India is a blessed country in so many ways as far as water endowment is concerned. Our monsoons, rivers, aquifers, the Himalayas, the rich traditional techniques and management systems, to name a few. But the impacts of accumulated mismanagement over the last several decades are now coming out in the form of crisis in multiple ways.

Unfortunately, the government treats water management as its exclusive monopoly. To call for a people’s movement for water conservation in such a situation is disingenuous, to say the least. Particularly when the water resources establishment is doing every thing against the sage advice. For example, the Ken Betwa River Link project, the top priority river link project of the government, involves cutting down of 46 lakh trees from drought prone Bundelkhand and facilitate export of water to outside Bundelkhand areas. Imagine how much water the 46 lakh trees can harvest?

Or consider this another recent instance: Between April 25 and June 12, 2019, the three dams Bhakra, Pong and Ranjit Sagar, on Sutlej, Beas and Ravi respectively, released over 2 Billion Cubic Meters of Water in non-agricultural season, most of which flowed away to Pakistan. This was of course against the public statements of Prime Minister and earlier Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari, both of whom said not a drop of water will flow from Pakistan out of India’s share of Indus water. Leaving that aside, it is well known that Punjab and Haryana suffer massive groundwater depletions every year. Why was this water not used to recharge groundwater?

So what are some of the key dimensions of India’s water management crisis?

The Groundwater Lifeline 

Most of the water that India uses today comes from over 30 million wells and tubewells. Irrigation is India’s biggest user of water and over two thirds of irrigated area gets water from groundwater. 85% of rural domestic supply, over 55% of Urban and Industrial water supply comes from groundwater. The graph of % of water in each sub sector coming from groundwater has been going up for at least four decades. In fact, some estimates show that over 90% of additional water India used in last four decades have come from groundwater. It sounds like an unmitigable blessing. That’s not how blessings work, unfortunately.

Central Ground Water Board’s data shows that in about 70% of areas, groundwater is depleting and at many places it has exhausted or is on verge of exhaustion. The quality is deteriorating. Warnings have been available for decades now, but the government has done little to address the emerging crisis.

In fact, India’s water resources establishment, led by the big dam ideologues at Central Water Commission have ensured that the government does not even acknowledge that groundwater is India’s water lifeline. That is the first change required. The acknowledgement of that reality in National Water Policy would mean that focus of India’s water resources policy, plans and programs is attainment of sustenance of that water lifeline.

This would need action on four fronts. Firstly, understand as to from where the groundwater recharge happens. And provide protection to groundwater recharge mechanisms like the forests, floodplains, rivers, wetlands, local water bodies. Secondly enhance recharge from these mechanisms where possible. Thirdly create more recharge mechanisms, including reverse borewells. And Fourthly and most importantly, regulate groundwater use.

That regulation has to happen, considering the resource location and its contours. Groundwater occurs in Aquifers. Aquifers in most places are local, and groundwater use is also local. So regulation has to start at local level. So create legal, institutional and financial enabling situation to make such regulation possible. For cities and industries, this may include pricing mechanisms, with higher price for higher users and an element of cross subsidization for the poorer people.

Unfortunately, no effective action has been taken on this groundwater regulation front. The Central Ground Water Authority, set up under the Supreme Court orders in 1996-97, is acting like a licensing body rather than regulating body. Regulation does not mean you pay and exploit. It would also mean restricting and stopping wasteful and unjustified water use activities in critical and over exploited areas. Regulation should ensure that water withdrawal is within limits of annual recharge.

The degraded Catchments 

While Chennai and Tamil Nadu water scarcity grabbed headlines this summer, few remembered that less than a year back, in July 2018 to be precise, all the dams in Cauvery, the most important river basin of Tamil Nadu, were so full that water started getting released to the flooded downstream rivers. The Mullaperiyar provided another bounty to Tamil Nadu in Aug 2018. When Cauvery dams were over flowing around July 24, 2018, the South West Monsoon rainfall in Cauvery basin was actually below normal. What does this phenomena of overflowing dams less than halfway through the monsoon, and when rainfall is below normal, followed by unprecedented water crisis less than a year later signify? What is described here is equally relevant for most river basins of India.

This phenomenon essentially signifies that our catchments have decreasing capacity to capture, store and recharge rain water. So the rainfall in the catchments is quickly ending up in the rivers and reservoirs, leading to floods in monsoon, but dried rivers and water scarcity soon thereafter.

Deforestation, destruction of wetlands and other water bodies, reducing capacity of the soils to hold moisture are all contributing to this degrading catchments. The way to reverse this crisis is to reverse all this.

