Sunita Narain: Reinventing the water paradigm

DOWN TO EARTH

People who understand water management will tell you that India is a traditional water economy and that it has to make the transition to a modern water economy.

In other words, the water sector has to become part of the formalised economy. As with any feel-right challenge, this is normally accepted to be true.

The point to understand is what this modern and formal water economy means to the rest of the world and what it will mean for us. In the industrialised world, industry and urban households use over 70 per cent of the water resources, while agriculture gets the remaining 30 per cent.

In traditional water economies like India, the reverse is true: agriculture consumes over 70 per cent and industry and urban areas the rest. The point is not where we are. The point is: where are we heading?

The fact is that urban areas and industrial hubs in our part of the world are now putting greater pressure on water resources. Cities across the country need more water.

They are powerful. Their elected masters work overtime to source water from far, and further, away. Delhi will get water from the Tehri dam, over 300 km away in the Himalayas; Hyderabad, from the Nagarjunasagar dam on the Krishna river 105 km away; Bangalore, from the Cauvery, about 100 km away.

Udaipur used to draw its water from the Jaisamand lake but its drying up, and so the city is desperately seeking a way out of this new thirst. Add to all this industrial growth.

Yes, the modern water economy is indeed at our doorstep.

But wait before rejoicing at the change. The fact also is that the "informal" water economy of rural India still exists. The economy has not transformed from being agriculture-dependent to a manufacture-service sector driven one.

The old needs water. The new demands more and more. Surely, the change will come "" carried on the shoulders of strife, even bloodshed: thousands of small and big mutinies, from Rajkot in Gujarat and Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan, in which farmers have died defending their first right over water.

There is no denying India's water sector needs to be reformed, indeed transformed, so that it can provide clean and adequate water to all. But there is no established model for our transformation.

We will have to leapfrog over the modern economic paradigm, to create our own "" hybrid "" version of the water future.

If we accept there is no model for us to emulate, then we are free to choose and reinvent our way based on need. Take irrigation, for instance.

We know that over 20 million individual wells and tubewells rule India's world of irrigation. Ground water is the main source of irrigation to agriculture, even as we have maximised our investments in creating surface water systems.

Here, distribution losses and inefficiencies push up the cost as compared to the informal world of the ground water agriculturists who have learnt to maximise the value of their water investment in making crops grow.

No policy plans for them, for nobody understands how to manage this army of water users.

The point is to innovate, by borrowing from the past. The challenge is to enlist this army into managing their resource better; they merely need to recharge the well to live off its annual water interest.

We can learn here from traditional systems of harvesting water: millions of disaggregated and diverse structures across the county. Built to also recharge the ground water "" holding the rain, like Earth's sponges, and enhancing subsurface flows.

Can we dare to rediscover the magic of the old systems of water augmentation and combine these with all the new answers "" water efficient crops, diversification of crops, pricing electricity to ward off over-extraction of water?

We can also innovate by borrowing from the present. The dogma that dictates against pricing of water and its efficient management will have to change.

We need to price water because rich cities and the industries of rich India need to pay for the water they use. We need to emulate the water-prudence of the modern world and even improve on it.

A city like Copenhagen, from using 200 litres per capita per day of water, today uses less than 110 litres per capita per day. Why should Indian cities first become wasteful, and then learn the science and art of efficiency? Today every city extracts water from cleaner upstream sources and discharges its wastewater downstream, people living here find the water they get is not fit for drinking.

Why should we not, as we begin to generate more and more waste, invent the most modern waste management system that reuses every drop of water discharged?

To be modern is not to "catch up and keep up". Being modern is being novel; it is a mindset that skips nimbly beyond. I believe all that stops us is our own lack of imagination. Water works must become water dreams.