More than a third of Indian districts routinely faces episodes of severe water shortage.
Denganmal, a hamlet in Maharashtra’s Thane, one of these parched regions, has found unusual ways of coping with the want of water.
The village falls under a so-called ‘monsoon-shadow’ arc of the state, meaning it perpetually receives scanty rainfall. Water crises have made the hamlet’s largely monogamous Hindu population turn to polygamy, skewing the local sex ratio.
In many families of Denganmal, men take up to three wives just to fetch water from sources that could be several kilometres away. More wives mean more hands to draw water and, hence, less hired labour. Sociologists have labelled them ‘water wives’.
“Strange as it sounds, this is a common feature in some communities where women are looked upon as a human resource for family labour. You get to see this among some communities in Rajasthan also,” says Archana Tamble, a researcher with Savitribai Phule University.
In other states, water tables have plunged and aquifers have been used up to unsustainable levels in most of the largest states, making the country a seriously water-stressed state.
{{/usCountry}}In other states, water tables have plunged and aquifers have been used up to unsustainable levels in most of the largest states, making the country a seriously water-stressed state.
{{/usCountry}}In the impoverished Bundelkhand region, an area HT visited three years ago, a number of villages have seen their residents quit farming altogether, opting instead to migrate elsewhere for work.
Bundelkhand is a parched region of 13 districts spread across Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Its per capita water availability is one of the lowest in the country.
In 2015, 163 million Indians lacked access to clean water, the highest for any country, according to the NGO WaterAid.
Scarcest resource
Water has indeed become India’s scarcest resource, which isn’t just hurting the economy, but its people too.
This year, the June-September monsoon arrived late and was significantly deficient in June. Rainfall revived in July somewhat and turned up to be massively surplus towards September. But much of the water would have just runoff.
“We are only able to save 8% of the rainwater, this needs to go up,” said Gajendra Shekhawat, minister for Jal Shakti, as the water ministry is now known.
After decades of wasteful consumption, the government has woken up to the possibility of a national crisis. The Modi government has launched a countrywide campaign to raise awareness and ramp up conservation. It has targeted to provide piped drinking water to all of rural India by 2024. Under this, 19.5% of rural households are to be covered in 2019-20 under a project to reach piped water to rural households.
Deficient rains can have other devastating effects. They bring about fatal heatwaves, killing hundreds. In 2014-16, which were drought years, heatwaves triggered severe water shortages, killing an estimated 2,500, according to figures reported by this newspaper.
Sometimes, the effect of the country’s water crises can ripple across the economy. On March 13, 2015, the Ganga ran so low on water near West Bengal’s Farakka that eastern India’s largest power plant had to be temporarily shut down. It lead to power outages that cut supply to industries and households alike.
In Maharashtra, water is transported in rail wagons during such crises. In Bundelkhand, district magistrates have to ensure nobody uses drinking water for any other activity.
Federal authorities, such as the Central Water Commission, have a fair idea when a crisis is about to set in because they track 91 nationally important large lakes and basins critical for power, drinking and irrigation. But they can do little to ameliorate the crisis, other than to alert states.
Plugging the holes
A bad monsoon isn’t the real culprit. It’s about how water is utilised, particularly in a country with only 4% of the world’s water resources and 16% of the global population.
In the mountain state of Meghalaya, one of the rainiest places on Earth, residents face shortages.
The country’s public water-supply systems are leaky. In large cities, much of the assured supply is hogged by the rich. Urban demand is currently 135 litres per person per day, three times as much as rural India’s 40 litres, excluding agricultural use.
When droughts occur, calls for ramping up India’s poor irrigation from the current 40% of total arable land grow loud. Yet, even with a relatively insufficient irrigation network, agriculture use accounts for 80% of the country’s total water consumption.
Water-guzzling crops, such as rice and sugarcane, are the single biggest threat to the country’s plunging water table.
India’s per capita availability of usable freshwater is about 1,523 cubic metres, down from about 4,000 cubic metres in 1947, and against the current global average of 3,000 cubic metres.
According to a paper released in 2018 by the NITI Aayog, the state-run policy think-tank, India’s groundwater in 21 cities is set to plunge to unsustainable levels by 2020.
The real problems are inefficient use and growing demand in the face of declining available sources. All this can quickly worsen into a humanitarian crisis when successive monsoons fail.
Parts of Chennai had gone without piped water this year for months. The city’s crisis was aggravated when Tamil Nadu received 55% less rains during the so-called winter monsoon in December 2018, according to weather bureau data.
Back to the field
A key task is to make agriculture use less water.
About 90% of India’s available water goes into farming. This figure is 64% in China and 60% in Brazil, according to WaterAid.
It takes India about roughly 5000 litres of water to produce one kg of rice, in contrast to China’s approximately 3000 litres.
“Agriculture’s demand for water is disproportionately huge. One of the reasons is free electricity and lot of incentives for crops such as paddy,” says Alok Nath, a former agricultural scientist with the National Council for Agricultural Research.
Despite such inefficiency and scarcity, India has turned out to be a virtual water exporter because it exports more water-intensive food and food products than any other country.
Virtual water exports refer to the molecules of water used up to produce exported goods. Such exported water molecules, in India’s case, are a net 95.4 billion cubic meters a year, according to the Water Footprint Network. This is way higher than that of countries such as China and Russia.
According to McKinsey Consulting’s 2030 Water Resources Group, India will be one of the largest centres of agricultural demand for water by 2030, with projected withdrawals of 1,195 billion cubic metres in 2030. This will require a doubling of its usable water generation.
Geographically, India is carved up into 5,723 groundwater blocks. Nearly 1500 are overused, making it impossible for rains to replenish them.
It’s tough for many rural households to get to a water source. According to the World Health Organization, a household is considered water-stressed if it spends more than 30 minutes getting to its water source.
According to the National Sample Survey Organisation, in Jharkhand, it takes 40 minutes one way, without taking into account the waiting time. In Bihar, it’s 33 minutes. Rural Maharashtra clocks an average of 24 minutes.
The policy focus of the Modi government’s efforts to improve India’s water-use efficiency and availability is geared towards conservation from the household-level up. It might be better started on the farmer’s field.