Ticking Water Bomb

AS INDIA'S WATER TABLE FALLS, IT'S IMPORTANT TO OPT FOR CONSERVATION MEASURES

- Rashmi Pratap

ARCHED SOIL, dead cattle, young girls walking miles for a litre of muddy water and villagers digging up dried wells hoping to find a few more drops are a common sight in the eight districts of Maharashtra’s Marathwada region. The region was declared drought-hit in November 2018. Things have worsened since then. Residents of nearly 2,000 villages get water supply for half an hour once in six days. There are close to 2,050 water tankers but their arrival in villages leads to quarrels about who will get water first.

In Tamil Nadu, the state government has declared 24 districts, including Chennai, drought-hit, apart from 38 other blocks in seven districts. Groundwater levels in some districts have dropped by an average of one metre from January.

Dying cattle, and fights over water are scenes that repeat themselves in various districts of Gujarat, Kerala, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. In a country of 1.3 billion people that is able to use only one-fourth of the 4,000 billion cubic metres – water from rainfall – this is not a surprise.

Syamal Kumar Sarkar, Senior Director, Natural Resource and Climate at TERI, says the main reason for India’s water stress is over-dependence on monsoon. “We all depend on monsoon rains and they are erratic – from 1,000 cm in some places to 10 cm in others,” he says. Of that, the utilisable water is 1,123 BCM per annum, comprising 690 BCM surface water and 433 BCM replenishable ground water. The rest is lost. “We should plug evaporation loss and regulate flow of monsoon water, allowing it to seep underground for future use,” says water activist and Magsaysay Award winner Rajendra Singh.

With annual availability per person at below 1,700 cubic metres, India is water-stressed, inching towards water-scarce status, according to the government. Scarcity means availability below 1,000 cubic metres.