Millions of Indians can’t access fresh water on a daily basis, Shreyasi Singh reports. And the situation is set to get worse.
Pinky Devi begins her long day in the chaotic urban sprawl that is Garhi, New Delhi, at the crack of dawn. She has to, otherwise she risks missing out on the seven minutes of municipal water supply that will splutter through the two taps in her tiny one room home.
‘My day is a collection drive,’ laughs the 32-year-old mother of three as she explains the different water sources she has to resort to each day. At 8 o’clock every morning, she queues up to fill colourful plastic buckets from the water tanker that chugs through her neighbourhood each day. The area’s residents have to pool money to buy tanker water to supplement their meagre supply.
‘About 15 percent of our household budget goes to water. How did water become a luxury?’ Pinky asks.
That she has to ask the question this year is something of an irony considering that Delhi received an unusually large rainfall last month of about 450 mm. The Yamuna River, normally a shallow trickle, exceeded danger levels on several days in August, while torrential downpours played havoc with traffic in the city. Many roads were water-logged, leaving commuters stuck for hours in jams.
Yet Pinky’s district in Delhi is far from alone. Analysts say India’s per capita water availability is set to slip below the critical 1,000 cubic metres mark by 2025, and the country is expected to join China in facing significant water stress.
The turnaround in India’s water situation has been dramatic. In 2005, the Global Water Initiative said India had ‘abundant’ water in 1975 but that by 2000, this happy state of affairs had turned into ‘stress’ even as demand has continued to grow.
‘Water–The India Story’, a widely quoted study by market research firm Grail Research, points out that India’s per capita domestic consumption of water is expected to grow to 167 litres a day by 2050, up from 88.9 in 2000. Factor in the growing population (expected to increase from 1.13 billion in 2005 to 1.66 billion by 2050) and the picture starts to look bleak.
One recent report, by Ravi Narayanan, vice chair of the Asia Pacific Water Forum, stated that even conservative estimates suggest that over 40 million people still need to be provided with safe water and about 100 million people with adequate sanitation just to reach Millennium Development Goals for urban India, much less reach universal coverage.
Such forecasts should be sounding alarm bells among policymakers.
Photo Credit: Uniphoto Press
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Jatin Singh
The situation described is truly alarming. The problem is that to manage the problem we need data. As long as agencies in India dealing with groundwater and basin level data treat data as some kind of trade secret, very little can done. Full disclosure on account of government agencies should be made mandatory.
sisterjohanna
The rising industrialisation of India is going to stress the water resources even more. All power generation, and especially thermal, requires large amounts of water, nopt to mention steel, aluminium, cement and others. The focus alos needs to be on industry use of water and this article does not get into that aspect. I find it hard to belive that any company, in this case ITC, would actually increase water resources as a result of their operations. Just how do they do it? Do you really believe that?
Bruce Hill
4 pages of discussion about the difficulties re water supply, access and rights to water but not a single mention of overpopulation. Until developing countries like India seriously start to address out of control population growth they will not get a great deal of sympathy if they struggle against lack of resources per capita – water being one of the most important.
India can spend money on Nuclear weapons and space programmes – no problems.But making a serious effort to reduce population growth to improve living standards for the masses – I don’t think so.
john
Agreed!
deride
In a democratic political framework like India population control is very hard if not impossible to enforce, call it a downside of democracy. Any hope may be with 100% literacy that is preceded by host of other things like 100% shelter, 100% food,100% water , basic health care, Infrastructure etc.. As for space and nuclear stuff it costs a fraction of what it can costs for other things thus is attractive as say …a low hanging fruit for the country by comparison.
Dr. M
Ah, it is the folly of humanity: Just like the “lesser” animals around us, our population explodes when not kept in check and/or is surrounded by bounty and then suffers due to overpopulation; what’s more, we are aware of this but sheepishly ignore it so we can gratify our basal urges.
Granted, I support freedom of thought and freedom of speech whole-heartedly, but we must also recognize that humans are, collectively, complete fools reliant on hedonistic pleasure (material or instinctual) and internecine combat.
Often, I end up toying with the thought that the most humane thing that could occur would be some type of virus which rendered large portions of the population (though not everyone) sterile; free us from the burden of responsibility and whatnot. Given how a virus spreads, it would be most endemic among high-density, low quality-of-life populations, exactly the areas which need to curtail birthrates (so as to improve quality-of-life). The problem becomes such a virus would surely need be man-made and institutionalized, otherwise we would simply seek to cure it or, failing that, breed past it via natural selection.
I realize what I say seems unethical, but consider this: overpopulation causes warfare, famine, disease, and (if uncontrolled) the extinction of species. Lower density populations virtually always exhibit a higher quality of life and a higher degree of innovation; after the Black Plagues, Europe quickly experienced a rapid rise in the quality of life culminating in the end of feudalism and the Renaissance; today, low-density countries like Canada and Sweden have extremely high qualities of life and are centers of innovation (Canada in particular, with a population lower then that of the Greater Los Angeles area and yet being a world leader in many fields of scientific and sociological advancement). The benefit of a sterility virus would be that not only does it achieve a stable population for humanity, it would also not directly cause any deaths.
While there are other solutions, none seem anywhere as effective (sex education and such only seems to work in areas which already have relatively high qualities of life, which creates a Catch-22 for areas like China and India whose populations would require more resources then the Earth can provide to achieve said quality of life) or socially acceptable (artificial modification of neural precepts and whatnot). Granted, it’s all very speculative and/or morally distasteful but, unfortunately, that is the point we have let ourselves get to thanks to our selfish need to over-indulge our primitive urge to reproduce, all while not thinking how it hurts our species.
G.N.Parthasarathi
The picture portrayed is absolutely TRUE.The problem, perhaps, is we rely more on organised efforts, like Municipal Supply, than on NATURE, which has never failed.Our ancesstors were wiser.
captainjohann
India needs water management as it wastes lot of water as the present flood in Jamuna shows.Narmada dam is now a saviour for whole of Gujerat but those Human rights wallahs were opposing this.We also need fast inter connection of rivers as China is doing without botheirng for western critics.When Pakistan made a huge cry about Kishenganga dam we tend to be defensive while we are yet to utilise1.3 lakh cusesc of water awarded by Indus water treaty.
Industry also utilise quality water by usurping green agricultural lands next to urban centres instead of using arid areas for industrilisation.
http://www.captainjohann.blogspot.com