Chennai: A recent Niti Aayog report sounded the alarm on the looming water crisis in India. One paragraph in the report summed up the crisis: “It’s a matter of concern that 600 million people in India face high to extreme water stress in the country.  About a three fourth of households in the country do not have drinking water on their premises. With nearly 70% of water being contaminated, India is placed at 120^th amongst  122 countries  in the water quality index.”

Despite being gifted with an abundance of rivers and lakes, we have not managed to harness them and maintain them in good quality to meet our water requirements. Poor water management and not the dearth of water resources that has brought us to point. 

Role of agriculture

In a predominantly agrarian country such as India, it is agriculture where water is highly utilised and, therefore, addressing the water crisis will have to necessarily tackle issues of unsustainable water use practices by farmers. For example, in late April this year, while traveling across Mandya district in Karnataka, I came across sugarcane fields almost everywhere I went. 

Local residents said the villages I was visiting were drought-prone and it came as a surprise that even so, they chose to grow sugarcane, a longstanding crop that requires large quantities of water (1,500-3,000 litres of water/kilo). 

As Gireesh Maraddi shows in his PhD thesis submitted to the University of Dharwad’s department of agricultural sciences, 60% of the sugarcane growers in Karnataka suffer a water deficit which adversely affects their yield. Of those who experienced water shortages during cane cultivation, half the respondents did not take any measures to conserve moisture in soil, the scholar notes. This is just one example of how in India, unsustainable water use in agriculture has affected water resources, resulting in drought-like conditions. 

It is well established that India is now producing a surplus of rice and wheat, both water-intensive crops, and dumping them in Food Corporation of India godowns, while ignoring crops such as millets and oilseeds that require less water and can meet the growing demand at home. In April 2016, 13 Indian states were affected by drought, with 10 of them classified as severely affected (Dhawan, 2017). All the drought-affected states where the ones were rice, wheat, cotton and sugarcane – water-intensive crops – were being grown in large measure. While the vagaries of the monsoon also played a role, it cannot be denied that growing water-intensive crops exacerbated the crisis. 

The most obvious instances of this are the agrarian states of Punjab and Haryana, where the water tables have plunged to alarming levels. A report in the Hindustan Times quoted the Central Ground Water Board saying 82% of Punjab and 76% of Haryana have seen a substantial fall in groundwater levels between 2006 and 2015. The report cites experts as saying that earlier farmers followed the maize-wheat or sugarcane-maize-wheat cropping pattern but for the past four decades they have shifted to the wheat-paddy cycle, causing unprecedented exploitation of groundwater for irrigation. In order to address the water crisis, Indian policymakers will have to incentivise sustainable water management in agriculture and encourage farmers in drought-prone areas to grow crops that require less water. 

Need for convergence of water agencies

A majority of India’s rivers are polluted. The Central Pollution Control Board includes all our major rivers, the Ganga, Yamuna, Krishna, Godavari, Narmada, Cauvery, Sabarmati, in its list of polluted rivers. If water is polluted, it cannot be used by farmers, nor can it serve drinking water needs. However, in India, the water-resources departments of state governments are unconcerned with addressing pollution. Their focus is on the expansion of irrigation, building bridges and barrages, and so on.

Take the Ganga, for instance. There is more interest from the government in building barrages every 100 km stretch of the river, than addressing concerns of water flow or rising pollution! With the Ganga, experts have noted that building sewage-treatment plants to reduce inflow of polluted wastewater alone cannot address the problem of pollution as increasing the water flow in the river is critical for the pollution load to come down. 

It is well established now that the effects of climate change such as glacial retreat and alteration in rainfall patterns have affected the water levels in our rivers. In 2015, during a tour of the Gangotri, where the Ganga river originates, I learned that the glacier had retreated 3 km in two centuries, and after 1971, the rate of retreat had sharply increased to about 22 metres a year. There has been considerable deforestation in the vicinity of Gangotri adding to a rise in heat, yet no river water authority has thought it fit to address the matter. 

Government agencies involved in the management of water are functioning in silos and that is posing a major hurdle in addressing India’s water crisis. There are separate departments for surface water and groundwater, for pollution, for the environment and climate change. It is pertinent, therefore, that government agencies managing irrigation, groundwater use, pollution and climate change converge under a common head to discuss ways in which these issues can be addressed as they are inter-linked.  

Managing disputes

Five major rivers in India are under dispute – Indus, Krishna, Cauvery, Godavari and Narmada. Often in the case of an unsettled dispute, such as in the case of the Cauvery, there is disproportionate sharing of water among the riparian states affecting dependant populations. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have been fighting to control the waters of the Cauvery for a century now. Yet, the court battles have not provided any meaningful solution to the crisis of water sharing. On June 30, Karnataka again said it would appeal to the Supreme Court against the formation of the Cauvery Management Authority, which an earlier judgment had made the nodal agency to resolve all disputes pertaining to the river between the concerned states. 

The communities involved have paid a heavy price for depending on courts to resolve political disputes over water. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, there were three cropping seasons in the Cauvery delta – kuruvai (June-July), samba (August) and thaladi (October-November) – however, due to the dwindling supply of Cauvery waters the farmers are mostly growing only one crop per year now. The court intervention has only dragged on and done nothing to address a very real water crisis affecting lakhs of people. 

The problem with dependence on courts is that the government’s attention is diverted away from the very real solutions that exist on the ground to address the water crisis. In this case, trapping of rainwater in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, can go a long way in storing water for irrigation purposes but has been neglected. According to rainwater harvesting expert S. Vishwanath, only 23% of the rainwater falling within the Cauvery basin in Karnataka is stored with the rest flowing downstream carrying off valuable topsoil. Issues such as deforestation in the source area of the river in Coorg and the pollution of the river by industries and households discharging wastewater has also not been addressed, since both the riparian states are busy fighting the battle in court.

Need for awareness

With an exploding population (in a few years India will overtake China as the most-populated country), our water crisis  is only bound to get worse. As the Niti Aayog report, has warned, unless and until people themselves are more aware of the need to conserve and preserve water resources, and the government creates incentive systems to promote such awareness, little headway can be made in addressing the problem. It is not as though dying rivers cannot be revived, as the Stockholm Water Prize winner Rajendra Singh has demonstrated in Rajasthan. It is only for the government to start looking at rivers and water bodies as organic life forms supporting other life, and not just as a base for engineering experiments – huge dams, barrages and interlinking projects. A plethora of environmental issues such as mining of groundwater, river-sand mining, industrial pollution and the like plague our finite water resources. A concerted effort involving an active citizenry alone can save us in the years to come. 

(Vidya Venkat is a Chennai-based journalist writing on issues of development and environment. She was Senior Assistant Editor at The Hindu until recently and Felix scholar at SOAS, London.)