By Sarosh Bana*
Water, the life resource, appears to be draining out of India’s very being.
Recurring monsoon failures have delivered the country one of its worst droughts in 30 years, blighted the earth, scorched the crops, spelt ruin and death for the farmers who nourish the population, and threatened the nation’s water and food security.
The terror of drought has gripped 330 million people – a fourth of India’s population of 1.33 billion – across 13 of the 29 states of the country. Beset with failed crops and unpaid loans, a staggering 3,228 farmers committed suicide last year in just one state, Maharashtra, India’s frontline industrialised state that has Mumbai – India’s financial capital – as its capital city. The state-appointed Farmers’ Distress Management Task Force blames the deaths on the “collective failure of government officials”.
India is a seriously water-stressed nation. Though constituting 18 per cent of the global population of 7.4 billion, the country’s inhabitants live within just 2.6 per cent of the world’s land area and have access to only 4 per cent of the world’s fresh water resources, compelling the need for water resource development, conservation, and optimum use. Even in urban India, piped water supply caters to only 63 per cent of the population and sewerage networks to less than half, when municipal corporations and urban local bodies should be ensuring 100 per cent water and sewer coverage for raising living standards.
Pertinently, chairing a National Water Resources Council (NWRC) meeting in New Delhi a year ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had described water security as an issue on which the country would swim or sink together.
The nation has been heartened though by predictions by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) of an above average south-west monsoon, which normally begins in the first week of July. But it is widely acknowledged that the widespread drought that has prolonged for three long years could have been vastly mitigated by timely and judicious state investment in, and promotion of, water conservation and management, and soil health management, apart from the upgrade of urban water and sewerage supply, and mandating of sustainable norms like rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling in the construction industry. In most instances, government intervention was found to be too little, too late.
Unavailability, and poor management, of water have led to dismal sanitation facilities that pose a major environmental and social challenge to the country. Every week, some
42,000 deaths – 90 per cent of which are of children under five – occur from preventable diseases like diarrhoea and dysentery, caused by unsafe drinking water.
Indian governments have done precious little to conserve water for off-season use beyond building rigidly centralised capacities that store only relatively small quantities of the fickle rainfall. Even after constructing 4,525 large and small dams, the country has managed to create per capita storage of only 213 cubic metres, as against 6,103 cu m by Russia, 4,733 cu m by Australia, 1,964 cu m by the US, and 1,111 cu m by China.
India’s water crisis is thus as manmade as it is natural. Though its courts uphold the Right to Water and Sanitation as fundamental to the Right to Life as guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution, both Central and State governments have overlooked this right. They have jeopardised the farming community and driven many a distressed farmer to suicide by ransacking funds allocated to irrigation, flood control and drought proofing, which could have assuaged much of the water burdens of Indian society. The more workable community-level water conservation and watershed management practices too have been disregarded.
As a consequence, India today confronts calamitous food shortfalls and a shrinking agriculture base that will decimate yields even further as farmers abandon their barren farmlands and gravitate to the cities where they are reduced to a menial existence. Hundreds of thousands of distressed farmers and their families have migrated to towns and cities this year in search of jobs. While the foodgrain production and population almost doubled between 1979, when they were 131 million tonnes and 683 million people, till now, when they are 257 million tonnes and 1.33 billion, the net per capita per day availability of foodgrains has remained static over these years, at around 466 grams per day.
Water is the lifeline more in India than anywhere else, because its deficit can ravage agriculture that consumes 83 per cent of the national fresh water resources and which strives to feed a huge population, of whom over 15 per cent are undernourished. Despite its sheen of a buoyant economy, the country is predominantly agrarian, with half its population having farming as the principal source of work and income security, and where the farm sector has a 17.4 per cent share in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and contributes 10.2 per cent of total exports.
However, even as long back as in 2006, the then Planning Commission (now renamed NITI Aayog) had signalled a “crisis of stagnation in agriculture” and postulated a growth path of 4 per cent for this sector in a resolve to reform it. But growth hobbled to an overall 1.1 per cent last year. With agriculture’s significant bearing on GDP, it is clear that the lack of water can hinder social and economic growth in the country.
Though irrigation is critical to sustaining food security, it has been thwarted by brazen corruption. Though a staggering $52.7 billion has been expended on Major and Medium Irrigation (MMI) projects from the 1st Five Year Plan (1951-56) to the 11th Plan (2007-12) periods, only 64 million of 142 million hectares, or 45 per cent, of India’s net sown area has been irrigated to date. Time and cost overruns have been stupendous, especially on the major projects where the average cost overrun has been as high as 1,382 per cent. While 28 of the 151 major projects analysed in a government study overran their costs by over 1,000 per cent, nine had cost overruns exceeding 5,000 per cent.
The most dastardly predation on a sector as vital for the public as water supply has, however, been in the state of Maharashtra where two succeeding Water Resources ministers, Ajit Pawar, a powerful politician, and his partyman Sunil Tatkare, have been charged with swindling $10.5 billion from irrigation schemes. A case filed against them and their alleged nexus of civil contractors and officials before the Mumbai High Court by a voluntary organisation in 2012 has opened an inquiry against them by the Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Both the former ministers are charged with favouring select contractors by clearing major projects in haste and at grossly inflated costs, with Pawar, for instance, accused of clearing major projects worth $2.7 billion in only 3 months between June and August 2009.
Maharashtra’s then Economic Survey report had recorded the state’s irrigation potential as having grown a minuscule 0.1 per cent over the previous decade. Investigations revealed the costs of 38 of the irrigation projects to have risen fourfold, from $1 billion to $4 billion, in just 7 months in 2009, while costs had mounted by 6 to 33 times the original costs in 6 schemes and more than doubled in the case of 12 others. Costs of one major project, for instance, had been revised frequently from $56 million in 1982 to eventually $2 billion, almost 35 times the original. Similarly, the cost of another spiralled 7,000 per cent, from $4.7 million to $328 million. The resultant per hectare cost of irrigation was $14,729, far in excess of the limit of $2,252 to $3,754 mandated by the Central Water Commission.
This swindled public funding could otherwise have been deployed to benefit farmers and farmlands. Owing largely to such omissions across India, irrigation efficiency, measured as the actual land watered as percentage of capacity created, dropped from 84 per cent during the 7th Plan (1985-90) to 29 per cent during the 11th. The Economic Survey 2015-16 attributed this decline to “improper operation and maintenance, incomplete canals, violations in cropping pattern, and diversion of irrigated land for other purposes”.
Water-stressed India has been embroiled in several conflicts over sharing of rivers with China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh that it shares its borders with. Treaties have been signed to manage these conflicts and negotiations have taken place, yet disagreements erupt repeatedly or remain unaddressed. India is particularly alarmed by China’s grand plans to harness the waters of the Brahmaputra by constructing hydro-electric power projects on it as well as by diverting its flow. Beijing is going ahead despite protests by India, which fears repercussions for water flow, agriculture, ecology, and lives and livelihoods downstream.
Though India receives a bountiful precipitation, including snowfall, of 4,000 billion cu m, only about 1,123 billion cu m – 690 billion cu m of surface water and 433 billion cu m of groundwater – can be put to beneficial use because of topographical and other constraints. Precipitation is besides confined to less than four months a year and varies from less than 50 mm in the baking deserts of Rajasthan and the cold desert of Ladakh to over 11,500 mm at Cherrapunjee, in the north-east.
Traditional wisdom flowered in India as people dwelt close to nature and evolved practices that suited their requirements and that of their environment. There was thus as much practicality as harmony in these imaginative, community-level methods of water husbandry that emerged, including the diverse mechanisms to catch, store and use water according to the topography of the region, the climate, and the types of needs. Though today’s existence has drawn the people away from nature, the advantage lies in their position to combine simple scientific concepts with local knowledge.
Rather than any “back to nature” move, priorities should shift from medium and large dams to multiple micro-watershed development and in-situ rainwater harvesting projects. Drip irrigation has been shown to result in upto 65 per cent savings in water for horticulture crops and upto 47 per cent for vegetables, while sprinkler irrigation has similarly resulted in upto 40 per cent savings of irrigation water in the cultivation of groundnut and cotton. Gujarat state has been successful in developing farmer-friendly ways of delivering micro-irrigation subsidy and changing subsidy norms to foster more competition among suppliers. The states of Rajasthan and Bihar have successfully capitalised on the declining costs of solar panels to make irrigation more affordable to their fruit and crop farmers, with solar pumps leading to increased yields and cropping intensity, and allowing the sowing of paddy even in a drought year.
Recent times have seen a range of localised efforts where innovative experiments have transformed societies by fulfilling their requirements for the most basic, and vital, commodity that water is(see BOX 1).
The choice otherwise stands starkly before us: to swim together or sink together.
SAROSH BANA*
Executive Editor
Business India
52 Bakhtawar (main)
22 Narayan Dabholkar Road
Off Nepeansea Road
Mumbai 400 006
INDIA
E-mail: sarosh.bana@gmail.com
Cellphone: 0091-9821388386
BOX 1:
Small is workable
Since drought is man-made, it can be reversed. And instances of this abound in many a village across our land where local initiatives have transformed the lives of the inhabitants, and the environs they inhabit.
