Chetan Chauhan - India can avoid water wars in the future by mixing old and new solutions
Drinking water
shortages are known to spark scuffles , but last week, it led to Sunil Giri,
23, losing his life. Giri was beaten to death in the Ramgarh district of
Jharkhand for objecting to his neighbour Anwar Hussain taking more than his
share from a drinking-water tanker that had reached the drought-affected
village after several days. Similar violence over
water sharing has also been reported from water-scarce districts in
Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana
since April.
Scarcity kills in
other wars too. In April, 12-year-old Yogita Ashok Desai died of heatstroke after
her fifth trip to fetch water from a handpump in drought-hit Beed district of
Maharashtra, when temperatures had crossed 47 degree Celsius. In the first week of
May, a 15-year-old girl died and 23 others were injured when the roof of an
underground water tank collapsed while they were waiting to collect water from
the almost dry tank.
Lost sources: The World Resources
Institute’s March 2016 report said 54% of India was water stressed, with
scarcity affecting every part of the country except Himalayan region and the
Ghats. “Almost 600 million people are at higher risk of surface water supply
disruptions,” the report said, attributing water stress to climate change and
poor water management. The map below
illustrates competition between companies, farms and people for surface water
in rivers, lakes, streams, and shallow groundwater. Red and dark-red areas are
highly or extremely highly stressed, meaning that more than 40 percent of the
annually available surface water is used every year. Find out more at the World Resources Institute’s website.
With the surface water
sources dwindling, people have shifted to unregulated tapping of ground water
--- for agriculture and drinking --- leading to levels dipping by three times
over the last 60 years, making groundwater the main drinking water source for 80%
of the population. Rising temperature
also mean higher human loss. Of the 4,204 lives
lost to annual heat waves over the past four years, half were in the drought
year of 2015. “The deaths were a
result of flawed government emphasis on building high-cost dams and canals that
have wiped traditional ways of water harvesting,” said Himanshu Thakkar of
South Asian Network of Dams, Rivers and People.
Another concern is
that 50% of ground water sources in the country are not “completely safe”. Of
the 660 districts, ground water in 276 districts has high levels of fluoride,
387 districts have nitrate above safe levels and 86 districts arsenic, shows
data from Central Ground Water Board’s latest report. Close to 650 major
towns and cities in India are on the banks of rivers contaminated with
pesticides from farms and effluents from industry, said the latest report of
the Central Pollution Control Board, which sickens 100 million people each year
because of contaminated drinking ground water.
If that’s not enough,
more and more states -- Haryana and Punjab in north to Tamil Nadu and Kerala in
south to Arunachal and Assam in north-east -- are entangled in disputes over
sharing water from major rivers.
The way ahead: If ground water
exploitation continues, the World Bank estimates that the per capita water
availability in India ---- where 46 farmers committed suicide every day in 2014
--- by 2030 may shrink to half from the 2010 level of 1,588 cubic metres per
year, which will push India into the ‘water scarce’ category (1,700 cubic
metres per year), from its existing ‘water stress’ classification (1,000 cubic
meter per year)... read more:
