What if you didn’t have water? Promise of piped water to every household could remain a pipe dream

Without water

You can't grow food

You can't build houses

You can't stay healthy

You can't stay in school

You can't keep working.

For school-aged children, lack of water traps them in poverty. With parents working for meagre wages, children, more often than not girls, are left to find water and bring them back home. Many of them fall ill. Some die. A large number drop out of school. At least some of them escape and take to crime.

The time lost fetching water robs entire communities of their futures. Just as people in the cities, the children deserve to take water for granted.

“When students are freed from gathering water, they return to class. Access to water leads to food security. With less crop loss, hunger is reduced. Safe water, clean hands, healthy bodies. Time lost to sickness is reduced and people can get back to the work of lifting themselves out of poverty. Access to water can break the cycle of poverty,” reads a poignant report of Project Water. Little wonder then that every Rupee invested in water and sanitation projects is estimated to fetch economic returns up to twelve times.

But that’s not all. When irrigation wells go dry, farmers turn to untreated wastewater that is laced with industrial chemicals and human sewage. Groundwater contamination is a food supply “toxic time bomb”.

The class two student is 10 years old. But every day he undertakes a five and a half hour journey to fetch what little water he can collect. He leaves home at Noon, reaches Mukundwadi Railway Station and waits for the Aurangabad-Hyderabad train which stops but for a few minutes at the station. Boarding the train is not easy. At Aurangabad City station, Siddharth and 12 years-old Ayesha and 9-years-old Sakshi fill their utensils from the taps. They have all o 40 minutes to do it before they catch a return journey home.

It is a far more tricky trip this time with the children fighting hard to ensure that precious water does not spill. Luckily the children have a middle-aged woman to shepherd them. She herself quit working when her 300-feet borewell stopped yielding water in April. Now she too accompanies the children from Nirmala Devi Nagar, a settlement of 300 houses, to the Aurangabad City Station.

She explains that buying a 200-litre drum of water from water vendors for Rs 60 was unaffordable. The municipal tankers do arrive with water once in four days. But the monthly charges for the seven odd days in a month work out to Rs 1150 a month which she says is too high a price.

Aurangabad Municipal Corporation had engaged a contractor to lay a water pipeline in 2011 as part of an ambitious plan to supply piped water to every household. Because of disputes the contract fell through in 2016 but two years later the same contractor has been brought back to complete the project.

The water kids claim that even those who have taps are lucky to receive the supply in summer once in five or six days.

In June, Maharashtra has received international attention for the frightening drought in Marathwada and Vidarbha. The New York Times published a story on its front page (see photo) and The Guardian reported that young and able-bodied men and women had deserted villages and escaped to adjoining cities for water and survival. They left behind the old and the cattle to brave the weather and cope with the scarcity as well as they can.

NITI Aayog, which released last June a report on water scarcity and need for better water management, made a startling admission. The Government, it said, did not have enough data on water.

The Government has little idea of the number of wells and ponds in the country. Which explains why a state chief minister had once exclaimed that in his state ponds were also stolen. “Here ponds are made above ponds,” exclaimed the then chief minister of Jharkhand and presently a union minister Arjun Munda. Every year money would be released for digging new ponds and on paper, the number of ponds would grow. But new ponds would come up over old ponds, he had added enigmatically, suggesting that public funds were being siphoned off without adding to the number of ponds.

Since then the panchayats have been delegated more power. Technology has improved. Communication has improved and so has increased surveillance by the Government. It is therefore surprising for the NITI Aayog to admit in 2018 that the Government has a serious problem with planning in the absence of authentic data. Not surprisingly, the Government seems to have no clue either about the number of private swimming pools which have come up (see box).

The ineptitude came to light again when in the middle of May, the National Green tribunal pulled up the Union Environment Ministry for failing to provide a report on steps taken to curb depletion of groundwater.

The NGT on January 3, 2019 had asked the Government to constitute within two weeks an expert committee to frame policy for conservation of groundwater. But the ministry sat over the direction and constituted the committee on March 29. The NGT also pulled up the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) for providing an incomplete report on the assessment of environmental compensation to be levied for illegal extraction of groundwater, demanding that the Board furnish the report by the end of June.

The report by the NITI Aayog places Gujarat at the top of the ‘performing’ states which have managed their water resources well. Farmers and activists in Gujarat may not find the claim credible even as farmers in Saurashtra and Kutch continue to wait for water from the Sardar Sarovar Dam inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September, 2017. The main Narmada canal to carry water from the dam has 42 branches across Gujarat, but construction of branches to take the water to Kutch, Saurashtra or North Gujarat is incomplete.

The slow pace of work on the Narmada Valley project was censured by the government’s auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, which found that the state government had fudged its accounts of expenditure incurred between 2014 and 2016 to the tune of Rs 213.17 crore.

The government had included expenditure on power projects in its statements even though the Central Water Commission had explicitly stated that this cost would not be borne by the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP) funding programme, the CAG report held in 2018.

While the Gujarat Government has diverted more water to industry and domestic use in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the original purpose of the project, inaugurated in 1961, to carry water to Kutch remains unfulfilled.

