Summer challenge brings tricky issue to fore
As summer sets in and urban India frets over the possibility of power outages, the real problem confronting the country is the availability of water, both for potable and irrigation purposes. This comes into focus every time the summer season arrives but little is done to address the issue during the rest of the year and to prepare for the eventuality. Figures relating to water availability are dismal: According to the Water Resources Information System of India, India ranks 132nd in terms of water availability and 122nd on the quality of water. In 2009, McKinsey had published a report on the subject of global water, which ominously predicted that this country would be able to meet just half its water requirements by 2030.
The report was prepared with the aid of an internal team, named the Water Resources Group. While Indian policymakers had taken note of the findings and acknowledged the scarcity, they seemed to be less enthusiastic about the dire forecast. Even the experts were sceptical, but not because they had figures to counter the McKinsey report; they simply didn't have enough material to do so. And this is perhaps one of the most significant lacunae the nation is faced with — the non-availability of definitive statistics to assess water availability and demand during peak and off-peak seasons. It must be kept in mind that this shortcoming is one of the primary reasons for disputes over river water-sharing among States to continue to rear its head every now and then.
The Union Government's recent proposal to create a single water disputes tribunal and fix deadlines for resolution, is a good idea, but it will suffer if the core issue of credible information on water availability at different points of the seasons is not there. While it is true that various estimates float around in the air, even hydrologists and other experts accept that there is much that needs to be done to get proper figures — if the statistics were there, there would have been no claims and counter-claims on water availability between States that are asked to share water and that which need water. The recent case of the Cauvery water dispute is a good example: Karnataka has one set of figures and Tamil Nadu, another. There are also the Krishna-Godavari water as well as the Mullaperiyar dam issues. The flow data on river waters such as the Indus, Ganga and the Brahmaputra are not in the public domain, but this could be due to the officials' reticence to share the information because these rivers flow out of the country as well.
Admittedly, the tangle is not a recent one; it's been there for decades, and one of the solutions presented during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime was the inter-linking of rivers to make optimum use of water across the country. Meanwhile, the Government — both at the Centre and in the States — must more aggressively tackle the issue through a few common sense measures, such as prevention of groundwater depletion (which has been happening through excessive exploitation), reduction and eventual halt in water bodies' pollution, incentivising farmers to adopt modern irrigation methods that consume less water and yet yield more crops, and afforestation. It's ironical that India, which has among the world's largest rivers, should be so water-stressed.