It has been 45 years since the first national water supply programme. This and many thousand crore of rupees later, more than half of India's population is still languishing in thirst. And where there is water, there are water-borne diseases. Tall claims have been the government's record till now. Down To Earth analyses the problem and ways of quenching the thirst of a nation
No water just woes
The buck never stops
"We have not failed," says S R Hashim, member secretary, Planning Commission, commenting on the country's water woes. "Problems are acute only in a few areas. We are chasing the problem, but it remains ahead of us," he defends. However, he agrees that most political decisions have only short-term gains in mind.
"The people are gullible. The politician promises only for 'tomorrow' while India's water requirements need long-term planning," reasons Henk Norden, director of the water and sanitation programme of unicef . But long-term solutions will take time and people are not ready to wait. This compels governments to invest in handpumps and borewells.
Even the handpump schemes that are implemented with so much enthusiasm become useless soon due to of lack of maintenance.In 1994, a Government of India survey found that more than 33 per cent of the handpumps installed through various schemes required repair, while some 22 per cent required rehabilitation. Some 12 per cent were completely defunct (See chart: Out of order) .
Pressure from irrigation
"The biggest competition to drinking water is from irrigation," says V G Joshi of the United Nations Children's Fund ( unicef). "We put up one drill for drinking water and many more come up for irrigation," he adds. Today, even in regions that do have water, 90 per cent of it is used for agricultural and other land-based applications. Only five per cent of it is used for drinking water.
Farmers get electricity and irrigation pumpsets at highly subsidised rates and can drill as deep as they want for water to irrigate their fields. In states like Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, 85 per cent of the irrigation is done through groundwater sources. Though the state and Union governments know that subsidised electricity and pumps only encourage indiscriminate borewell digging, very few are willing to cut down on the subsidies for fear of losing their votebank. Says Kanchan Chopra from the Institute of Economic Growth: "Solutions are targeted at the individual farmer and completely bypass the issue of overall scarcity of water."
In Maharashtra , borewells cannot be drilled within 500m of a drinking water source. Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, too, have similar laws. However, so far, only Maharashtra has achieved any perceivable impact. Hashim says, "Legislation is all right but enforcing it is very difficult."
Take Chennai for instance. Here, the government introduced a bill, called the Chennai Metropolitan Area Groundwater (Regulation) Act, 1987, to regulate over-extraction of groundwater as well as its transportation to other parts. However, even now, private lorries carrying water from one part of the city to another operate freely.
Then there is Rajasthan, where wheat and sugarcane are flourishing. Rajasthan is suffering from yet another kind of problem. Here, according to experts, dryland agriculture should have been encouraged. "In the beginning when the project is formulated, water is there but the demand is not," Hashim explains. "So the farmer starts growing water-intensive crops. Slowly, the cropping pattern gets established and the entire economy starts depending on it. It becomes difficult to reverse the trend even if the region witnesses water scarcity.
Quality control? No, thanks
Till even a few years ago, most took groundwater's purity for granted and did not care much about testing its quality before digging wells. Matters are still the same. Planners have fallen into the classic 'quantity, and not quality' trap. Water monitoring facilities in the country are either non-existent or are at absolute infancy. "Testing is done only where there is an outbreak of diseases," says Norden.
Supplying rural populations with clean drinking water often figure low in the government's list of priorities. According to the rgndwm the ministry of water resources ( mwr ) spends almost 80 per cent of its budget on projects involving large dams and canals. The rest, only a meagre 20 per cent, is left for drinking water supply schemes (see table: Rural water supply ). Further, rural water supply is the responsibility of the ministry of rural development. The mwr, which handles the maximum finance for water, has no role in these water supply schemes. These and other bureaucratic hurdles further add to the problem of water scarcity.
"Water-harvesting is an inter-sectional issue where many sectors, including the private sector, are involved. But none of the departments agree to work one another," says Joshi.
Quenching parched throats
FOR THE PEOPLE , BY THE PEOPLE
So far, the planners have done their best to leave communities out while conceiving projects. It has not worked, India needs to give water back to its people, the planners need to involve the masses.