Meanwhile, Gujarat government’s proposed ‘State Draft Water Policy’ is yet to see the light of day.

struck. The first draft of the policy was prepared in 2014-15 but it was never sent to the cabinet. Promises were renewed after the last assembly election but the policy is not public yet.

The Composite Water Management Index report published by Niti Aayog in June 2018 reveals that around 600 million Indians are reeling under water shortage. Nearly 75 per cent households do not have access to drinking water on their premises. To top it all, the Index says, around 70 per cent of the fresh water available in the country is contaminated, making India rank among the lowest vis-à-vis water quality index.

A 2016 report submitted by the Committee on restructuring the CWC and CGWB observed: “While big dams played a big role in creating a huge irrigation potential, today the challenge is to effectively utilise this potential, as the water that lies stored in our dams is not reaching the farmers for whom it is meant. At the same time, groundwater, which truly powered the Green Revolution, faces a crisis of sustainability.”

Water levels and water quality have both fallen creating a new kind of crisis, where the solution to a problem has become part of the problem itself, the report said. The new challenge is to manage our aquifers sustainably so that we make sure we do not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

This and many other ground reports indicate what we call drought is actually a full blown water crisis, accentuated by our poor planning, as a recent Water Resources Institute (WRI) report indicated (http://www.wri.org/blog/2018/01/40-indias-thermal-power-plants-are-water-scarce-areas-threatening-shutdowns).

It said: “Water shortages are hurting India’s ability to produce power” and that “40 per cent of the country’s thermal power plants are located in areas facing high water stress, a problem since these plants use water for cooling. Scarce water is already hampering electricity generation in these regions—14 of India’s 20 largest thermal utilities experienced at least one shutdown due to water shortages between 2013-2016, costing the companies $1.4 billion. It’s an issue that’s only poised to worsen unless the country takes action—70 percent of India’s thermal power plants will face high water stress by 2030 thanks to climate change and increased demands from other sectors.” We are putting our water-guzzling industries in water-stressed areas.

The 2016 report on the CWC-CWGB restructuring says, if the current pattern continues, about half of India’s water demand will be unmet by 2030; our water tables are falling in most parts; there is fluoride, arsenic, mercury, even uranium in our groundwater; climate change poses fresh challenges as more extreme rates of precipitation and evapo-transpiration exacerbate impacts of floods and droughts; our cities produce nearly 40,000 million litres of sewage every day and barely 20 percent of it gets treated; only 2% of our urban areas have both sewerage systems and sewage treatment plants.

As monsoon sets in, drought would soon be a stale news, until the summer sets in next year and rings like a déjà vu, a cycle repeating itself. Factor this from 2016:

“People from Latur would always come to our village with their cattle in the summers because we had water,” 70-year-old Tukaram Gayakwad told me in May 2016 in Dharkhed village. He recalled a time when the Godavari was replete with fish, melons and life. In the preceding three months before I went to Dharkhed the village dug over 50 wells and bore-wells along the riverbed, each going below 200 feet. Most of them, the sarpanch Digambar Chorghade told me, were dry.

Dharkhed, a village opposite Gangakhed town, was a classic example: It saw its wells go down an average four metres that summer. Sugarcane, the major crop in the village, was wilting in the absence of water.

Another villager, Munjaji Bobade’s six acre-farm was barely a couple of km from the riverbed. On that he grew cotton, soybean, fodder, vegetables, and sugarcane. His 49-feet well – it would never go dry – was dry.

In 1992, Baliram Bobde, 55, dug a well and it yielded water at around 40 feet. In last three years, he told me, he had to dig deeper every year, to tap ground water. The well is now 63 feet deep – but dry. It hit Basalt, the rock that forms the character of 70 per cent Maharashtra and makes it virtually difficult for the rainwater to seep in and ground water to be extracted from deeper depths.

We are mining water from Paleolithic age in Marathwada, a central ground water board scientist in Pune told me that year. Ditto: we suck water from the great depths of the Cauvery riverbed to meet the burgeoning demands of the parched cities along its banks.

If what I saw was a picture of devastation out of water scarcity in a village along the Godavari, there was only distress to be seen in other parts of Marathwada, a region downstream of this perennial river.

The Godavari was dry. And people were clamouring for water. Three years on, nothing has changed.

A number of beer bars along the under-construction four-lane state highway from Latur to Aurangabad via Beed woefully contrasts the pain and suffering water scarcity and economic distress has wrought on the people of this region. This year too (2019), while monsoon was below normal, Aurangabad’s beer industry saw 18 per cent growth in production and sales, even as the city faces water scarcity and cuts. Drought has given birth to big tanker economies and bustling private water markets.

In Latur, in 2016, it led to conflicts and the district collector had to enforce section 144 (CrPC) around the few surviving water bodies acting as lifelines to the resident communities of the region.

“The first and foremost law must be to have adequate quantities of water reserved for drinking for both humans and livestock,” says Shripad Dharmadhikari, water policy researcher of the Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, Pune. “Right to water,” he says, “should mean a high priority to drinking water.”