Due to the lack of rainwater, lakes and
wetlands, most of India’s population is heavily dependent on groundwater:
around 25 percent of the groundwater extracted around the world is removed in
India
Duvvuri Subbarao, who
served as governor of the Reserve Bank of India between 2008 and 2013, once
spoke about the way India’s monsoon season could impact everything from his
emotional wellbeing to his career prospects.
In his role as governor
especially, he was helplessly dependent on the weather: “If it rains, the
monetary policy works. Everything is all right. If it doesn’t rain, there is
worry.”
Half of India’s annual
rainfall usually occurs in just 15 days. As the rainfall that takes place in
this critical window has a huge impact on the country’s economic prospects for
the year, this turbulent climate has often left India seesawing between deluge
and drought. Recently, though, the rains have become even more volatile.
“The climate pattern of
India is changing,” Samrat Basak, Director of the World Resource Institute
India’s Urban Water Programme, told World Finance. “We are having
extremely dry periods followed by a monsoon which is extremely heavy but
happens only in a very short space of time. So the number of rainy days is
reducing.”
This year, the
south-west monsoon arrived 10 days late, bringing 30 percent less rainfall than
average to the region. This delay, combined with poor rainfall last year, has
created drought-like conditions across nearly half of India. Chennai is one of
the worst-affected regions, experiencing its most severe drought in 70 years. The city’s four
main reservoirs have disappeared in as little as six months.
It’s easy to blame the
hardships facing India’s population on climate change, but this isn’t the whole
story: India’s water crisis is just as much a product of poor infrastructure
and chronically inadequate water management.
Not a drop to drink
In a climate where
rainfall occurs in such a short space of time, storing rainwater is crucial to
ensuring people don’t run short throughout the year. But India has struggled to
keep its water storage infrastructure properly maintained. Years of negligence
meant that, during the 2018 monsoon, dams in the now drought-stricken state of
Tamil Nadu were unable to retain all the water they caught.
What’s more, the
government has not preserved the water-catchment areas that occur naturally in
the environment. “With unprecedented and unmanaged urban expansion, we have not
thought about preserving the local resources like the lakes, wetland and so
forth,” Basak said. Chennai, for example, used to have abundant supplies of
surface water. These have since been paved over with parking lots and
skyscrapers.
Due to the lack of
rainwater, lakes and wetlands, most of India’s population is heavily dependent
on groundwater: around 25 percent of
the groundwater extracted around the world is removed in India. Much of this is
done illegally, which only adds to supply problems. In major cities like
Bangalore and New Delhi, so-called water mafias rule unchecked, extracting
water from kilometres away and selling it to locals at an extortionate premium.
The situation became so serious in Chennai this summer that even hospitals were
dependent on privately owned tankers to supply water for surgeries. The cost
was then added to patients’ medical bills.
In a tragically ironic
twist, many of these patients were hospitalised for waterborne diseases. In
August, researchers found that over
three quarters of the groundwater wells in the north-western state of Rajasthan
– the largest in India – were polluted with uranium, fluoride and nitrates,
making them unsafe to drink from. If groundwater depletion and contamination
continue at their current levels, 60 percent of India’s districts are likely to
see groundwater tables fall to critical levels over the next two decades.
In hot water
Surprisingly, the biggest consumer of India’s water is not its city-dwelling population – around 80 percent of India’s water is used in agriculture. This figure is so high partly because state governments in Western India provide free or heavily subsidised electricity to farmers in exchange for groundwater irrigation. “This encourages excessive groundwater pumping and has bankrupted electricity companies,” said Tushaar Shah, a senior fellow at the International Water Management Institute. “Everyone knows this, but no political leader has the courage to rationalise or reduce these subsidies since farmers are a massive vote bank.”
As a result of these incentives, 88 percent of farmers use flood irrigation methods instead of more efficient drip or sprinkler irrigation systems. Attempts to curb groundwater usage are politically complicated, but Philippe Cullet, a professor of international and environmental law at SOAS University of London, believes a change in legislation and regulation is critical to ensure water is used more efficiently on India’s farms.
This change, he told World Finance, must stem from a different way of thinking about water. “What we need is a complete reversal of perspective that takes us back to considering groundwater – and water generally – as a commons that is shared,” Cullet said. “The second thing is that we have to move away from a framework that considers water primarily from the point of view of ‘use’ when the first priority should be protection.”
There are a number of ways the government could promote this approach to water. Incentivising farmers to use drip irrigation or grow less water-intensive crops than sugarcane or rice could be a way forward. Another promising idea, launched by the International Water Management Institute, is to create solar irrigation cooperatives where farms can generate their own solar energy, providing an incentive to save energy and water. Shah is a pioneer of this concept. “The basic premise is that, while it is politically difficult to charge farmers for grid power supplied, it is rewarding to pay them for solar power they generate on their own farms. This will incentivise them to save energy and water to augment income from selling solar power,” he said.
Build, neglect, rebuild
Water scarcity is one of the biggest challenges facing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and he is keen to be seen tackling it head-on. In response to this year’s crisis, he sent more than 250 civil servants to aid the country’s drought-stricken areas and consolidated the various water ministries into a single entity, named the Ministry of Jal Shakti.
But water conservation experts are concerned that Modi’s administration has a flawed understanding of the issues at hand. As part of his response to the water crisis, Modi unveiled plans to provide piped water to all Indian homes by 2024. While there is no doubt this would have a transformative impact on India, providing clean water to as many as one billion citizens is an overambitious target. Currently, there is no indication as to where the water for these pipes would come from. “Water security plans need to be prioritised over plans for a piped water supply,” Basak said. “Just having pipes but no water won’t work.”
Unfortunately, rather than taking a fresh approach to the crisis, Modi is following in his predecessors’ footsteps. Instead of anticipating crises, India’s state governments have often acted only once the situation reaches breaking point. When this happens, they tend to fall back on expensive quick fixes that temporarily relieve pressure but fail to tackle the root of the problem. For example, when drought struck this year in Tamil Nadu, the state government approved a crash-engineering project to bring in water by rail for the following six months. As well as costing the government $94m, this short-term solution did nothing to improve India’s water sanitation and storage over time.
Even when the government does enact longer-term solutions, these often prove inadequate. Critics have accused the Indian Government of taking a ‘build, neglect, rebuild’ approach: new infrastructure is constructed, but the necessary measures aren’t put in place to ensure it is maintained. This can be seen in India’s traditional approach to water catchment. Currently, India captures only eight percent of its annual rainfall – one of the lowest figures in the world. Meanwhile, many local governments have mandated rainwater harvesting with little effect. After the drought of 2000, Chennai made it obligatory for buildings to have rainwater-harvesting systems installed, but these have since fallen into disrepair. The Rain Centre also found that, while on paper 99 percent of India’s buildings catch rainwater, in reality, this figure is closer to 40 percent, demonstrating a fundamental lack of governance.
With a climate that swings so drastically between drought and monsoon, it is perhaps unsurprising that the government has tended to think in the short term, focusing on fighting fires rather than implementing long-term solutions. But as climate change makes India’s rains even less predictable, the cost of this attitude only grows. The government must now prioritise proper governance and maintenance of its water infrastructure, or risk seeing its major cities dry up completely.
- Worldfinance
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