Will India become a dessert soon?
For 12 hours a day, Shiva Korade stands in the blistering sun selling sugarcane juice at the roadside. He can’t afford a mechanized juicer; instead, he and his fellow villagers take it in turns running in a circle to push the arm that operates the press. Korade comes from Jalna, a water-deprived district in Maharashtra state. Every summer his village is emptied of its able-bodied residents. They make their way to Pune, one of India’s largest cities, where they rent rooms together and peddle juice, vegetables and street food.
For the past three years Korade’s village of about 900 people has had no water for irrigation and received just three government-provided tanker deliveries per day for domestic use – about 40 liters per person, not including livestock. ‘When the tankers come you grab whatever dish you can and race to them,’ says villager Sopan Gajanan Khedekar. "It’s a lucky dip if you’re going to get any water that day. There’s a lot of violence, people beat and shove each other."
This is a story repeated across India. Since the monsoons began to fail in 2012, conflict over meagre water resources and farmer migration in search of employment has increased exponentially. But the successive meteorological droughts, blamed by many on climate change, are not the only cause of India’s water scarcity problems.
‘We are in the midst of a mega water crisis that is not one year old, not one season old, but 20 years old,’ veteran rural affairs reporter P Sainath told the National Consultation on Drought last year. Back in 1996 Sainath published Everybody Loves a Good Drought, which detailed how commercial operations exploited water resources, while struggling farmers and rural citizens, lacking both access to a water source and government assistance, were forced to pay exorbitant prices for paltry deliveries. Little has changed since then. The ‘water mafia’ and ‘tanker mafia’ continue to boom while authorities ignore local water-security schemes, favoring big dam projects instead. This, Sainath says, is the thirst economy.
In Jalna district, there are no apparent official plans to help with the water crisis, and villagers will likely continue to rely on tankers provided by government schemes. ‘The money is getting eaten by the middle men; more water should be sent but a third of the money is going into their pockets,’ says Khedekar. This practice is so well known that even India’s mainstream media reports the water mafia is ‘sucking India dry’. The borewell industry also does well out of droughts. With no irrigation canals, the villagers of Jalna, in the historically parched Marathwada region, rely on water drawn from wells. In desperation, they continue to hire expensive machinery to dig new borewells at random in the hope of striking water. Aquifers and groundwater reserves across India are becoming so depleted that wells must be dug deeper and deeper – Khedekar and Korade say they’re digging down to 90 meters now. Due to over-extraction, rivers and streams that rely on groundwater are drying up.
Desertification is taking hold in areas such as Tamil Nadu state, which many observers say is suffering its worst drought in 140 years. Environmentalists fear for the future of Kerala’s Bharathapuzha river, where farmers recently sank borewells into the dry river bed. This despite an above-average summer monsoon fall – the downpour failed to recharge Kerala’s groundwater and aquifers, as deforestation causes rainfall to run off into the sea.
This is all the more worrying in the stoke of the Heatwave and inflation rising. How can you help in this Battle? Appreciate the value of water and conserve. A few decades ago it was considered mad to have to buy water, but these days it has become the norm. We should limit our wastage of water and adopt water-conserving techniques.
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