Blessings are complicated. They come with a lot of attachments. And if you cannot manage them, you could invite disasters.
India is a blessed country in so many ways as far as water endowment is concerned. We are blessed with monsoons, rivers, aquifers, the Himalaya, rich traditional techniques and management systems, to name a few. But the cumulative impact of our mismanagement over the last several decades is now coming out in the form of a many-headed crisis.
Unfortunately, the government treats water management as its exclusive monopoly. To call for a people’s movement for water conservation in such a situation would be disingenuous, to say the least—particularly when the water resources establishment is doing everything against sage advice. For example, the Ken-Betwa river interlinking project, the government’s top priority among such projects, involves cutting down 46 lakh trees in drought-prone Bundelkhand to facilitate the export of water to other areas. Imagine how much water the 46 lakh trees can harvest.
Or consider this other example: Between April 25 and June 12, 2019, the Bhakra, Pong and Ranjit Sagar dams, on the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi rivers respectively, released over two billion cubic metres of water; it being the non-agricultural season, most of this water flowed away to Pakistan. This contradicted the public statements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the erstwhile Union water resources minister Nitin Gadkari, both of whom had declared that not a drop of water would flow out of India’s share of Indus waters to Pakistan. Even if we leave aside this issue, it is well-known that Punjab and Haryana suffer massive groundwater depletions every year. Then why was the dam water not used to recharge groundwater?
This brings us to the following question: what are the key dimensions of India’s water management crisis? We discuss the four most important ones below.
I. The groundwater lifeline
Most of the water India uses today comes from over 30 million wells and tubewells. Irrigation is India’s biggest water need, and over two-thirds of the irrigated area uses groundwater. About 85% of the rural domestic supply and over 55% of the urban and industrial water supply comes from groundwater, and these numbers have only been climbing for at least four decades now. In fact, some estimates show that over 90% of the additional water that India used since about 1980 has come from groundwater. It sounds like an immitigable blessing. But that’s not how blessings work.
Data from the Central Ground Water Board shows that in about 70% of the areas, groundwater is being depleted. In fact, in many places, it has been exhausted or is on the verge of exhaustion. Its quality is deteriorating. Warning signs have been visible for decades now, but the government has done little to address the crisis.
In fact, India’s water resources establishment, led by the Big Dam ideologues at the Central Water Commission, has ensured that the government doesn’t even acknowledge that groundwater is India’s water lifeline. That would be the first step. Such an acknowledgement, through the National Water Policy, would mean that India’s water resources policy, plans and programmes can then make and implement plans to preserve this lifeline.
This would need action on four fronts. First, we need to understand where groundwater recharge happens, and protect recharge mechanisms like forests, floodplains, rivers, wetlands and local water bodies. Second, we need to enhance recharge from these mechanisms where possible. Third, we need to create more recharge mechanisms, including reverse borewells. Fourth, and most important, we need to regulate groundwater use.
Groundwater regulation depends upon the its location and contours. Groundwater occurs in aquifers. Aquifers in most places are local, and groundwater use is also local. Ergo, regulation has to start at the local level, enabled by legal, institutional and financial instruments. For cities and industries, this may include pricing mechanisms, with higher price for higher users and an element of cross subsidisation for the poorer people.
Unfortunately, the government has taken no effective action to regulate groundwater. The Central Ground Water Authority, set up under the Supreme Court’s orders in 1996, has been acting like a licensing body rather than a regulating body. Regulation does not mean you pay and exploit. It would mean restricting and stopping wasteful and unjustified water-use activities in critical areas. Regulation should ensure that water withdrawal is within the limits of annual recharge.
II. The degraded catchments
While Chennai’s water scarcity grabbed headlines this summer, few remembered that only in July 2018, all the dams on the Cauvery, the most important river basin of Tamil Nadu, were so full that water had to be released to the already-flooded downstream rivers. The Mullaperiyar dam provided another bounty to Tamil Nadu in August 2018.
When the Cauvery dams were overflowing around July 24, 2018, the southwest monsoon in the basin was actually below normal. What does this phenomenon—of overflowing dams less than halfway through the monsoon, despite the rainfall being below normal, followed by an unprecedented water crisis less than a year later—signify? The answer would be relevant for most river basins in India: it signifies that our catchments have a lower capacity to capture, store and recharge rainwater than before. So rainfall in catchment areas quickly ends up in the rivers and reservoirs, leading to floods during the monsoon but dry riverbeds and water scarcity soon after.
Deforestation, destruction of wetlands and other water bodies, and the declining capacity of the soil to hold moisture, are all contributing to this tragedy. So the way to reverse the scarcity crisis is to take action in all these areas and reverse this decline.
III. The urban water policy vacuum
The urban water footprint is going up in multiple ways, but the urban water sector is operating in a policy vacuum. There are no specific policies, guidelines or regulations to guide the sector. Under the circumstances, the cities don’t harvest rain, don’t recharge the groundwater, don’t reduce transmission and distribution losses, don’t adopt other demand-side measures, don’t protect their water bodies, and don’t treat and recycle their sewage. Instead, they demand lazy, easy solutions like more and bigger dams, more river interlinking projects and/or massive desalination projects. The government has a Smart City programme but, inexplicably, there is no mention of making the cities water-smart.
As a first step towards correcting this situation, India urgently needs a National Urban Water Policy that will define what a water-smart city is and provide best-practice guidelines for various aspects of the urban water sector.
IV. Outdated water institutions
India’s water institutions were established soon after Independence, though some were older. They operate with an outdated mindset and within an institutional architecture. An overhaul has long been overdue.
That India’s water institutions are plagued by multiple crises is best symbolised by the fact that we don’t even have reliable information about water in India. This is because the Central Water Commission, which heads India’s water institutions, is involved in many functions that are in conflict with each other. We need an independent institution, along the lines of the US Geological Survey, whose principal mandate is to gather all the key water related statistics on a daily basis and promptly place them in the public domain. But such an institute should have no role in water resources development or management.
Similarly, we need a National Rivers Commission to monitor the state of India’s rivers and produce reports and recommendations about what ails these water bodies. Similarly, river-basin organisations will have to be inter-state bodies that develop all the relevant knowledge about the state of the country’s river basins.
***
Prime Minister Modi, in his Mann Ki Baat on June 30, 2019, the first episode in his second term, highlighted the importance of water conservation and then used the 8% figure: “You will be surprised that only 8% of the water received from rains in the entire year is harvested in our country.” Where does that 8% come from? Modi did not elaborate, but India’s annual rainfall is around 4,000 BCM, 8% of which comes to 320 BCM. That is approximately the storage capacity of India’s big dams. If he was referring to this, the mistake he made was that big dams are not rainwater-harvesting options, they are storage options.
Then again, they aren’t the only or best storage options. That award goes to groundwater aquifers, which are benign, naturally gifted, low cost, low impact and efficient. Wetlands, local water bodies and the soil are similarly qualified alternatives. But by mentioning this 8% storage figure, the prime minister is privileging big dams while ignoring all the other storage options. And until our water-resources establishment does not get out of this bias for big dams and big projects, there is little hope that our water blessings will not become disasters.
[Himanshu Thakkar is the coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) and a water expert.]