Anna Hazare rose to his heights as a social crusader on the basis of his perseverance and commitment that lifted his village of Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district out of despair and drudgery. On his annual visits to his village on leave from the army where he drove trucks, he found that the scant rainfall of 400 to 500 mm received by his village located in the rain-shadow ran off almost completely. The village could thus cultivate only one crop on about 350 acres out of a total 2,200 acres of land available and most families learned to survive on one square meal a day.
While some of them trudged 5 to 6 km each day in search of work in nearby villages, some others started brewing liquor to earn their livelihood. The village soon had 35 breweries and alcoholism became rampant. Hazare was inspired by late Vilasrao Salunkhe’s experiments in watershed development and water management started in some villages near Saswad in Pune district in 1972. He called on the then district Director of Agriculture, one Mr. Dikshit, to have him visit Ralegan Siddhi with a team of officials where they ascertained its topography to find it suitable for undertaking watershed development.
Hazare started supervising the work once it began, without any remuneration. He used the experience and knowledge that he gained on this sector in constructing many more water harvesting structures with people’s participation. He built 48 nulla bunds, five cement check dams and 16 Gabions – rock-filled gravity retaining walls – over the years, enabling all the rainwater to be conserved and the groundwater aquifers to be recharged. Ralegan Siddhi now harvests two crops across 1,500 acres of land. With rising prosperity, distress migration stopped long back and farmers now hire wage labourers from other villages for various farm operations. Alcohol, smoking and tobacco have been given up by the villagers for the last 13 years. And while earlier only 300 litres of milk were sold from the village every day, today the purchase by cooperative and private dairies of the 4,000 litres produced earns the village about Rs1.5 crore annually, apart from the income agriculture now provides to the unemployed youths of the village.
Hazare replicated Ralegan Siddhi’s success in watershed development in four other neighbouring villages and the movement has now spread to 85 additional villages of Maharashtra.
**
The 1,300 habitants of Hiware Bazar, also in Ahmednagar district, too started scripting their destiny differently since the ‘90s when Popatrao Pawar took over as the village sarpanch. Sensing the potential of rainwater harvesting and tree-plantation, Pawar realised he could solve both the problems of water scarcity and joblessness that his village faced by having the gram sabha start out with a van kshetra (local plantation) initiative that reimbursed farmers through the state’s employment guarantee scheme for planting saplings of lemon, custard apple and tamarind. Spurred by the success, the gram sabha then marshalled the villagers in building trenches and earthern bunds, which transformed over 1,000 hectares into a watershed of sorts. All initiatives were funded through various government schemes.
In 1994, the villagers chose to ban private borewells, a measure that helped conserve the groundwater table, and three years later, decided upon cultivation that shunned water-intensive crops like sugarcane and bananas. This enabled them to turn from rain-fed crops such as bajra and jowar to cash crops like onions and potatoes. At a time when drought-hit villages elsewhere find themselves in dire straits, Hiware Bazar boasts of an annual Rs1 crore yield of onions, a daily milk collection of 3,000 litres and two percolation tanks brimming with water. In fact, a delegation of farmers from the village toured 20 parched districts in the Marathwada region from mid-March on a mission to spread water literacy.
**
There are compelling reasons why 57-year-old Rajendra Singh is known as the Water Man of India. The winner of the 2015 Stockholm Water Prize “for his innovative water restoration efforts, improving water security in rural India, and for showing extraordinary courage and determination in his quest to improve the living conditions for those most in need” started out as an ayurveda practitioner. But as he wandered through his desert state of Rajasthan in the mid-‘80s to set up health clinics, he was told by villagers that their greatest need was not health care, but water. As wells dried up, crops wilted, and rivers and trees disappeared, many able-bodied villagers left for cities in search for work, leaving behind women, children and the elderly.
Singh set aside his quest for clinics and instead galvanised support from the villagers in building a series of johads, or traditional earthen dams. Within the next two decades, he and his co-workers in Tarun Bharat Sangh (India Youth Association), that he set up, had built 8,600 johads and other water-holding structures, re-introducing water to a thousand villages across the state. Greenery has been brought back to these areas and with it, wild birds and animals as well. Their efforts have also restored several rivers across Rajasthan. “This work of ours is a way to solve both floods and droughts globally and we, therefore, believe the impact of this work is on the local, national and international level, but above all at the village level,” said Singh in his award acceptance speech in Stockholm.
