dried up due to excessive withdrawal without sufficient replenishment or often the water left even after replenishment is heavily polluted. Plastic is creating havoc by clogging all discharge outlets of cities — the result, urban floods!
To meet the increasing water demand, underground water is becoming the main source albeit without being adequately replenished. When the search for underground water goes deeper & deeper, ultimately the water pumped out is often found to be contaminated with Arsenic. As an alternative, municipalities and corporations try to fill the gap of water demand by transporting water from rural areas that are 100–200 kms away from the city. The high-rise buildings as well as city slums depend heavily on water tankers to sustain their water needs specially in the summer season. Thousands of water tankers are involved in this business run by water mafias allegedly supported by politicians. It is becoming a common scene that hundreds of people are thronging around a water tanker just for a bucket of water. On the other hand, poor villagers living in the rural areas from where water is transported, get deprived of their right share of water.
Home to 16% of the world’s population, India has only 2.5% of the world’s land area and 4% of the world’s water resources at its disposal. According to the Ministry of Water Resources, by 2050, India’s water requirement will reach approximately 1,180 billion cubic meters whereas presently only 695 billion cubic meters (BCM) of water is available. This is the combined result of rapid urbanisation and industrial growth along with highly water intensive agricultural methods developed to meet the food demands from the country’s limited land resources. Due to population growth, the per capita annual water availability in India has declined considerably. In fact, the per capita water availability in India had dropped almost 15% from 1816 cubic meters to 1545 cubic meters in 2011.
According to hydrologists, a country having annual per capita water availability below 1700 cubic meters becomes water stressed. When a country’s annual per capita water availability falls below 1000 cubic meters, it is considered to suffer from water scarcity.
India has not yet reached the point of absolute water scarcity, but is surely moving towards it.
The real water management challenge in India is that its environment is characteristically monsoonal and the rainfall is very skewed. 75% of the total annual rainfall takes place within the months of June to September.
This makes India both water rich and water poor simultaneously.
In many cities of India, the entire rainfall of the season occurs in a small window of time. In fact, in 22 cities of sizeable population, 95% of monsoon occurs within a period of 3 to 27 days on average. For example, Delhi receives 50% of its monsoon rainfall in just 33 hours (1 and a half day). On the other hand, India’s financial capital Mumbai receives 50% of its annual rainfall in 134 hours (that’s 5 and a half days). In this respect, India reflects very much the global scenario, as discussed in the article by Stephanie Pappas in the Live Science and I quote from the same below.
“Half of the Year’s Rain Falls on Earth in Just 12 Days!”
There is an ongoing debate about diverting the course of rivers to address the inequity of water distribution across India. This matter needs separate thought and discussion, that I plan to write about next.
India receives around 4000 BCM of water as rain and snow fall, that is around 4 trillion litres of water annually, mostly during the monsoon season. However, 50% of it gets lost as runoff through rivers and the rest gets lost into the system. Hence, it can be said -
It is not that India is running away from water, rather water is running away from us Indians.
So, here are some suggestions offered to mitigate water scarcity in cities and drought affected areas of India:
- Revive the dried up and polluted water bodies in and around cities.
- Increase water storage capacities of existing reservoirs through desedimentation of dams, lakes, ponds and canals to increase their depth.
- Create extra storage capacity by making new man-made lakes, canals and ponds at strategic locations after studying rain fall data, geographic terrain, etc. to catch the river runoff.
- The cities which have water bodies scattered inside as well as at the fringes presently clogged due to pollution and mismanagement may be taken into consideration for rejuvenation. I think about my city Kolkata which is criss-crossed by canals connected to the river Ganga may be considered for conversion into a city of tourist attraction by reviving those canals for light navigation as well as water storage.
From this discussion of water crisis in India, the utmost necessity is felt for every Indian to mitigate the crisis looming large on the country. Every Indian citizen should therefore practice conservation of water in his day to day life. What other place will be more suitable than one’s own home? The next discussion will therefore be on water conservation in urban households as we focus on water crisis in Indian cities.
