India in deep waters

India burrows deep for its water. Groundwater extraction in most northern states including Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan has reached 100 per cent (when annual extraction exceeds water availability), with huge ramifications for agriculture and the economy.

Delhi is in particularly dire straits, with nearly 500,000 illegal borewells sucking up the city’s groundwater. About 16 per cent of Delhi’s urban households and 30 per cent of its rural ones have little drinking water supply.

Indian cities now face an acute water crisis, with Delhi and Chennai sourcing water from rivers that are 250-450 km away. Domestic water consumption is expected to triple by 2050.

Industrial water consumption could rise fourfold by 2050, driven by thermal power stations and steel plants. Small and medium industries do not invest in effluents; Ankleshwar’s 3,000 units discharge 270 mm litres of effluent every day.

Just 40 per cent of urban sewage is treated, leading to severely polluted stretches in 18 major rivers, leading to a consequential reduction in agricultural production.

Rainwater harvesting, which includes recharge wells, gutters, cascade captures and roof catchments for storing water, can help conserve soil and water. In Chennai, rainwater harvesting is conducted in nearly 2,000 government buildings and 33,000 households.

Any new construction in all cities should have mandatory rainwater harvesting policies. Desalination, through thermal and membrane technology, needs to be considered, especially for coastal cities. Chennai’s Nemmeli desalination plant helps meet its water deficit, providing nearly a 100 megalitres a day, produced at Rs 30 per kilolitre.

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), in Mumbai, has built a barge mounted desalination plant, which can produce 50,000 litres of drinking water every day, at about 12 paisa per litre. Such barges could help serve remote areas with brackish or polluted water. Innovations such as forward osmosis desalination and metal mediated aeration should also be considered.

Our farms are increasingly thirsty, with the volume of water required for irrigation expected to rise by 68.5 trillion litres by 2025. Uttar Pradesh could face 50 per cent groundwater depletion in the medium term, while pesticide pollution by chemicals such as methyl malathion rises. Eutrophication results, as seen dramatically in Hussain Sagar and Nainital.

We plant rice in arid regions. Our cropping decisions are made irrespective of local surface water availability. This reflects the systemic focus on rice and wheat production, with dry land agriculture neglected.

We must shift focus to other crops, reducing water demand by adopting drip feed agriculture. Protection for river ecosystems should be stren-gthened, with illegal sand mining curbed. Political will to curb these practices should be mustered.

Desiltification should be introduced. According to the Central Water Commission, dams across India have never been desilted, leading to a decrease in their water holding capacity; Hirakud, India’s most silted big dam, has faced a reduction of 27.25 per cent in capacity. While cost concerns have been raised, alternative new dams will have ecological consequences. Silt can be sold off to nearby farms, improving soil composition.

Water policies are badly outdated. Anyone can pump out groundwater, in whatever amount and for whatever purpose. We have no integrated policy on water pollution and sparse networks to track pollution of rivers, lakes and groundwater.

Subsidies on electricity and tube-wells should be reduced while those on micro irrigation equipment and system of rice intensification (SRI) programmes are enhanced. Wastewater collection and treatment by industries should be mandated and incentivised, with monitoring systems in place along river banks to ensure that such regimes are implemented.

In particular, water allocation decisions are made inconsistently. Take the Hirakud dam, built for agriculture, but increasingly focused on industries. An operational mechanism for sectoral allocation, based on logic, need and social equity, needs to be developed.

The government must undertake regional or basin level water planning, enabling communities, industries and civil society to negotiate over allocation. Legal protections for minimum water flow in our rivers need to be strengthened. Political interference in water allocation should be curbed.  

India needs a central regulatory agency to design, control and coordinate national programmes for water conser-vation. Water management is governed by multiple agencies, with state governments and municipal bodies focused on drinking and sanitation, and the Central Water Commission on overall water usage and inter-state water allocation disputes.

Bad coordination results in multiple pollution surveys, with little follow-up. There are examples to learn from. China’s Zhumadian city implemented baffled reactors, which provide 120 mm litres of treated water every day.

The Gansu province utilised rainwater harvesting to provide drinking water to nearly two million people, and irrigate 236,400 hectares of land. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s pre-treatment programme in the US collects and treats wastewater, covering nearly 2,000 industries across six states.

The Deep Pond System, with anaerobic digestion, in Hyderabad treats nearly 38,000 litres of wastewater per day. With low installation and maintenance costs, it is easily scalable. The Tamil Nadu Water Supplies and Drainage Board Experience is a great example of an entire state changing its attitude to water conservation.

Water costs practically nothing in India. More than 40 per cent of India’s water is not priced, with most consumers in Delhi paying less that 50 cent of the cost of providing water.

India needs to implement programs based on established water management techniques. Watershed management, by enhancing management of water supply, drainage and watershed inventory across the entire basin, can help restore our rivers.

The Karnataka Watershed Development Project has resulted in a 30 per cent increase in crop yield. Digitisa-tion of water management can help provide information on consumption, leakage, demand trends and cut corruption.

Indian citizens deserve an actionable right to safe and sufficient water, one derived from rivers with healthy fish stocks and sand banks. Such a right needs rivers that flow freely and without pollution.

It also deserves water and river basin management systems that incorporate communities and the private sector. Enacting and implementing such a right will help clean up our rivers and revive their flow.

The writer is a BJP Lok Sabha MP and a national general secretary of the party