**
Villagers of Gauna, in Almora district, Duarab, in Nainital district, and some other villages in Uttarakhand, the Himalayan state now being ravaged by forest fires, have proved that rooftop rainwater harvesting is a reliable, economic and sound way of ensuring self-sufficiency and dignity.
In initiatives taken up since 2003 and part-funded by the NGO, Central Himalayan Environment Association (CHEA), these mountain-inhabitants have been following two approaches, that of harvesting rooftop rainwater and of harvesting surface runoff. The former method involves conducting rainwater from the roof through horizontal channels and vertical down-take pipes to a closed tank, often built of brick and plaster. This water, close to the house, is used for drinking and washing.
Harvesting surface runoff involves channelling the water that runs across the land into open tanks constructed in pits by the villagers. These stone tanks smoothened with clay and cow dung can last for decades, if desilted and maintained well. The water collected is used mainly for irrigation and for livestock. There are now 155 such rainwater harvesting tanks in Gauna and its neighbouring villages.
It is calculated that a 6 by 4 metre roof in an area of average rainfall of 1,500 mm can harvest as much as 36 cu m or 36,000 litres of water. With the ‘first flush’ of rains not collected but allowed instead to flow off the roof, thus cleaning it, about 29,000 litres can be harvested. Calculating an average daily usage of 40 litres per person in rural areas, this amount would be adequate for a resident couple for 363 days, or almost the entire year.
S.B.
BOX 2:
India’s watery history
The erstwhile Planning Commission questioned the penchant for building large dams – “temples of modern India”, as Nehru extolled them – that have been the mainstay of the irrigation effort in the country, but which are now recognised to be limited in providing economically viable additional large water storage.
India need look only to its past to draw on the viable and sustainable water conservation practices that had evolved in those times. A system to channel water to various settlements had been developed as far back as by the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300-1700 BC). Irrigation, or the managed application of water to crops, is time-tested in India, in many parts beginning with tilling of the land itself. It flourished during the Vedic period (1500-500 BC). The large numbers of tanks found in the Deccan have been in existence for ages. The Cauvery delta canals date back to the 2nd century and the Yamuna canals were constructed originally about the 4th century.
India’s first agrarian economy was established by the Nanda Dynasty of Magadha (424-321 BC), the first empire builders in the recorded history of India, with the building of an effective irrigation system through canals and inland waterways that gave rise to crop cultivation-oriented agriculture. The need for water has also shaped exquisite architecture and engineering in India, as with the ancient stepwells, or baori, that first appeared between the 2nd and 4th centuries and then grew across the country’s arid areas. There are also any number of parks and gardens established by various rulers that had fountains and water circulation systems for cooling the environs. Among the numerous artificial lakes that were created is the 36 sq km Jaisamand Lake, the largest artificial lake in Asia, built near Udaipur by Maharana Jai Singh in 1685. The splendid Keoladeo Ghana bird sanctuary in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, is a 29 sq km lake and wetland created by Maharaja Kishan Singh that has a system of small dams, dykes and sluice gates to control the water levels. The area was declared a national park in 1982 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.
By 1850, large numbers of irrigation works were conducting waters to almost 1.2 million hectares of land. These works were in the nature of small tanks in southern India, inundation canals in northern India and reconditioned canals like the Cauvery delta system in Madras and the Yamuna canals. About two million hectares were under well irrigation at that time, mostly in northern India. The country’s first major irrigation work was the Ganga Canal in Uttar Pradesh, opened in 1854 and followed by the Upper Bari Doab canal in the Punjab and the Godavari and Krishna delta systems in Madras. Then came the Sirhind canal in the Punjab, the Lower Ganga and Agra canals in Uttar Pradesh and the Mutha canal in Bombay. The total irrigated area nearly doubled, from 12 million to 23 million hectares, in the half century from 1896 to 1945.
The human need for proximity to water has spawned some of history’s greatest civilisations on ancient river valley systems, such as the Mesopotamian in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (3300-2000 BC), the Egyptian in the Nile valley (3200-1000 BC), the Chinese in the Yellow River valley (2000-200 BC), and the Harappan in the Indus valley. Almost all the world religions have gods, angels or spirits specifically designated for protecting our water sources, such as Varuna, the presiding deity in Hinduism over water, oceans and aquatic animals, and Indra, the Hindu god of rain and thunderstorms. The traditions of Indian hospitality – and culture – enjoin the hosts to offer drinking water to the guest upon his arrival. Such an offering is especially a precious tribute in the arid areas of the country where water is overtly cherished.
S.B.
