India’s water crisis: A statistical view in just two minutes 

India’s first Union Minister for Jal Shakti Gajendra Shekhawat has the daunting task of fulfilling BJP’s promise of reaching piped drinking water to every household by 2024. But even as water scarcity is driving young and able-bodied men from the villages of Maharashtra, UP and Rajasthan into cities for survival, Shekhawat believes this is a false hype created by the media.

India, he said at a press conference, has enough water in dams. “Up north, in Himachal and other areas, there is enough water in the dams. The entire panic of a water crisis is only a hype created by people in the media,” he declared.

Ironically, several of these well-known facts about India’s water woes are included in a NITI Aayog Report published in June, 2018. Some are being tweeted by NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant as recently as in the third week of June.

•  10 drought years between 1950 and 1989
•  7 drought years since the year 2000
•  4% of world’s fresh water is in India
•  16% of the world’s population live in India
•  163 million Indians have no access to safe drinking water
•  210 million do not have access to improved sanitation
•  21% of the diseases are water-borne
•  500 children under the age of five die from diarrhea every day
•  80% of available water used by agriculture sector, claims the Govt
•  9.2% of the total potential area under micro irrigation
•  150 million workdays every year are spent by women on fetching and carrying water
•  Ground water accounts for 63% of India’s irrigation needs
•  1000 cubic meters of water availability per Indian per year as against 8000 cubic meters in the United States. A country is deemed water-stressed if it has less than 1,700 cubic meters per person per year
•  75% of Indian households still do not have drinking water on premises
•  84% of rural households do not have piped water access
•  70% of the water is contaminated
•  India ranked 120 among 122 countries in the water quality index
•  54% of groundwater wells are said to be declining
•  21 major cities including Delhi are expected to run out of groundwater as early as 2020
•  Water-stressed states like UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Haryana account for 20 to 30% of the country’s agricultural output