India’s water: Scarcity amid plenty
India’s water crises is worse than it may seem. In effect, it is worsening by the day, season and year. Post-Independence, per capita water availability has declined from a high of 4,000 cubic metres in 1947 to a low of 1,486 cubic metres in 2021. It is an alarming trend as the accepted global norm is 3,000 cubic metres. Given the country’s annual water endowment of 4 billion cubic metres, the picture is one of scarcity amid plenty.
Statistics reveal only a part of the daily ordeal a sizeable population in the country undergoes, in urban and rural centres. Household water connections have remained an exercise in numbers as per capita daily allocation of 135 litres for urban and 55 litres for rural areas is good only on paper. The gap between water haves and havenots has widened. It’s no surprise, therefore, that increasing demand, asymmetric distribution and contaminated supplies have left a large, growing population vulnerable to water stress, social conflicts and medical conditions.
Over the decades, programmes and projects have delivered promises but not enough water. The solution to the crises may seem obvious, yet have remained somewhat elusive for the well-entrenched water bureaucracy at both the federal and state levels. As total precipitation is received during a few monsoon months a year, directing rainfall into surface storage structures for use during the lean season remains a workable solution.
Before being subsumed under the urban sprawl, traditional water tanks were spread across the country and helped Indians even out seasonal and geographical variations in rainfall. Large dams were supposed to have performed better as a replacement, but the cumulative storage capacity of these structures has remained below par. As a result, India’s per person surface water storage is an abysmal 150 cubic metres. That’s 10 times less than the global average of 1,500 cubic metres. In comparison, China stores thrice as much while the US stocks 10 times more than India does.
The water bureaucracy must take the blame for deepening the hydrological fault lines created by the British. Contemporary water management continues to favour capital-intensive big engineering structures that modify the landscape on which water conservation techniques were practised for centuries. Far from appreciating the hydrological diversity and reviving traditional systems, water institutions have sought to spread a scarce resource across land and time. Not much seems to have been learnt, partly because the resolution to the crises rests on the very premise that drove us to the present predicament.
Focusing on this and much more, Watershed provides a comprehensive assessment of the country’s unfolding water crises. As the impact of climate change becomes more pronounced, the extremes of drought and flooding are bound to expand water insecurity. The book highlights community initiatives on water conservation that need to be integrated with beleaguered mainstream water systems. Making the water sector resilient is the running theme as the book traverses 4,000 years of our water history. Watershed is a readable primer on our rich waterscape and nudges the reader to learn from the past.
In proposing a checklist of actions, however, the author misses out on the fact that our society has long delegated all decisions on managing water to the water bureaucracy, which decides what happens in eveyone’s home. The fundamental question about water is related to power, and only by developing a new social contract with communities can the water bureaucracy come up with a hybrid water management system. With the water crisis on the verge of breaking through the thin walls of political institutions, forging a power-sharing alliance with communities can usher a new era in water management. Without that, individual and community action on conserving water will remain at the periphery, with political institutions pursuing business as usual. Institutional reforms in the water sector can be the first step towards protecting the country’s water future.