ENVIRONMENT: Growing Water Crisis in India

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 21 1998 (IPS) - India, already suffering from excessive depletion of its water table and a lack of drinking water during the summer months, could face a major crisis by the year 2017, warns a new report released here Tuesday.

The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) argue that five percent of India’s rural population – or some 141,000 households – currently lack regular access to safe drinking water.

Across the nation, the report adds, 44 million people are affected by water quality problems, while nearly 700,000 children die each year of diarrhoeal diseases – most of which result from drinking unsafe water or lacking water for sanitation. The Indian problem is only part of an increasing problem worldwide, say U.N. officials.

“The crisis in freshwater is a crisis for children,” says Sadig Rasheed, director of UNICEF’s programme division. “Every year, more than two million children under the age of five die as a result of unsafe water and poor environmental sanitation.”

The current two-week session of the Commission on Sustainable Development underway here intends to highlight the water problems as part of a U.N. effort to urge nations to improve freshwater management. Governments and experts are debating different approaches, including community-based water management and fair water pricing, to achieve that end.

The situation in India, the report argues, will worsen over the next two decades as more water is wasted through seepage or directed disproportionately toward irrigation or urban water supplies. By 2017, the report warns, per capita availability of water will decline to 1,600 cubic metres – a level low enough to signify ‘water stress’, in U.N. parlance – while lack of water “will lead to high levels of water-related diseases and death.”

To find ways to forestall that threat, UNICEF and WWF have studied sites within five Indian regions – the states of Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu – to study the causes of, and different methods of treatment for, the water crisis.

The report cites several common problems, including a system of water rights under Indian common law which has allowed for continued individual ownership of “the water beneath one’s land”, and the “uncontrolled” use of borewells for irrigation and the growing of cash crops. In addition, the report argues, “subsidised electricity has been a major contributor to the uncontrolled extraction of ground water for irrigation.”

In different communities, UNICEF and WWF found economic, caste and gender considerations also adding to the water crisis.

Women, who bear the burden for carrying water from remote sources to their households, have to make an average of 10 trips, amounting to 5 kilometres of walking, to fetch 150 litres of water in the community of Gurrubbadu in Andhra Pradesh.

That task is made harder nationally because some two-thirds of India’s handpumps, which serve the needs of almost 395 million rural people, require repair or rehabilitation or are completely defunct, according to a 1994 government survey.

In other areas, caste considerations make water access even more difficult, as in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas, where at some watersheds Dalits (lowest-caste Hindus) “are not allowed to take water from springs which the upper-caste Rajputs use … (and) have to walk long distances to fetch water.”

Lessons learned by the two agencies from the Indian study emphasise the need to place communities in a position to manage water resources. Their report declares that “only if communities are aware and participate in managing their water environment will they be able to protect it.”

Basic water services should be provided “at a reasonable distance” as opposed to at distant handpumps, the report adds. In addition, the agencies recommend instituting water pricing and taxation of water involved in agricultural use – but only, they caution, if equitable distribution of water is ensured.

UNICEF and WWF, in launching the report, argue that the lessons of the water problem in India can be instructive in dealing with the growing number of water crises worldwide. The agencies, whose two-year study in India was their first collaboration on freshwater problems, have vowed to continue to promote sustainable community management of water.

“The India experience has inspired both WWF and UNICEF to engage in a global partnership,” says Claude Martin, WWF director- general. “The more countries and governments join in, the better we shall be able to manage freshwater resources.”

UNICEF and WWF intend to select an African country for their next cooperative study.