21 Indian cities will run out of groundwater by 2020 / ‘Clean water is a luxury we cannot afford’
The world's second-most populous country is
running out of water. About 100 million
people across India are on the front lines of a nationwide water crisis. A
total of 21 major cities are poised to run out of groundwater next year,
according to a 2018 report by government-run think tank NITI Aayog. Much-needed monsoon
rains have only just arrived in some places, running weeks late, amid a
heatwave that has killed at least 137 people this summer. Groundwater, which has
been steadily depleting for years, makes up 40% of the country's water supply.
But other sources are also running dry: almost two-thirds of India's
reservoirs are running below normal water levels, the country's Central Water Commission said in June. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi recently created the Ministry of Jal Shakti (water power) to
oversee water resource management, and reiterated his election campaign promise
to provide piped water to every rural home by 2024.
But many fear it won't
be enough. According to a UN human rights report, the world is fast approaching a
"climate apartheid" where only the wealthy can afford basic resources
in the face of fatal droughts, famine and heatwaves. In some places in
India, disaster has already arrived. The four reservoirs that supply Chennai,
India's sixth-largest city, are nearly dry. Hundreds of thousands
of residents wait in line each day to fill their pots at government water
tankers, and critical services like hospitals and schools are struggling. People are forced to wash utensils in the same
dirty water, saving a few bottles of clean water to cook food... read more:
‘Clean water is a luxury we cannot afford’
In March this year,
while carrying three pots of water in the scorching sun one afternoon,
24-year-old Manta Rinjad fainted on the deserted pathway from the well to her
house. “Nobody even saw me on the street lying like a dead person,” she says.
“When I woke up after 20 minutes [I saw that] I’d spilled all the water.
Somehow, I walked back home and woke up my husband who made namak-sakhar [salt-sugar]
water for me.”
This year, Mamta, like
the other women of Galtare, has had to begin her gruelling daily summer treks
to a dug well, located three kilometres away, much earlier than in the past.
The two dug wells in Galtare village of Wada taluka in Palghar
district of Maharashtra completely dried up in February. In previous years, the
people here say, the water in the village’s dug wells – which they use for
drinking and cooking – has lasted till the beginning of May. After that, the
women have to walk to the distant well which usually has some water left.
But in 2019, the scarcity began months earlier.
"We have suffered
water problems every summer, but this year all our sources of water are going
dry," says 42-year-old Manali Padwale, who, like Mamta, works at a large
temple complex near the village as a cleaner for Rs. 155 a day, where her
husband works as a driver. “We have not once been supplied with water tankers
and we don't have enough money to buy them,” she adds.
The Vaitarna river,
which passes at a distance of around half a kilometres from the village, is one
of the major sources of water for Galtare’s 2,474 residents (Census 2011), most
of them from the Koli Malhar and Warli (listed as Varli in the Census) Adivasi
communities. By May this year, the river had only a pile of rocks and barely
any water. In previous summers, the people of Galtare say, the Vaitarna has had
more water. “The little water [now] left in the river is used to wash cattle
and then the same dirty water flows into the village taps," adds Manali... read more:
https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/clean-water-is-a-luxury-we-cannot-afford