With the onset of summer the queues for water have started getting longer and longer.
While people in urban India stand in line for hours waiting for state-owned water tankers to quench their thirst, women carrying pitchers and trekking long distances in search of water is becoming a usual sight once again.
The water table in India is fast depleting and water sources drying up in a gradual manner. Frequent fights for water in many parts of the country, leading to deaths, are common.
Several states such as Punjab and Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are already waging water wars in the corridors of power and in court.
India is yet to resolve water-related disputes with neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Unfortunately, the number of villages without water has risen from an estimated 232 at the time of independence in 1947 to about 9,000 in the country despite billions of rupees having been pumped thus far to provide drinking water to all villages.
The latest figures released by the ministry of rural development admit that in the desert state of Rajasthan alone there are at least 2,785 villages where less than 10 litres of water per person is available.
The situation will become even grimmer. While demand for water in the country is estimated to rise by about 40 per cent in the next two decades, the availability of water will dwindle by about 33 per cent.
Although on an average India gets only about 100 hours of rain every year, experts feel the problem has more to do with mismanagement of whatever water is available than lack of water. Nearly 1,179 billion cubic metres of drinking water is either wasted or drains out into the sea each year, which if managed properly can quench the thirst of millions across the country.
Policy makers in the country were aware of this gigantic problem and came up with the idea of inter-linking rivers to ensure adequate supply of water across the country soon after independence. The idea, however, was dropped due to lack of resources.
It needed the intervention of the Supreme Court to order inter-linking major rivers of the country in October 2002. The then National Democratic Alliance government responded positively to the court order by setting up the National Water Development Authority.
Experts say that besides inter-linking major rivers that will enable excess water to be diverted to dry areas rather than allowing water to flow into the sea, rain water harvesting holds the solution to the problem.
Water harvesting essentially means capturing rain water, storing and recharging. Several states such as Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have already made rainwater harvesting mandatory in new housing complexes.
The federal Ministry of Urban Affairs and Poverty Alleviation has also pitched in by making rainwater harvesting mandatory in all new buildings with a roof area of more than 100 square metres and in all plots with an area of more than 1,000 square metres, while the CGWA has banned drilling of tubewells in notified areas.
Several upmarket satellites town like Gurgaon and Noida around Delhi continue to depend on underground water to meet their demands and the colony managements are yet to put in place a system to recharge underground water by harvesting rainwater.
STATISTICS
- Water level in the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President's House) that was 5 metres below ground level in 1960 has gone down to about 15 metres below ground level.
- The water table in fast upcoming Dwarka township in south-west Delhi has gone down from 2 metres in 1960 to 10 metres.
- In posh Vasant Vihar of south Delhi, water level has gone down from 5 metres in 1960 to 30 metres below ground level.
- Satellite pictures show that in many areas of south India, there is no water to tap even 800 metres below the ground level.
- Out of 1,422,664 villages nearly 90,000 have no regular sources of water.
- In 95 per cent of villages the per capita water available is just about 40 litres a day, which is inadequate considering most of it is used for irrigation.
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