THE CASE OF DISAPPEARING WATER

Ancient civilization invariably grew on the banks of rivers may it be the Ganga and Yamuna in India, Tigris and Euphrates in West Asia or Yangtze and Yellow river in China. This is no coincidence because water is essential for life on planet earth not only for humans but for almost all species of plants and animals. It is this water which faces a global crisis today. The crisis is both of fresh water availability as well as portability. Is there enough water available and is it clean enough so that when we drink it we don’t get sick? This is a million dollar question today!

As all these years water was available in plenty, we have not attached a value to it, something which it always deserved. We have used less, wasted more and polluted most of our water sources. In much of the world, existing water supplies are insufficient to meet all of the urban, industrial, agricultural, and environmental demands.

The primary condition determining whether a region has a water surplus or experiences water scarcity is whether precipitation exceeds potential evaporation. In regions where potential evaporation exceeds precipitation, there is minimal runoff available to be intercepted and stored for later use, leading to a critical dependence on the timing and amount of rainfall.

The crisis is multi-dimensional:

1.       A crisis of management: are we managing the water resources efficiently, or, is there a government commitment to even deliver water to its people?

2.       A crisis of economics: does a country have the wealth to build and maintain the infrastructure to treat and distribute water?

3.       A crisis of understanding:  does the public and do our elected officials really understand what’s happening with water, nationally and globally? 

Groundwater depletion is a global phenomenon.  At least 2 billion people rely on groundwater as their primary water source, and most of their water comes from these aquifers that are at risk of running dry in the coming decades. As it is more than 1 billion people world over lack access to a reliable supply of potable freshwater and as days go by their numbers will be on the rise. As of today there is no law in as to how much ground water we can pump out and we are getting greedier and greedier!

For an agricultural country like India this is where most water is used and we need to urgently work on improved water conservation and efficiency. We can do so much more with so much less.  We need more efficient irrigation, better crop selection, more saline and drought tolerant crops, more greenhouse agriculture, and yes, better pricing. We need to incorporate technology in a very big way to conserve our most precious resource. Economic growth and environmental preservation are not mutually exclusive.  A green economy can be a very, very strong economy, and the water sector can be a big part of that. And remember, without water, we don’t even have an economy.

So what are the answers for our acute water shortage? The most basic is a change in our attitude. At first we really didn't understand how the water cycle worked so we did things like dump toxic materials right on the ground or directly into rivers; and a more recent phase in which we actually know better, but choose to do it anyway, because it’s easy and cheap. This cannot continue, we can’t continue with a bad habit because it is easy and cheap.

Then there are some technological advances and some lifestyle changes which we need to adopt:

1. Cloud seeding, practiced in China releases additional "nuclei" in the sky around which water condenses. These nuclei can be salts, calcium chloride, dry ice or silver iodide, which the Chinese use. Silver iodide is effective because its form is similar to ice crystals. We have to plan ahead with aircraft, locations, met help and chemicals needed so that we can execute it during the draught season over Marathwada, Telengana, Bundelkhand and other notoriously arid regions.

2. The parliament should start functioning for a change and pass a bill that demands water harvesting both for new and for existing homes, offices, factories, schools, colleges, everyone. Failure to comply should result in imprisonment and punitive fines. If politicians can’t do it, the Supreme Court should.

3. Changes in agriculture:

A. Order change of crop patterns and revert to low water demanding crops. Meet the vested interests objecting to genetically modified crops head on and evolve new paddy varieties that take lesser water to plant and harvest.

B. Shift from landscape flooding to drip irrigation method of watering crops. It is now scientifically proven that the latter is targeted or precise watering, and yields better crops as we have seen in sugarcane farms lately.

C. WaterSense Labeled Irrigation Controllers are weather-based, a type of "smart" irrigation control technology that uses local weather data to determine when and how much to water. Thus both water and money are saved.

D. Soil Moisture Sensors senses the amount of moisture the soil has and helps in tailoring the irrigation schedule accordingly.

4. Ensure strict "no leaking plumbing" compliance regulations for taps, pipes, joints and bends manufacturing and practice. ITIs is should train high quality plumbers to repair water tanks, pipes, taps. If water is taxed by Jal Nigam they should be held responsible for leaking taps and burst pipes in public places.

5. Water meters like electricity meters should be made compulsory in both urban and rural set ups and wastage at home or fields should be heavily penalized. Volume of water allowed per family should be counted according to the number of household members and per square feet land area of occupancy.

6. All religious ceremonies from birth to death should aim at keeping water clean and not polluting it. If Ganga is our mother then how can our religion not teach us to protect all rivers and water bodies? Religious organizations, temples, churches, gurdwaras and mosques should sermonize the devotees against wasting and polluting water.

7. Educate children at schools, parents and teachers on water preservation and management. Make it a subject in all schools and colleges. Children are best teachers of ignorant parents.

8. The Army has a lesser known Ecological Battalions which comprise of ex military veterans who plant and maintain, water 300,000 saplings a year with 98 percent survivability. Promote them and encourage them to have more such troops to wage a holy war against drought and deforestation.

9. Open free nurseries for people to plant millions of trees this Monsoon and maintain them.

10. Stop gifting useless items in all functions. Gift only saplings, endemic to that area and assist in afforestation. Offer free services on maintaining trees, planting the right kind at the right time.

11. As Corporate Social Responsibility, each private agency, public agency, school, college must plant trees and maintain them - for shade, fruit, air conditioning (trees cool the area), aesthetics. Public – private partnership in afforestation should be encouraged.

12. Get serious with rain water harvesting. The local municipality should not pass a house map if it does not have provision for the same. At a larger scale town planning should drastically change and cemented sidewalks should become narrow strips with greenery in majority of places.

Only after we've done these easier and cheaper things should we significantly ramp up our recycling and desalination efforts. I like the water train and the plans of cleaning rivers and inter-connecting them but these are costly tokenism at present.

The nexus of water and energy and food will define our quality of life in this century. It already is doing so. Ultimately, water will be the limiting factor in all respects, unless we learn to do more with a lot less, and to reuse and reuse more and more, and to manage our way to a sustainable water future. The case of disappearing water is not yet water tight!