Water is the basis for all life forms. As the prime mover
of economic activities, it has an overwhelming influence on the future of
mankind. Fortunately, we are said to be a better endowed country with an annual
precipitation of around 4000 BCM and a share of about 4% of the total average
annual runoff in the rivers of the world.
But with the rapid growth in population, the per capita
availability of water is coming down sharply: it has fallen from a high of 5200
Cu mt in 1951 to a low of 1400 Cu mt. And given the projected rise in
population by 2025, no wonder if the per capita water availability further
slides to 1000 Cu mt and even less. This is a pretty disturbing phenomenon in
the offing, for it is sure to place us in a regime of stress.
Indeed, we are already witnessing the social, political
and economic impacts of water scarcity. Around 850 million Indians live in
villages and nearly 60% of them depend on farming for their survival. But due
to weak monsoon rains during 2014 and 2015, 10 out of 29 states have already
declared droughts. Irrigation dams, canals, riverbeds have all gone dry. The
indiscriminate pumping out of ground water, that too at an alarming rate, has
only lowered the water table further.
The frequency of droughts has indeed been increasing:
there were six droughts during 1900 and 1950 as against 12 in the following 50
years, and four droughts have already occurred since the beginning of the 21st century. Severe droughts—dry winds, parched
fields, emptied wells, withered crops, dying cattle, hunger deaths—often result
in the migration of the poor and the marginalized lot from the countryside to
the nearby urban centers for a fistful of food leaving behind everything: their
dwellings, relations, their associations, indeed their very roots.
In all this, it is the “people much farther down the
economic ladder” that are the worst sufferers. They encounter even starvation
deaths, “not because there being not enough to eat”, but more because of their
“inability to establish [their] entitlement to enough food.” And that is where
the government of the day plays a critical role, but seldom found it rising to
the challenge—no wonder, if the Supreme Court has recently made a scathing
verdict on the “lack of will” shown by the Center and States in combating
drought and saving lives, although a third of the nation is affected by the
disaster.
Stare at the picture at the top—the picture of the woman with two
vessels on head and one in each hand
while her child is dangling all by him-/her-self from her arm-pit, which indeed well reflects
the plight of women from the country side walking for miles together to fetch a
pile of water, that too, even after 60 years of independence—
empathize with the women, at least empathize with her plight … meditate on her fortitude, I am sure
you would be reminded of what a poet mused some 50 years back:
“Duniya
mein hum aaye to jeena hi padega / Jeevan hai agar zehar to peena hi padega” (If we have come into this world, then live we
have to / If life is poison so we have to drink it); Gir gir ke museebat mein sambhalte hi rahenge (Falling again and
again in troubles, shall keep going yet)
gum jisine diye / gum jisne diye hain whohi gum door karega (Whoever has
given us the sadness / Whoever has given us the sadness will also make it
vanish).
This lady in the picture and her
ilk appears to believe that life is a ‘given’ to them and it is their sacred duty to
live it out, come what may! See the gait: there is no trace of any resentment
whatsoever or sorrow of her plight on her face—in short, no whine and whimper.
On the other hand, her body language reflects an element of nirliptata, detachment— detachment from
all the externalities. There is indeed a
spring in her walk—the walk with sun high in the sky and the baking
dusty road under her feet plus all that load all over her body—exuding an
amazing belief in her own abilities, ability to carry on the life’s caravan on
her own. I wonder, if she ever looks for help from anybody in her sojourn on
planet earth. This heroic style of her living with whatever has been doled
out tells me: “look, bachhu boy,
don’t wait hoping that somebody will come someday to serve you, instead carry
on your engagement with the life with whatever cards you have been dealt with.
She even tells me: “My boy, if there are obstacles on the path, keeping your
faith in god, bend down and pull them out/push them away and keep going—thuj ko chalna hoga.” She even trumpets: “Duniya mein hum aaye to jeena hi padega /
Jeevan hai agar zehar to peena hi padega”
OH! My god, what an inspiration
she is! Won’t you think her heroism puts us all to shame, particularly, the
ruling clan, who often keep yelling from rooftops to turn this land of hers
into Singapore or, into a paradise, and what not? And no party is exception to
this phenomenon—they all project ‘illusion’ before them exhorting to celebrate
it. There appears to be no room in the minds of the ‘more-than-the-ordinary' people of this nation for the sufferings of the ‘less-than-the-ordinary’. We
take pride in celebrating our success—the success of our lopsided
priorities. What a shame!
There is yet another arena where we witness the glaring
failure of our government, both at the Center and States: disputes arising out
of sharing water from a common source—the Cauvery river water dispute involving
Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala; the Krishna river water dispute involving Maharastra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka; disputes between Punjab, Haryana and Delhi in the north, etc—are some such examples, though
potential enough to challenge the ‘economic-sustainability’ of the zone and the
very federal setup of the democratic India, and these are seldom addressed
meaningfully, particularly with a sense of urgency to resolve them. Nor is the
government of the day—be it from any political setup—has ever been found
evincing keen interest in maintaining storage capacities already created:
de-silting dams, tanks, canals and repair and maintenance of irrigation canals
to arrest leakages and ensuring secured passage of water to the intended
purposes is hardly attempted with the kind of enthusiasm that we notice in
pursuing newer projects.
As we shift our gaze from quantity to quality of water,
the apathy of the governments in providing safe and adequate drinking water to
the rural masses turns out to be even more appalling: the sight of people using
ground water that is heavily contaminated with hazardous chemicals such as
fluoride, arsenic, nitrates that are known to cause serious ailments like
crippling bones, renal failure, epileptic seizures, mental retardation, etc.,
is common in areas like Telangana, Tamil Nadu, etc.
Unless the
government of the day wakes up and collectively with people initiates measures
for:
- conserving water and harvesting rainfall by educating people to adopt simple techniques such as ploughing the land across the slope, digging percolation tanks, injection wells, erecting surface barriers and using these savings to nurture the water table,
- desilting existing reservoirs to restore their full storage capacity and repairs to the canal system to ensure minimum wastage and maximum reach to the intended destiny.
- improving utilization of existing water resources by growing crops that are appropriate to a region, preferably using drip irrigation and reviving use of traditional systems such as tanks and huge open wells that could act as mini-storage systems too for harvesting rain water—in short,
- building harmony between extraction and restoration, and importantly,
- choosing the right priorities like fixing the drinking water problem in the country-side vs Mars expedition, for allocating the scarce capital, and
- addressing water crisis as a risk-management practice
India cannot
ensure a water-secure future. And unless water problem is solved urgently and
effectively, its adverse effects are sure to spill over the national effort to achieve
double-digit GDP growth rate too.
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