India's "Running on Empty"

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 7/12/2007 12:43:00 AM
Global Envision has an interesting new story on a particular challenge facing India in its path to progress: water, or more accurately, the lack of it. Aside from squabbles with China over water, it has to deal with a dilapidated infrastructure for delivering water and other challenges brought on by a longtime neglect of its water infrastructure:
New Delhi's water woes are typical of many parts of India. Most low- and middle-income neighborhoods in large metropolitan cities face similar shortages. But those worst hit by the shortage are the poor. The majority of slum areas in cities like Mumbai (Bombay) have no tap water; period. The water crisis, decades in the making, is getting worse just as India's economy is making impressive strides. A soaring population, rapid urbanization, and a thirsty farm belt are all putting enormous strains on India's anemic water infrastructure. The resulting water shortage could severely impact India's agricultural sector and thus hamper the country's ability to feed its billion-plus population and also cause internal and transborder conflicts.

Measured by conventional indicators, water stress, which occurs when the demand for water exceeds the available amount during a certain period or when poor quality restricts its use, is increasing rapidly, especially in developing countries like India and China. According to the 2006 Human Development Report (New York: UNDP), approximately 700 million people in 43 countries live below the water-stress threshold of 1,700 cubic meters per person. By 2025, that figure will reach 3 billion, as water stress intensifies in China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa...

Uneven access to water, wastage, and widespread corruption in collecting water tariffs are compounding the waterscarcity problem, and no city exemplifies this better than New Delhi. According to a 2006 United Nations Development Program paper, New Delhi's water demand is estimated at 3,600 million liters of water per day (and rising); the highest of any city in the country. The local public-water utility, Delhi Jal Board, supplies approximately 3040 million liters per day, out of which only about 1,730 million liters reach consumers, because of massive distribution losses resulting, for example, from leaks from old pipes.

Access and use of water varies widely. The Delhi Development Report 2006 (Delhi government [New York: Oxford University Press]), published with the help of the UNDP, points out that almost 27 percent of homes in the city receive tap water for less than three hours a day, and 55 percent of households receive water for only three to six hours a day. In addition, almost 18 per cent of households receive less than 100 liters per capita daily (lpcd), while 31 percent of households get over 200 lpcd. Also, of the nearly 690,000 households living in slum areas, 16 percent receive less than 25 lpcd and another 71 percent receive between 25 and 50 lpcd. Not surprisingly, reliable access to tap water is a major sales pitch for the posh condominium and apartment buildings that are sprouting up in the suburbs of almost every big city. To guarantee 24-hour running water, contractors are digging wells deep underground. Not surprisingly, the water table in some parts of Delhi, for example, have dropped by as much as 30 meters, compared to levels in 1960, and is not getting adequately replenished. Experts fear that this supply will soon get exhausted. What happens after that is anyone's guess.

India's water scarcity is made worse by high levels of pollution in water bodies in all major cities. According to We for Yamuna, an environmental group based in New Delhi, their city dumps 950 million gallons of sewage into the Yamuna river, which flows through the bustling metropolis. Out of this, only 5 percent is treated properly before it gets dumped into the Yamuna, which supplies 75 percent of Delhi's drinking water. Sewage disposals from New Delhi neighborhoods, industrial effluents, chemicals from farm runoffs, and arsenic and fluoride contamination have made the Yamuna water extremely poisonous for both consumption and irrigation, and experts agree that the river is clinically dead. Millions have been spent on "cleanup efforts," but no one knows where the money went...

India faces a serious water crisis, which, if it remains unattended, has the potential to threaten India's economic growth and create domestic instability and tension among its neighbors. The lack of water in the agricultural states has the potential to accelerate the demographic problem by hastening the migration of farm workers to urban centers, thus putting enormous pressure on city infrastructure. India's ballooning population, coupled with rapid industrialization, means that meeting the rising water demands will become an increasingly difficult task unless urgent steps are taken right away. Everyone agrees that building extensive canals by itself won't solve India's water woes. The first step, experts suggest, should be a massive public education scheme to teach people, especially wealthy farmers, the need for water conservation and thus reduce the per capita water consumption. On the policy front, India will have to take urgent steps to improve the management of water utilities and reduce wastage. In addition, technological innovation through further advances in desalinization, water recycling, deeper drilling, and water transportation techniques has to be stepped up. But these steps must be accompanied by traditional water-conservation means such as constructing water percolators to refill aquifers, switching to crops that need less irrigation water, reforesting hillsides, and restoring topsoil to increase the absorption of rainfall. Together, these steps will go a long way to alleviate the situation.