Urban Water Policy Vacuum

The Urban Water footprint is going up in multiple ways, but the Urban Water Sector is operating in complete policy vacuum. There is no policy or guidelines or regulation to guide Urban Water sector. Under the circumstances, the cities won’t harvest rain, won’t recharge groundwater, won’t reduced transmission and distribution losses, won’t adopt other demand side measures, won’t protect its water bodies, won’t treat its sewage and recycle it. In stead, they would demand, lazy, easy solutions like more big dams, more river linking projects or massive desalinization projects. The government has smart city programme, but none for a water smart city! Can there be a smart city without it being water smart?
To correct this situation, as a first step India urgently needs a National Urban Water Policy that will define a water smart city and also provide best practice guidelines for various aspects of Urban Water Sector.

Outdated Water Institutions

India’s water institutions were established soon after independence or some even before independence. They have outdated mindset and institutional architecture. This needs urgent overhaul.

The clearest problem with India’s water institutions is symbolized by the fact that we do not even have reliable water information in India. This is because Central Water Commission, which heads India’s water institutions is involved in so many functions that are in conflict with each other. We need an independent institution, on the lines of USGS, whose main mandate will be to gather all the key water information on daily basis and promptly put it in public domain. But such an institute will have no role in water resources development or management. Similarly, we need National Rivers Commission that will monitor the state of India’s rivers and come up with reports and recommendations about what ails India’s rivers. River Basin organisations will be inter state bodies that will come out with all the relevant information about the state of river basins.

In conclusion

The Prime Minister, in his Mann ki baat on June 30, 2019, the first episode in Modi’s second term, while highlighting need for water conservation, used the 8% figure: “You will be surprised that only 8% of the water received from rains in the entire year is harvested in our country.” So where does that 8% come from? The PM did not elaborate, but India’s annual rainfall is around 4000 BCM, 8% of which comes to 320 BCM. That is approximately the storage capacity of big dams in India. big dams are certainly not rainwater harvesting option, though it is a water storage option.

But big dams are not the only storage option, nor the best storage option. The groundwater aquifers are the most benign, naturally gifted storage options, that does not even involve costs, impacts or losses. The wetlands, the local water bodies, and the soil moisture are other major water storage options. But by mentioning this 8% storage figure, the PM is not just privileging big dams as storage option, is in fact ignoring all other, most of which are much better storage options.

Till our water resources establishment does not get out of this bias for big dams and big projects, there is little hope that our water blessings will not become disasters.

Courtesy: Counter View

The post Why India’s policy makers refuse to acknowledge groundwater as India’s water lifeline appeared first on SabrangIndia.

“Panditaraja Jagannath, Mughal court poet extraordinaire, a scholar of Linguistics, poetics, and philosophy, hounded by the Brahmin orthodoxy led by Hara Dikshita for marrying a Muslim woman, sought refuge on the steps of Banaras by the side of the Ganga. Forbidden to step into the water lest he pollute the river with his transgression, he was moved to compose his famous devotional eulogy of the Ganga, known as the Piyushalahari. As he composed each verse, legend has it, the river rose step by step, and at the end of his recitation sweeps him and his devoted wife away.”

This is one of the many fascinating stories that Sudipta Sen tells us in this remarkable book, a product of at least 12 years of labor of love.
Rivers are indeed storehouse of millions of tales, and no book can do justice to all the tales a river has to tell. One book can never be sufficient to tell a history of a river, as the history of river would include the history of all the key interactions that a river has had with various living organisms and people. Not the least a river like Ganga.

The author says in his introductory chapter, “This books explores the evolution of this image of a cosmic river at the intersection of myth, history and ecology.” For a river like Ganga, this is a herculean task. It is difficult to judge how far the author succeeds in this exploration of myth and history. But, he does not go far in defining the ecological parameters of the river.

The author starts his journey from Kali Gandaki river, the river older than even Himalayas: “Geologists have been fascinated by the Kali Gandaki and its tributaries because it is the only river that has retained its path through the Himalayan massif.”

In the beginning of this journey itself, the author asks a pertinent question: “How did the Ganga come to assume such a central place in the civilization and culture of the Indian subcontinent?” He may well have asked another pertinent question there itself: if Ganga did assume such a central place in the civilization and culture of the subcontinent, why was the river allowed to degenerate into one of the most polluted and defiled places on earth, its situation worsening during the right wing rule of Vajpayee and Modi?

The author variously describes the river as “a mundane river, repository of accumulated human misdeeds”, “cosmic river”, “one of the most engineered spaces on the planet”, “immaculate and eternal deity of the flowing waters”, “the river of the last resort”, “refuge of the wretched of the earth”, “the iconic status”, “River of afterlife”, “a comfort for the dying”, “the metaphysical threshold”, “the most compassionate mother”, “resplendent necklace on the bosom of the earth”, among many others. It reminds one of the 1000 names that Ganga has been given in puranas.

Some serious limitations For a book published in 2019, one expects it to contain a reasonably accurate account of the key current issues plaguing the river. But the book makes no detailed mention of plethora of bumper to bumper hydropower projects and all the debates around them, the unsustainable sand mining, encroachments on the floodplain and river bed and even the historic 2013 Uttarakhand flood disaster, or climate change impacts already affecting the river.

