The next water decade

Water can be recycled and re-used and thus we may not have water wars. The real challenge is ensuring the sustainability of the water-supply systems

I would dare to say that I do not believe that there will be water wars, or that cities will run out of water, or that we will not have any water to drink. I say this, knowing fully well that we have a dire and crippling crisis of water shortage in the country and it is getting worse.
 
I say this because water is a resource that can be replenished — it snows and rains each year. More importantly, other than in the case of agriculture, we don’t consume water. We use and discharge. Therefore, it can be treated and then re-used and recycled. So, this is one future we can change.

 
But this means getting the policy and practice of water management right. The good news is water literacy has grown. Till the late 1980s, water management was largely confined to the issue of irrigation projects — building dams and canals to store and supply water over long distances. But then came the big droughts of the late 1980s and it became clear that it was not enough to plan for augmenting water only through large projects. This was also when the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) published its report Dying Wisdom, which documented technologies for rainwater harvesting in ecological diverse regions of India. Our slogan for that period was, rain is decentralised, so is the demand for water. So, capture rain when and where it falls.

 

There was a paradigm shift in policy. In the droughts of the late 1990s, state governments launched massive programmes to capture rainwater by building ponds, digging tanks, and building check-dams on streams. By the mid-2000s, these efforts coalesced into the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act — investing labour in building rural water assets.
 
In the decade of the 2010s, the crisis of urban drought hit homes. But again, policy evolved as it learnt that augmenting water supply was only one part of the challenge — cities were increasingly dependent on long-distance sources; pumping and piping this water meant losses in distribution as well as the costs of electricity, and these, in turn, made the available water expensive and more inequitable. More importantly water supply was linked to pollution — the more the water supplied, the more is wastewater generation. The CSE’s report Excreta Matters detailed how this unaffordable paradigm of water-sewage management needed to be changed.

 
A few years later, our research revealed that the bulk of the urban residents are not even connected to the underground sewerage network, which is capital- and resource-intensive. Instead, they depend on on-site sewage “disposal” systems, where household toilets are connected to septic tanks or just holding tanks or even to open drains in the vicinity. In all this, new solutions emerged — if affordable water supply was critical, then cities needed to cut the length of their distribution pipelines, which meant increased focus on local water systems like ponds, tanks, and rainwater harvesting. Then, if cities needed to ensure affordable sanitation for all and affordable treatment of wastewater, then on-site systems could be re-engineered so that waste was collected from each household, transported, and treated.

 
So, this is where we are in our understanding of water management. We know what to do, the question is why we are not getting our act together.
 
This is where the real challenge remains — ensuring the sustainability of the water-supply systems. Today, the problem is that the natural-resource water asset created is not durable — the pond gets filled; the tank is encroached upon; and the watershed, so critical for the drainage to be secured, is destroyed. The problem lies in the fact that land and water bureaucracies are fractured — somebody owns the pond, another agency the drain, and yet another the catchment. Water security requires this to change. This means giving much greater control over the water structures to the local community — deepening democracy and devolution of powers — is then the answer to water management.

 
Then we need to do all we can to minimise our use of water, and become much more efficient with every drop. This means doing everything from investing in water-efficient irrigation, appliances, and changing diets so that the crops we eat are water-prudent.
 
So, this is the opportunity — the decade to put all we have learnt into practice and to turn around the water-story of India. It is possible. We just have to make it our single-biggest obsession. Water, remember, is about livelihood. It is about food and nutrition. It is about economic growth.
 
This decade is then our make or break — it is also because it is in this decade that we will see the revenge of nature as impacts of climate change grow. We need to scale up our work to invest in water systems and to make them durable, not just to withstand another rain but another deluge. We need to speed up our work, because climate change will make sure that we have more rain, but in fewer rainy days. This means doing much more to capture the rain, when and where it falls. It is about a new worship — this is a god that we cannot fail.  

 
The writer is at the Centre for Science and Environment. sunita@cseindia.org; Twitter: @sunitanar