For a secure water future

Managing water inequity: Dealing with drought

It was only in March 2013 that the drought crippling large parts of Maharashtra finally grabbed the nation’s attention. The region had been reeling under water scarcity for two years — by 2013, agriculture was severely hit, as was industrial output. Maharashtra is no stranger to droughts. In the 1970s, the state had initiated the country’s first employment guarantee programme to provide drought relief. But the drought of 2013 was different. It brought home the fact that a state can suffer the consequences of increasing variability of rainfall if it mismanages its water. Maharashtra’s drought is a reminder of what awaits India in its water future.

Maharashtra has spent a lot on building irrigation projects. Since 2007 — when farmer suicides in Vidharbha hit the headlines — the state has been given central grants for water projects. According to the state economic survey, till February 2012, Maharashtra had spent Rs 12,000 crore only on this, with nothing much to show for it: irrigation projects had either not been built or simply not utilised. The state’s own data says some 40 per cent of the potential created is not being used. Reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) speak about scandalous ways in which dams are built but canals are not and about cost escalations so high that projects become unviable and are never completed.

This is also the only Indian state to give industry priority over agriculture in allocation of water, because there is more recovery of investment. So even when an irrigation project is built, the water from it is diverted to urban and industrial needs. In Amravati, a drought-hit district, the Upper Wardha irrigation project was built under the prime minister’s relief package. But when water started to flow in the canals, the state decided to divert it to the Sophia thermal power project. Farmers protested the move. This led to the overturning of the policy that gave industry priority, but not in the cases where water was already allocated.

The state’s economic survey accepts that only 50 per cent of the utilised water in its reservoirs is being used for agriculture. With rapid urbanisation, the demand for water is bound to go up. This will add to the stress unless cities and industries become water-prudent now — use less water and return clean water (and not sewage) to farmers.

The inequity between agriculture and industry-urbanisation finds an echo in the inequity within agriculture itself. Maharashtra grows sugarcane-type water-guzzling crops. This dry and water-stressed state produces 66 per cent of the crushed sugar in the country, way over what Uttar Pradesh, located in the Ganga basin, manages. Thus, water available for agriculture is also not used wisely (see Box: Sugarcane: Engineering scarcity).

But it is the inability to link investment in watershed and soil conservation to groundwater recharge that has been the most damaging. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has replaced the state’s three-decade old employment guarantee scheme. But with the focus on creating jobs, and not on completion of the work, there is little productive asset creation. Even during the drought, the scheme had no takers. Down To Earth reporters found that during the state-wide drought in 1972, 1.5 million people had worked under the employment guarantee scheme. But in 2012, the number was down to 0.25 million — mostly because of low wages and delayed payments.

Furthermore, investments in water assets — coming largely through employment guarantee schemes — are hardly ever productive. Watersheds are planted with trees, but protection of the trees is not ensured. Tanks are desilted, but the channels or the catchment that bring water to the tanks are not. Worse, the tank is rarely completed. In this way, drought becomes perpetual; rain or no rain, money or no money.

Distributed access and dying wisdom

Every country has to mind its water business. But for a country like India, where it rains for roughly 100 hours of the year, the management of water becomes even more critical. It literally determines if the country remains poor or becomes rich; diseased or healthy. In other words, water is the determinant of its future.

What is clear is that the issue of water is not about scarcity but about its careful use and about its equitable and distributed access. Water is the starting point for the removal of poverty in the country. It becomes the basis of food and livelihood security. Water management strategies will need to be carefully designed so that they lead to distributed wealth generation.

This will require reworking the paradigm of water management, so that it is designed to harvest, augment and use local water resources. It is also clear that local and distributed water infrastructure will require new forms of institutional management as established water bureaucracies will find it difficult to manage such vast and disparate systems. It is here that India’s learning from its traditional community-based water management systems will be useful.

Lately, there has been recognition of the need to invest in local and distributed water systems. But as the drought in Maharashtra shows, the programmes for building, restoring and rejuvenating ponds, tanks and other water structures remain deeply flawed. The largest investment in water management is through MGNREGA. Under this programme, over 5.5 million water conservation structures have been created in the past eight years. But thousands of these valuable assets remain incomplete or simply abandoned — which means drought relief is not being utilised to become a permanent relief against drought. Water insecurity grows as a result.

The third agenda is connected and critical. The treated effluent must not be put back into the same open drain, which carries the untreated waste of the majority. It must be reused and recycled, as far as possible locally so that costs of pumping are reduced. Today, we spend huge money in first pumping sewage long distances for treatment and then waste this effort by dumping the cleaned water in unclean drains. In other words, sewage must be reused in gardens, in lakes or in industry. STPs must be built only when they have been planned for reuse.

Consider this: today, sewage is treated at the Yamuna Vihar plant in east Delhi, and disposed off in the drain carrying untreated waste outside the plant. Then the same waste is treated further down in the Kondli treatment plant. Cleaned effluent is then dumped into a drain, which flows past the new colonies of Noida, which add more discharges. By the time it reaches the river, there is only sewage in the drain, no water.

Fourthly, we must treat sewage directly in the open drains that crisscross the city. So, instead of waiting for every open ‘storm water’ drain to go underground and disappear, the system will ensure all waste is treated and cleaned as it flows through the city. This would mean using innovative technologies for bioremediation (‘green’ plants) and oxidation to decompose and degrade sewage. Fifth, we should build STPs close to the banks of the river to treat what remains in the drains. This would mean using technologies which need less land to treat sewage. The design would be not to discharge anything but treated effluents in the Yamuna.

The ultimate tragedy is that what Delhi will do to the Yamuna and its downstream city of Mathura, Faridabad on its upstream will do to it. Never forget, we all live downstream.