Almost all the countries that face a water crisis today can trace the roots of this to the discontinuity in their water management strategy since the 19th century. In most cases, the State has emerged as the water provider, replacing communities and households as the primary agents.
After innumerable faulty projects, the government agencies have now realised that if they want the water programmes to succeed, things have to change. More crucially, community participation is one of the most important elements India's policymakers need to address. "There is need for a supply-driven approach rather than a demand-driven approach," Hashim explains.
Community participation in most of the water supply schemes is zero. "The state supply agencies are merely engineering bodies and they do not understand the social issues involved, or the needs of the people," says Norden. Even an expert committee report of the ministry of rural areas and employment commented on the lack of people's participation: "The community was not made aware of its entitlements -- that is the right to know the details of the scheme and the funds being utilised, the right to be made aware of the technical aspects and the right to know its new obligations."
After a project is sanctioned, the work is usually handed over to contractors. Social issues and community participation figure at the bottom end of the contractors' priorities. "The people give up their own efforts, when they see the government doing all the work and is not bothered about what the masses feel, think or want," agrees Hashim. However, not all projects ignore vox populi . That the clue to all such programmes lies in community participation has been aptly highlighted by the success of the water missions in Madhya Pradesh ( see Down To Earth, Vol 7, No 15). The masses need to be involved for the rest of India's villages and towns to follow the examples set by Alwar (see box: Partners in progress ) and Jhabua: if you give water back to the people, more will flow. REVIVING TRADITIONS
India must learn to value the raindrop. It must catch rain where it falls. These are some of lessons the traditional modes of harvesting water taught us
Water harvesting as a strategy for meeting human needs in management essentially means re-establishing the relationships between the people and their environment and turning water into what is -- an element of nature to be used judicially. It also means empowering urban and rural communities so that they begin managing their own affairs.
Today, what India needs is a revitalisation of all its ancient traditions of conserving and harvesting water. These traditions are now languishing for every little attention they can possibly get. India receives most of its rain in about 100 hours. For the rest 8,660 hours of the year, there is hardly any water. The people who practised water harvesting in the ancient times and their modern counterparts -- all knew if they did not catch rain as it fell, there would be nothing later. Not all the traditions are dead, though. The people of Rajasthan developed the art of making kundis, a water harvesting system, that goes on to this day. All it requires is a sloped patch of land with its slope directed towards the centre. The people place either cement or limestone on this artificial catchment to increase the run-off and gather it in the central depression. Ladakh, Rajasthan's polar opposite, also faced intermittent water shortages. So they learnt to capture the evening glacier run-off and use it later.
There are many such examples. Himachal Pradesh ( hp ) a hill state in India's north, receives some 1,134mm of annual rainfall. Still, most of the state's 59 urban settlements face a water shortage. For instance, the average water supply available in Shimla is 101.79 lpcd, much less than the 150 lpcd suggested by the state's planners. Water supply method here mostly involve lift schemes, as most of the residences are on the hill top and the water is collected downhill. The answer: "Catch water at the top of the hill," says R K Sood, joint member secretary at the State Council for Science and Technology.
Buried beneath the houses and gardens of Jakhu hill, Shimla's highest point, are many snow pits that people once collected and stored water for the summer months. But today, hotels dot the hill slopes. These inevitably dry up during the summer, as tourists throng the cool hill station.
But if state chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal has his way, the scenario will soon change again. The state cabinet has decided to make rainwater harvesting mandatory for all new constructions. hp becomes the first state to do so, close on the heels of the Madras metro board. "The cabinet has approved it. Only the modalities have to be worked out now," says Rajwant Sandhu, secretary in charge of forest, rural development and science and technology. India is lucky enough to have a huge quantity of water, theoretically as much as 173 mham, which is lost as evaporation or as soil moisture every year. This water can be easily captured directly as rainwater or as run-off from catchments. Capturing floodwaters of a river can further boost water availability. If even 20-30 mham can be captured, a tremendous load will be taken off India's ground and surface water sources.
Reports by Indira Khurana, Jitendra Verma, Manish Tiwari, Max Martin, Richard Mahapatra, Neera and Vineet Katariya. Edited by Mridula Chettri and Arnab Ray Ghatak
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