Underground water table in the Indus River basin and the case of community bunkers on the border

With the Indus Water Treaty back in debate and after India suspending its participation in the agreement, it's time India focuses on the issue of groundwater resources in the basin.

- VENUS UPADHAYAYA

In that context it's time to also conduct an audit of the thousands of community and family bunkers India built on its disputed border with Pakistan to provide protection to its citizens from cross-border shelling. These two are related.

The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs approved 415 crore rupees in 2018 for the construction of 14,000 bunkers along the international border in Kathua, Samba and Jammu and the Line of Control in Rajouri and Poonch districts.

These included 1,431 community bunkers each of which was budgeted at 10.5 lakhs and 13,000 individual bunkers each of which cost 3.5 lakhs. The bigger-sized community bunkers were built in thick neighborhoods where many families lived in vicinity to each other and the individual bunkers were given to those individual families that lived in isolation and not in clustered neighborhoods.

Since they were built for the protection of border residents from cross-border shelling they were built ten feet below the ground level and at a distance easy enough to escape in case of firing. The government has SOPs issued to guide and regulate their construction and I have witnessed both the community and individual family bunkers at multiple locations in RS Pura (Jammu), Hiranagar (Kathua) and in Nowshera (Rajouri). I have also witnessed a bunker built for a government primary school in the Nowshera sector in 2019.

BASIN'S GROUNDWATER RESOURCES The Indus River basin is one of the largest 37 largest aquifer systems in the world but sadly one of the most 13 depleted aquifers, according to a decade-old NASA study.