Provide water security

SCARCITY EVERYWHERE : Groundwater is vanishing fast from the world. India has the world's largest number of people without access to clean water.

In one of the pictures posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his Twitter account, the illustrious son, clad in grey T-shirt and black trousers, is seen showing his mother Heeraben around his official 7, Race Course Road residence. The bucolic image of Modi in his youthful and sporty look attending on his mother would have been almost picture-perfect had he just factored in what it really takes to make India a global superpower.

The picture of the lush green of the amply water-fed, leafy garden, when contrasted with the parched earth of Latur, reminds one that India’s superpower ambitions are sure to come to blows with its ineptitude in handling its precarious water resources.

With nine of the 29 states and 248 out of its 660 districts being declared drou-ght-affected, with pictures of a water-starved Marathwada and Vidarbha blowing in its face and IPL shunted out of Ma-harashtra and beset by water shortage and pollution in key rivers, and the issue of inequity in water availability snowballing into several inter-state and intra-state disputes, there is not much need for further documentation that India needs to girdle up its loins to fight the future water wars. Now that we have woken up to the enormity of the situation, India’s “mega water crisis” is at least 20 years in the making, says journalist P Sainath.

Considering the frequency of drought, a characteristic of Indian agriculture,
assured irrigation has become a prerequisite for intensifying agricultural production particularly following the introduction of high-yielding varieties (HYVs). According to a 2012 study by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), the most powerful factor behind groundwater exploitation is the regime of flat rate tariff and power subsidies that India has introduced since the beginning of Green Revolution.

Groundwater is disappearing fast from the world and India is among the worst hit, shows data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. The scientists have warned that problem of depletion of groundwater is more accurate in northern India, particularly in the agriculture rich regions of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Scientific evidence regarding global warming, air pollution, water and food shortages, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuel continues to accumulate; yet, in the face of what appears to be a looming global crisis, the political system, at best, can manage spasmodically to enact regulations in those areas – only to have them weakened or rolled back by a new administration.

The frustrations of environmental policy reveal a profound inability of the system to deal with long-range problems requiring consistency of purpose, allocation of public funds, taxes and a determined commitment to controlling corporate behaviour, qualities that a porous policy process lacks.

The thoughtless despoiling of our forests, mountains, and water systems is undertaken by marauding multinational corporations, and ecocide is the new name for development. Those who recount how tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones, are called Luddites.

Rising rivers

Further example of our policy mismatch is that while India’s state-owned banks have written off millions of dollars worth of unpaid corporate loans, indebted far-mers are driven to suicide. Speaking at a recent National Consultation on Drou-ght, Sainath explained how India’s ‘thirst economy’ makes roaring profits at the cost of the vast suffering underclass.

India has the world’s largest number of people without access to clean water. India and Pakistan constantly bicker over the Indus. China, Nepal, India and Bangladesh all fight over the rivers rising in the Himalayas and which flow through neighbouring countries, providing water for nearly 500 million people on the way.

And to contextualise the scenario, South Asia houses a quarter of the world’s population and has less than 5% of the global annual renewable water resources. In addition to low water availability per person, this region is vulnerable to high frequency of extreme weather events, including severe droughts.

According to the Central Water Commission, total water available in India’s 91 reservoirs stands only at 32% of their storage capacity. In view of the unsustainability of highly water-intensive thermal power plants and the projection that energy generation is set to assume a much larger proportion of water usage by 2050, India must think out of the box.

Technical developments in agriculture from 1952 to 2000 spread across three distinct phases – the pre-“revolution” period, the period of production revolution, and the period of market reforms – helped us achieve food sufficiency but technology alone would be of little use without a drastic overhaul about how we use water. Irrigation, of which over 60% comes from groundwater, takes up over 80% of total water usage.

If one adds the bottled water industry to the mix, we see how in India and across the world, multinational corporations are seizing control of public water resources and prioritising profits for their stockholders and executives over the needs of the communities they serve.

On July 28, 2010, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution proclaiming a human right to “safe and clean drinking water.” When the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights was written, no one could foresee a day when water would be a contested area. Instead of allowing this vital resource to become a commodity sold to the highest bidder, access to clean water for basic needs is a fundamental human right.

Considering that our prime minister cares for these niceties, unsafe drinking water is the single largest killer in the world. Roughly half of the developing world including India suffers from illnesses caused by contaminated water supplies. As every third person deprived of clean water in the world is an Indian, India’s superpower ambitions must be made of sterner stuff. Without water security, food security and even sub-national security are distant dreams.