Before the taps run dry

With per capita water availability falling to a third in the last 50 years, and expected to fall by another third in the next 50 (by which period, India will officially be in the ‘absolute scarcity’ zone), the country has a serious problem on its hands.

For, while it is true that the ability to pump water from great depths and move it over huge distances has prevented all post-Mayan civilisation from dying on account of a water famine, the prohibitive costs of water could make the difference between survival and the lack of it for the country’s poor.

While the cost of pumping out water is around 85 paise per cubic metre at depths of 15 metres, this goes up to Rs 2.10 when the water table goes down to 35 metres. In parts of Punjab and Haryana the water table is going down by around half a metre a year.

So, large tracts of land could become uneconomical to cultivate in a few decades. In Haryana’s Kurukshetra, in just four years from now, the costs of pumping water will go up by Rs 7 crore a year due to this factor alone, making most crops unviable.

The over-exploitation of water has led to increased salinity of the soil, and already led to large areas, in some districts 5-10 per cent of the land, becoming uncultivable.

While there are only stray instances of industry being starved of water, like Coca-Cola being asked not to use groundwater in Kerala, it’s only a matter of time before industry begins looking at water availability (and costs) as a factor while locating manufacturing units.

The most urgent action area is agriculture, where over 80 per cent of water is used today. Free power and water, for instance, are the main reasons for excessive use of water, and growing salinity, in most parts of the country.

And policy has encouraged states to grow water-intensive crops even though the agro-climatic conditions don’t warrant them.

The Punjab government is now weaning away lakhs of acres of land from wheat to more suitable crops — ironically, the central government is not willing to subsidise this process, though it doesn’t mind subsidising the purchase of wheat grown in the state.

Curbing wastage is another serious issue. In areas like the capital city, more than half the water supplied gets lost along the way, and more than occasionally merges with sewage lines.

Fixing the system is not going to be easy. But a start has been made — in Tirupur (Tamil Nadu) an entirely new system is being put in place that is privately financed, and in areas of Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh water systems have been handed over to local bodies to run.

It helps to know, as an all-India survey by the Public Affairs Centre in Bangalore has found, that 40 per cent of Indians are ready to pay more for the water they use; this is not surprising , considering that the same survey reveals just a fifth of all users are happy with their water supply.