Reader’s Digest India – July 2019

and water riots will break out in many
parts of the country. Can you imagine
the fallout if the people of Thane and
Palghar districts in Maharashtra refuse
to allow water to be piped to Mumbai? If
the people of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh
demand that their governments should
meet their water needs first rather than
quenching Delhi’s thirst? Sound scary?
I fear that these will come true sooner
than later.

A Man-made Crisis
In the 21st century, climate change and
global warming are the biggest threats
and we humans are responsible for
them. The water crisis is no different.
While travelling through Narsinghpur
in Madhya Pradesh recently, I noticed
that the government has launched some
modern irrigation projects, but much of
the water has been used by the sugar-
cane farmers. That, to me, is criminal
wastage. ‘A’ class water, that is fit for
drinking, is being used up in gallons to
irrigate sugarcane farms, which can be
easily done with ‘C’ class or treated sew-
age water. This is only one of the many
ways in which we are wasting our water
resources across the country.
We have used different kinds of mod-
ern technologies to exploit nature. How-
ever, we are not applying science to sus-
tain, nurture and conserve it.
Governments have spent lakhs of crores
of rupees on building big dams and irri-
gation projects, blatantly overlooking
sustainability and conservation.
No state in the country has spent more

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A dried-up well in the

drought-hit Palghar

district of Maharashtra

Reader’s Digest