The whole book is about a River. One expects the author to at least attempt to define the river along with a narrative about various dimensions of a river. The author falls in the familiar trap of using water and river interchangeably. The book may also have benefited from providing map of the Ganga basin to define the changing Geographic contours during different eras.

The author makes a large number of inaccurate, wrong or misleading assertions. For example, he says Farakka barrage was “originally intended for irrigation and flood control”, which is not true, the basic objective of FB was to sustain navigability of Kolkata port.

Moreover, the book makes rather confused statement: “India has defended the viability of Farakka as a safeguard against excessive siltation that has progressively diminished the navigability of the river between Hugli and Allahabad.” In the context  of Farakka, Allahabad does not come in the picture and the stretch between Hugli and Allahabad has seen various adverse impacts.

Similarly, his contention that efforts between India and Bangladesh “have not been successful in reaching a mutually acceptable compromise” does not seem correct in view of the 1996 Ganges agreement that has survived 23 summers without major issues.

For a number of questionable statements, the author does not provide any source or reference, which is a rather disturbing weakness. For example, he states “Some scientists have sounded the alarm that the Tehri Dam added to the minor barrages in Bijnor, Narora and Kanpur, has so accelerated the siltation rate of the Ganga that its lifespan is limited to a meagre forty to fifty year.” The author neither names any source nor any scientist, the statement itself sounds meaningless as it stands.

Similarly, he says the Tehri debate “pitted engineers and technocrats against villagers, devout Hindus, hidden leftists and environmental militants.” He does not clarify source or who is means by environmental militants or hidden leftists. He makes another factually wrong statement when he says, “The (Ganga Action) plan was officially withdrawn in 2000 and a postmortem was done by the National River Conservation Authority.”

These are avoidable mistakes and let us hope the writer qualifies them or corrects them in the next editions.

Political setting The author may as well have noted that it was BJP rule under AB Vajpayee when the Tehri Dam gates were closed rather secretively, without going through due process.

And that it was Congress rule when Prof GD Agarwal (also known as Swami Gyan Swarup Sanand) went on fast at least four times, and government negotiated with him and agreed to many of his demands, each time, he withdrawing fast, whereas under Modi, Prof Agarwal died during the very first fast as the Prime Minister had no time for responding to Prof Agarwal.

The claims of the “Ganga putras” like the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ministers Gadkari and Uma Bharti about Ganga notwithstanding, there is little dispute that their actions have done enormous harm to the river. As I write this, Swami Atmabodhanand broke his fast unto death for the Ganga on 194th day of fast on May 4, 2019.

The songs and the tales right in the beginning of the book the author mentions the notes from the seventh century Chinese traveler Xuanzang who saw at Ganga-Yamuna Prayag, “hundreds of men fasting for days before immersing themselves in the river for a last ritual bath before committing suicide by drowning.” The strange ritual was ultimately stopped by Mughal emperor Akbar, the author notes.

One is reminded by the author about “the songs and verses of the radical devotional ferment that swept across India of the late Sultanate period, led by figures such as Nanak, Raidas, Dadu and Kabir, all of whom questioned the blind following of prescriptive rituals in normative and orthodox forms of Hindu worship and piety.” Sen goes on to remind about Nanak recording in Adi Granth “about the folly of believing that simply bathing in the Ganga makes one pure”. And about Kabir talking in his famous language of “enigma and paradox” when he says purity is an attitude, a state of mind.

The same water that flows in the roadside nala also flows in Ganga, but the former is not even worthy of being touched. The author notes, “Decades before India’s official independence, the Ganga had already secured its place as the national river”, referring to Poet Iqbal’s Song of India “Sare Jahan se Achha”, written in Lahore in 1903.

At one stage, the author asks a pertinent question that Ganga herself possibly asked Bhagiratha: “And then where would she go to cleanse herself of such accumulated poison?” As Bhagiratha reportedly replied to Ganga, she possibly does not have to go to any new place to clean herself. If truly religious people of current day India, like Panditraja Jagannath and his wife from the story we started with were to stand up for the river. Today we have saints of Matri Sadan, ecologists working on dolphins and turtles, activists working against dams, civil society working against unsustainable sand mining, pollution and environment flows, standing up for the river. But we clearly need more  efforts from all concerned to improve the state of Ganga.

A number of scholarly books have come out in recent years on Ganga. Sudipta Sen’s book is a valuable addition to literature on Ganga, especially for the way in which it connects various historical periods of the river. In spite of its limitations, but the book is a keeper.

But we need lot more scholarly work on our rivers, before the amazing beauty of rivers desert the humanity forever.

Courtesy: Counter View

The post A valuable addition to literature on Ganga, on the way it connects the river’s various historical periods appeared first on SabrangIndia.