WATER, WATER

More than a century after it was outlined, the much-maligned Malthusian hypothesis of population outgrowing resources has finally caught up with India on the eve of the arrival of its billionth citizen. As it usually happens at such times all eyes are on the government, which is being blamed for not acting in time but is now expected to pull a rabbit out of its hat — supply water, fodder, grain and work to around a quarter of the country’s population over the next few months, comments Baljit Singh

DROUGHT 2000 is the flavour of this summer, with reports of water shortages coming in from various parts of the country, including Orissa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Though there may be an element of media overkill involved, this does not detract from the fact that there is a serious water crisis at hand. And with the monsoon still more than a month away from even the east coast states, and an intense heat wave sweeping the country, the problem is likely to grow much worse before it gets any better.

To add a touch of morbidity to human misery the meteorological office has predicted that this year’s monsoon will be below normal, hinting that the drought could be worse than the killer drought of 1987, the second worst of the century. As if that were not enough, experts believe the problem is now structural in nature, that groundwater aquifers are so severely depleted that annual droughts are here to stay.

More than a century after he outlined it, the much-maligned Malthusian hypothesis of population outgrowing resources has finally caught up with India on the eve of the arrival of its billionth citizen. As usually happens at such times all eyes are on the government, which is both being blamed for not acting in time and is now expected to pull a rabbit out of its hat — supply, water, fodder, grain and work to around a quarter of the country’s population over the next few months.

Essentially, there are three main aspects to fresh water — rain water reservoirs, river and canal water and sub-surface or ground water. The government already dominates the first two resources while the ownership of groundwater has thus far been vested with the owner of the land. But whenever there is a crisis, the government, not quite unexpectedly, blames the one source independent of it for the problem, and seeks control over it.

The first attempts at a national water policy were made by the Rajiv Gandhi government immediately after the drought of 1987. However, so extreme and plainly discriminatory were its core proposals of harsh curbs on extraction of ground water (ban on new private tube-wells) and tough legislation on canal water that even the states cried foul. The proposal lapsed.

Subsequent efforts were bogged down by the prickly nature of the subject, lack of data or consensus among the five union ministries that span water and the fact that irrigation and flood control were state subjects. Another understated obstacle was the realisation that a national water policy — a one cut suits all or Delhi and DC know best — was unsuited to a country as large and diverse as India. In a land where features change from kilometre to kilometre, a uniform water extraction and use policy is seldom practicable even for an entire block, leave alone a state or the country.

Thus in Haryana, irrigation has had diametrically opposite effects in different parts of the state. Most southern districts and parts of central Haryana with light, loamy soils which have a higher capacity for water retention have witnessed rising water tables, poor drainage, high soil salinity and water-logging, while most northern districts with heavier soils have had the obverse problem of falling water tables and soil-compacting. Punjab’s experience has been similar. The previously arid western canal zone is now devastated by water-logging, while heavier soils with higher run-off are plagued by problems of paucity. Then there are local variations depending on soil, crops sown and the mode of irrigation.

At least one facet of the water policy debate has become clear in the past decade. Satellite mapping now permits precise, politically neutral data on surface and underground water resources, vegetation and soil — the bedrock of any water policy. There is a growing realisation that any realistic water policy must cover all three water resources, for rain and river water are integral to any groundwater recharge and management policy.

Devising policy apart, there is also the problem of implementation. For even should the bureaucracy be able to come up with intelligent micro-strategies of water-management, it is badly placed to implement them, as the states experiments with irrigation have proved. Even presuming the state has the resources to do so.

Unfortunately, decades of politicisation of rural bodies and the central role of irrigation in rural empowerment means that the logical substitute for a distant government, local bodies, are not much better placed to frame water extraction and management policy or act as impartial monitors — not when the sarpanch’s major USP is his three ‘motors’.

Nor are ‘outsider’ NGOs a panacea given the diversity and scale of the problem — according to experts, irrigated land generally turns saline over a 50-year period. Given that, the Green Revolution started circa 1968, much of rural Punjab has a due date in the next two decades. And the problem is spreading. In 1972, a central study put the number of villages with a drinking water scarcity at 150, 000. In 1982, when aggressive intervention had provided water to 94,000 of these, the number stood at 231,000. Today, with population growing apace and the forest cover falling, that number has climbed to a point where over half of all villages have either no source or an unreliable source of water.

Given this and the fact that the government can’t be relied upon for manning a viable water policy while the community has a vested interest in advancing the status quo, what is the way out? One solution may be in splitting the problem into manageable parts.

Thus something so transparently utilitarian as harvesting water for drinking purposes is better left to the community, biases and all, rather than a distant government. Their status notwithstanding, the rural rich cannot drink more water than the poor, yet need drinking water as greatly and thus have an interest in its preservation. Techniques for water harvesting will, of course, vary from region to region, and may need to be revived and refined to prevent evaporation and pollution of source. At which point local bodies and NGOs can step in as facilitators.

In regions where traditional techniques are no longer viable or need to be supplemented, mostly in arid zones, solar and, in coastal regions, wind energy are relatively inexpensive and sustainable sources of groundwater extraction and even for desalination of water for drinking purposes.

As for groundwater extraction for irrigation, it must be realised at the outset that sweeping curbs on tube-wells will throw the farm sector into chaos, even derail the food programme. For make no mistake, problems and all, the Green Revolution hinges not on magic seeds or fancy labs but on irrigation. So, instead of government diktat, pragmatic principles of involving the tube-well owner in water harvesting need to be evolved. And its not hard to convince a farmer who’s had to deepen his well every two years, usually at considerable cost, of the merit of channelling the rainwater run-off from his fields back into his well. Especially in this region where fields are usually level and pumps are housed in wells anyway to facilitate extraction.

Tube-well owners can also be made to contribute in cash and kind to de-silting of village ponds, roof water harvesting and for check dams on seasonal rivulets to recharge local aquifers, resources that they as a group depend on. In regions where the problem is of water-logging, the same funds can be used to support drainage, where possible even use the water for recharging depleted aquifers elsewhere.

Finally big brother’s territory — canals and rivers. While there is no gainsaying that large dams, and the canals they generate, charge the aquifers of the landscape they flow through, they do this at the expense of drying aquifers along their original course, not to mention trapping precious silt, which ends up as expensive waste at the bottom of dams. Canals also obstruct natural waterways and, where used to irrigate light soils typical of most arid regions, soon cause new problems through water logging and soil salinity.

Thus any major irrigation project needs to be premised on this harsh cost-benefit analysis reality rather than playing state A off against state B for political advantage, and in the process locking states of the union in bitter water disputes.

Does all this — honest farmers, good neighbours, good government — sound too utopian. Actually Thomas Robert Malthus also sketched out a less utopian alternative. Its called famine, perdition and worsening wars over water.