Water will cost a lot more as India grapples with the worst crisis ever

• Nagpur, the orange city, is witnessing unprecedented water scarcity and lopsided distribution, yet the city’s water utility, a private company called the Orange City Water Distribution Company Limited, has received a national award for being the most progressive water utility in India. The joke’s on people in Nagpur living on the margins.

• Bengaluru, India’s IT capital, sits on acute water shortages akin to the ones witnessed by Cape Town in South Africa. A CSE (Centre for Science & Environment) study found that water table in what was once known as a lake city shrunk from 10-12 m to 76-91 m in two decades while the number of extraction wells went up from 5,000 to 0.45 million in 30 years. A good monsoon does not augur well for the IT capital of India.

• Chennai has witnessed the strange spectacle of restaurants giving up the traditional ‘Thali’ meals so as to reduce the number of bowls and utensils to be washed.

• Narmada, usually an ebullient river, has seen part of the river-bed turned into a parking bay for cars of the pilgrims at Chandod in Gujarat’s Vadodara district. With little or no water released from the upstream Sardar Sarovar, the perennial river that once had an expanse of 300 m is now reduced to a 20-feet stream.

• Cauvery delta in Tamil Nadu is facing extreme water stress. The Godavari — the Ganges of the South — is sans water. The Krishna too, in many stretches, is but a stream of dry pebbles.

• Karnataka, which has been in the shadow of successive years of drought, has seen frogs caught and married (whatever that means) as part of rituals to propitiate the monsoon gods!

Seven years ago I had witnessed in the temple town of Nashik, tankers filling up the dry Ram Kund in the divine Godavari so that pilgrims could perform the after-death rituals to seek Nirvana for their departed kin.

It was a bizarre sight. A municipal corporation was pouring water from nearby wells into the river that had run dry; the civic body had dug new bore-wells to keep the river alive two months after a huge Kumbh had seen the same place use and waste thousands of gallons of water for a bath. India doesn’t learn its lessons. And seven years later, the situation is even worse.

Tens of thousands of people from the arid Bundelkhand region in central India are migrating to the cities, or wherever they can, to escape both hunger and water scarcity. The exodus of the unwashed masses marching towards cities in steady streams should have sent alarm bells ringing. But we are far too busy watching the World Cup in England.

Says Pradeep Purandare, water policy expert and former professor at the Water and Land Management Institute in Aurangabad: “We unfortunately see water only in terms of irrigation projects or water scheme. River has not been our area of attention. We need a balance between water- needs of the society and that of the river itself.”

The surge in the sale of beer, soft drinks and bottled water also demonstrate the unequal distribution of the natural resource and lopsided priorities (See Pages 6-7).

Manisha Dandekar (17) from a village in Maharashtra’s Melghat region, is battling for her life. Her breathing, doctors at the trauma centre of the Government Medical College and Hospital in Nagpur say, is laboured. “She may not survive this emergency,” a lady intern looking after her says.

Four days ago, Manisha fell into an open well while fetching water and broke her skull. She’s in a comatose condition ever-since she was brought by villagers to the hospital. The teenager would make several trips every day to draw water from the well, but that day, she accidentally slipped and suffered the head injury that threatens to end her life.

Manisha, unfortunately, is not alone. A large number of children, teenagers and women continue to get killed in their desperate pursuit of water. Video clips of women chasing tankers to collect the water dripping from them, risking their lives and limbs, are now commonplace in the drought affected parts of Maharashtra.

On yet another scorching day, Balaji Paratwad and a few of his grim friends watch expectantly one of the the last remaining puddles of water in the Godavari, behind a barrage in Nanded’s Mukhed tehsil near village Devapur.

But for the puddle, the riverbed is bare. But there are blue fishing nets and a small catch of fish on the rocks. “This will sustain us for the next two-three days,” says the fisherman. “We’ve been living here on this river bed for almost two months,” he says. “Once this dries up, we don’t know where to go.”

A few miles upstream, in a village called Nagthana, blue plastic boats hang by the walls; the fishing nets are folded and kept on tin sheds of the shanties that are locked. There is no sign of anyone living here at the moment.

Raibai Ghaire, a middle-aged woman is home, but she says she’s leaving the village with her daughter in a couple of days. Her husband and a teenaged son left home more than two months ago.

She will join her husband, she says, at Paithan, in Aurangabad, where he is camping near the Jayakwadi dam reservoir which has hit the dead storage but has enough water and fish to sustain them.

Almost every family of the Bhois – an impoverished and nomadic fishing community – from Nagthana, a village along the banks of the Godavari river ten km from the temple town of Gangakhed has left home and migrated to wherever they can find water.

Raibai says her extended family, by which she means her community, is scattered all over in this drought and it would be some time before they return home. “Our river is dry,” she says, of the Godavari that flows along the village.

The Bhois (fishing community) liken the river to a farm that provides food, work and prosperity. The fishing communities along the Godavari have seen the water crisis leading to livelihood crisis almost every year in the past two decades. When drought strikes, they are the silent, almost invisible sufferers.

Further westward in Beed district, which is in the grip of severe water scarcity, Pralhad Jagtap cries standing in front the rows of his guava plants and exclaims that he was watching his income, his hard work, drying up. The Jagtaps own 44 acres of land. Pralhad, the youngest of three siblings, has ten acres to his share, of which his orchard stands on four acres, supplemented by drip irrigation system to save water and enable “more crop per drop”.

He mutters: “What more can I do other than working hard and giving the best of my attention, converting this arid land into a productive multi-crop farmland?”

Over a thousand 11-12 feet tall four-year-old plants of guava – which would have given fruits in the coming winter to him – are wilting and there’s nothing he can do. There’s no water. Four dug wells on their family land are sans water. Every single well and bore-well in their village is dry. For 4-5 months since November, Pralhad has bought water, every other day to save his plants, but he ran out of money to buy more water.

Not just his, but horticulture plants across Marathwada have taken a beating this year, according to the data compiled by the Aurangabad divisional commissioner’s office.

There is no water, but there’s a contrast. This has been a year of bumper sugarcane harvest and a bumper yield of sugar from the cooperative and private sugar factories in Marathwada and western Maharashtra, the two regions now crumbling in the face of water shortages. The sugarcane crop and sugarcane crushing guzzle water but the scarcity has not come in their way.

Drinking water in many villages now comes by tankers or is to be bought privately. The western, northern and central Maharashtra’s arid districts hang by, only just, as tankers ferry bad, non-potable, and at times highly polluted water to parched people.

What this has meant is less cash and purchasing power with the poor, higher and higher dependence on limited tanker water, more and more sucking of ground-water; draining of the last remaining resources; emerging new private water markets, and a complete mess in water management and governance.

When rivers run dry, journalist Fred Pearce wrote in his book, we mine our children’s water.

If one were to travel across the length and breadth of India, Pearce’s wisdom that drying rivers and parched regions make up a defining crisis of the 21st century, comes alive like an alarm bell.