December 30, 2019
A riveting character in the book called Angel
Chennai’s water crisis is front-page news; friends’ FB posts describe in grim
detail what is it is like to go without enough water day after day. instant electric water heater
tap Suppliers All the four reservoirs that supply Chennai its water are
running dry this summer because of scant rainfall in 2018. (Representional
Image) In his 2015 sci-fi thriller, The Water Knife, set in Phoenix, Arizona,
sometime in the near, dystopian future, novelist Paolo Bacigalupi talks about
places that are catastrophically water-starved, where suburbs have morphed into
ghost towns and where people are fleeing drought.
A riveting character in the
book called Angel is a "water knifeâ€, tasked to infiltrate and sabotage the
water supplies of competing states.I read excerpts of the book. It is racy,
graphic, and terrifying, and not in the realm of the implausible anymore.We are
living in water-stressed times; there are water-haves and a rising tide of water
have-nots. A friend who lives in Gurgaon recently tweeted that in upscale
condominiums in his city, there is free, unmetered, unlimited water for
residents and one can actually leave a tap running and go off for a week with no
charge and minimal consequences.Meanwhile, the residents of Chennai, India’s
sixth largest city, are living through horrific times, though it rained a little
earlier this week. Chennai has basically almost run out of water.
The city is
almost entirely dependent on the northeast monsoon, which starts in October.
Last year, it received very little rainfall.Even thousands of kilometres away
from Chennai, it is hard to insulate oneself against its troubles. All the four
reservoirs that supply Chennai its water are running dry this summer because of
scant rainfall in 2018. Chennai’s water crisis is front-page news; friends’
Facebook posts describe in grim detail what is it is like to go without enough
water day after day. There are images and video clips of long queues of people
around water tankers in searing heat; there have been reports of scuffles over
water. Many of Chennai’s hotels are rationing water for guests, and some private
companies have reportedly asked their staff to work from home.This week, the
state government has announced that a train will bring water to Chennai from
Jolarpettai in Vellore district, more than 200 km, away at a huge cost. The
Opposition DMK leadership is against the idea. In short, more troubles lie
ahead.Chennai makes the headlines because it is a metropolitan city. But it is
by no means the only place suffering acute water stress. Nearly half the country
is grappling with drought-like conditions, and this has been particularly bad
this year in western and southern India because of the below-average
rainfall.The question that interests me most about Chennai is how did it get to
this sorry state? Tamil Nadu was perhaps the first state in India to make
rainwater harvesting (RWH) mandatory for all buildings in 2003. Chennai has more
than eight lakh RWH structures. So why are so many people in that city facing
such an acute water shortage?There hangs a tale which explains just about every
mess that you see in urban India. A building with a rainwater harvesting system
on paper does not mean it actually works. A bit like the existence of a toilet
does not mean it is used.It will not work if it is not maintained properly.
Friends in Chennai tell me there is huge apathy among a lot of people towards
maintaining these structures. The water crisis had never been this acute. Many
of the rainwater harvesting structures in Chennai are also inefficient.If
Chennai and so many other cities are facing a water crisis today, one big reason
is that neither policymakers nor many people living in these places truly
realise the horrors of running out of water. If it starts raining anytime soon,
people will forget their recent sufferings. That’s why the inefficiencies in the
water sector remain, and rainwater storage and reuse and treatment of greywater
are not given the importance that they deserve.Here is one scandalous statistic
about water losses. Lack of proper maintenance of infrastructure causes losses
of almost 40 per cent of piped water in urban India.Chennai is currently in the
news, but the big picture regarding water in India is grim. The Niti Aayog, the
government’s think tank, acknowledges that nearly 600 million people in the
country face high-to extreme water stress. There is a deepening national
groundwater crisis, with 54 per cent of wells declining in level due to
unsustainable withdrawals for irrigation.The Narendra Modi government’s new Jal
Shakti (water) ministry has announced a grand plan to provide piped water
connections to every household in India by 2024.But the key question remains —
what will happen if there is no water to give?What will it take to realise that
time is running out and we have to also wake up to simple ideas about conserving
water. India captures only eight per cent of its annual rainfall. This is among
the lowest in the world. Our ancestors used to capture far more. But those
traditional methods have been neglected to the point where most are in ruins. We
also don’t use our wastewater well.There is much talk about security. It is time
to realise that water is a security issue. Millions of Indians are not
water-secure. Fights are breaking out over water. In Madhya Pradesh, the state
government has reportedly asked the police in all its 52 districts to guard
water sources.An existential threat hovers over many prosperous pockets of
India. A drought is a huge part of the problem. The situation is getting
steadily worse with unregulated extraction of groundwater, which is depleting
underground aquifers. Take Bengaluru. Whoever has money drills a borewell to tap
groundwater in the newer suburban areas where tech companies are clustered in
the city.A few years ago, I remember meeting a young hip technocrat who told me
that "I fear the day when I will have soap all over my face and there is not a
drop of water coming out of the tapâ€.But I also saw a fascinating initiative
called the Participatory Aquifer Mapping Project, which sought to involve
Bengaluru’s residents in sharing information about borewells in their
communities so that the city’s policymakers could learn what was happening
underground and begin to craft a suitable response.Today, in this country,
demand for water vastly outstrips supply; the situation can deteriorate sharply
unless we realise that this is an emergency and we must treat water as a
precious resource and everyone must work towards conserving it.The future could
well resemble dystopian fiction.
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02:28 AM
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