E-Paper
Watering down the issue
In Amravati, Maharashtra, the police opened fire on farmers last month agitating for water from the nearby dam. Water that was being routed to nearby towns even as the fields lay dry.
In Amravati, Maharashtra, the police opened fire on farmers last month agitating for water from the nearby dam. Water that was being routed to nearby towns even as the fields lay dry. One person was killed in the firing. In Rajasthan’s Ghadsana town, eight people died when the police fired on farmers demanding water for use at home and the fields.
Six died in Tonk when farmers tried to prevent the ferrying of water from the Bisalpur dam to Ajmer and Jaipur — water that the villagers consider their resource. Earlier here, the villagers had taken things into their own hands and emptied out a full reservoir overnight that was reserved for urban use — re-routing the water to their fields. In Bijapur district of Karnataka, two died in a water clash with the police. In Gaya, Bihar, two water activists were murdered when they tried to break the monopoly of the rich over the village water. These are some of the officially recorded ‘water deaths’ in the last year.
It is one thing for futurists to sketch scenarios where wars between nations will be over water resources. It is quite another for that future state to have begun in India’s villages — in small-scale agitations, deaths and a search for a solution that eludes policy-makers. The flashpoints are not stray incidents. They are illustrative of the struggle that even rural India is facing when it comes to availability and accessibility to potable water. These are no longer local happenings but represent what is simmering across the country as multiple stakeholders jostle for the all-essential natural resource.
The morning scene at village wells, hand pumps and community taps has become a stress point, with women tearing each other’s clothes, pushing and clawing to be the first with the water bucket. There are thousands of small mutinies brewing from Rajkot in Gujarat to Ganganagar in Rajasthan, and arid regions of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Such conflicts come as no surprise to activists involved for the last two decades. Their attempts have focused on reviving traditional water harvesting methods and recharging ground water. As governments, in their myopic wisdom, laid a maze of long pipes to bring in water from far and near, criss-crossing the land, villagers forgot to conserve and save in the traditional way. They became dependent on the sarkar’s ‘pipe’ — which more often than not, brings in only a trickle. Along with this came changes in cultivation pattern with an emphasis on growing rice and wheat which need much more water than fields of coarse cereals.
Depleting water resources have pitched rural needs against urban ones and agriculture demands against those of the industry. The right to water has a context of rich vs poor, pitting village against village to the extent that men in a village with water are ‘valued’ higher than the inhabitants of dry villages. The inter-state imbroglios, of course, remain the most publicised.
Policy-makers and technocrats can’t continue selling the ‘pipe-dream’ of water, assuring supply from further and further away through giant-sized pipelines. Policy mandarins must realise that water conflicts will only grow if such situations aren’t pre-empted and tackled through reasonable formulations. Policies on equitable allocation of water rights, re-examination of the norms of water use and industrial location and water conservation must be backed by legislation.
The government has to recognise that no strategy will work without the local community’s involvement at the grassroots level. The community is the stakeholder which has to wake up to the realisation that water, however plentiful in times gone by, is not an unlimited resource. India has to change its water culture. The days of ‘flush and forget’ are over. Every city and village will have to plug the loss of its water.
The strategy is to understand the water-waste economies in countries like Australia, Singapore and Israel. Each city will need to locally collect water, supply it locally and take back the waste, treating and recycling it for drinking and other purposes, as is done in Singapore. Water should be drawn by cities and villages from sources outside and further away in mountain rivers and streams or lakes, only after it has optimised its own.
It’s time to look out for water efficient household gadgets which are mandated by law. Individual use of water in our cities is one of the highest in the world. In Delhi, for instance, a person uses 317 litres of water everyday. Compare this to Singapore’s figure, where an individual uses only 165 litres a day. It isn’t as if Indians don’t know how to conserve. It’s just that dependence on piped water has made communities discard traditional attitudes towards water consumption and usage. This, we must recapture.
