Crisis alert: Careless water management poses India an existential threat

Mint

3 days ago

The warnings are dire. India is running dry. There is a looming water crisis—a threat to India's future. Alarm bells around a water shortage have become increasingly shrill and loud over the past few decades. Experts in India have long lamented the poor state of water storage capacities in the country, the extent of pollution in our rivers, the annual cycles of drought and floods, the over-exploitation of ground water and the provision of water as a free good—often exacerbated by free electricity for agricultural groundwater-pumps given to farmers as an election sop.
India provides drinking water access to nearly 95% of its population, albeit at a fairly basic level. The World Bank's broadened definition of 'access' includes people using safely managed water services as well as those using basic water services, which is drinking water from an improved source (like a piped-in tap, borehole or tube-well, protected dug well, protected spring and packaged/delivered water), provided the collection time is not more than 30 minutes for a round trip.
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The 79th round of the National Sample Survey 2022-23 brings out a paradoxical reality: 48% of rural India continues to be dependent on hand pumps or tube-wells for water, while nearly 15% of urban India is dependent on bottled drinking water.
Both ends of the spectrum have their health and related problems, the first due to unacceptably high levels of physical, chemical and/or biological contamination reported from various geographies across India, and the other due to over-purification leading to the demineralization of water, presence of cancer-causing substances and plastic pollution at a very large scale.
About 68% of urban India is served with piped water that undergoes water treatment with varying levels of effectiveness. The need for water treatment is becoming increasingly more intense and costly due to uncontrolled industrial effluent discharge, untreated or partially treated household sewage and release, and the disposal of hot water from thermal plants.
A case in point: the Yamuna river gets so polluted by the time it reaches Agra in Uttar Pradesh that the Central Pollution Control Board does not consider it suitable as a raw water source for treatment. Additionally, the wastewater from water treatment plants is often so bad that it needs treatment before discharge. With nearly 7-8% of electricity consumption estimated to be going into meeting the clean-water demand of 68% of India's urban population, the climate impact of such supply is also very high, clearly.
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Worsening this poor management, water leakages from India's water pipelines are estimated to be in the range of nearly 40%. Poor quality and ageing water pipeline infrastructure also allow contaminants to seep into treated water supply, including sewage from equally or more leaky pipelines following the same right of way.
Also challenging is the growing shortage of water, with water demand in 2030 expected to be twice its available supply. India's natural endowment, at about 4% of the world's fresh water resources, has always been meagre, given that the country is home to 18% of the world's population, but even this is now under threat from glacier melting.
Himalayan glaciers are a major source of freshwater (and related services) for nearly 60% of India's population. However, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a multilateral organization focused on the Himalayas, these glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate: 65% faster in 2011–2020 than in the previous decade and faster than the global average too.
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It is projected that under global warming scenarios of 1.5–2° Celsius above the pre-industrial level, glacier volume in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region may reduce by 30–50% by 2100. If global warming exceeds 2° Celsius, which cannot be ruled out, these glaciers may shrink to just 20–45% of their 2020 volume. But, before the depletion of Himalayan glaciers, the rapid melting is likely to cause severe flood- related disasters and threaten infrastructure designed for a very different flow rate in rivers that originate in this mountain range.
On the somewhat positive side, summer monsoon rainfall in India is likely to get much stronger, although it will be increasingly erratic. For every 1° Celsius of global warming, monsoon rainfall is likely to increase by about 5%, according to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
This could help ease India's water stress to some extent, provided we do a better job of managing our water resources. The erratic nature of the monsoon, however, will surely challenge the farm sector enormously, as 60% of Indian agriculture continues to remain rain-dependent and needs some predictability of rainfall patterns.
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Clearly, a lot needs to—and can—be done right away to improve the management of water in India, despite the complexity of the challenge. India has spent several decades and thousands of crores of rupees ineffectively on trying to make end-of-pipe technologies at least reduce pollution in the country's two major religiously significant rivers, the Ganga and Yamuna.
We have also explored ambitious but probably impractical projects like the linking of Indian rivers. These lessons should be borne in mind before embarking on a newly proposed initiative to divert Ganga waters to increase flows in the Yamuna and flush out its pollution further downstream; all consequential impacts must be assessed and evaluated (also from an equity perspective).
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Solutions for better water management are well known, although they can be enhanced with the deployment of state-of-the-art technologies. India needs a mission-driven systemic approach, free of politicization, towards securing and managing its water resources. The country must harness the increasingly inevitable impact of climate change— think of water from melting Himalayan glaciers—for greater water security. It can be done.
The author is an independent expert on climate change and clean energy.