Meanwhile

Water is crucial to all societies as it has a myriad of uses. However, in India, it is of much more importance as over 600 million people make a living off the land. They rely on the monsoon to replenish their water sources and the unpredictable nature of rain leaves them vulnerable. The country breaks out in a cold sweat every time the monsoon is delayed.

India’s peculiar demographics make the water equation quite problematic .The country is home to nearly a sixth of the world’s population but has only 2.4 per cent of the world surface and gets only 4 per cent of the Earth’s fresh water. More than half of the country faces high water scarcity. Out of the 1.2 billion people living in the country, about 742 million live and farm in agricultural heartlands.

The country is in an alarming situation on the water front. A Water Aid report in 2016 ranked India among the worst countries in the world for the number of people without safe water. An estimated 76 million people in India have no access to a safe water supply, and the situation is only getting more serious. Government records show that in 1980, just one per cent of India’s rural areas had access to safe, usable water. By 2013, that had increased to 30 per cent, but the majority of rural India continues to live without proper access to safe drinking water

According to Unicef, only a quarter of the total population in India has drinking water on their premises and nearly three-quarters of all diseases in