cover story
Ask Jayanta Sharma about such contradictions. Sharma, 33,
buys nearly 300 litres of water daily from a private firm, deliv-
ered by tankers directly to the overhead tank in his apartment
in Guwahati. Yet, he and his family of three cannot step out of
their homes on many days during the rainy season as even
brief showers flood the entire locality. “We are having a tough
time with water. The irony is that the roads are flooded with
water and we are buying in trucks,” says Sharma, who works
in a private company. Over the past decade or so, Guwahati
has seen an unplanned growth of housing apartments, leading
to fast depletion of its groundwater level. And floods in
Assam’s capital are now a recurring problem, an urban night-
mare that also blights Mumbai and other cities annually.
Across the length and breadth of India, millions of people
are grappling with water—more often for the lack of this
life-sustaining elixir. It’s an unequal—some say, losing—battle.
The conundrum was never so prominent, or puzzling. Every
year, around this time, while parts of the country reel under
droughts, there are others that are flooded. Taps run dry in
cities, including the major ones, and rural areas that get
enough rains depend on faraway sources. Cities
like Chennai, which were once self-sufficient,
now face water shortages. It was the same city
that came to a standstill for days due to floods. In
both urban and rural India, the crisis is acute.
We are in the midst of shortages, toxic contami-
nation, raging disputes between states over
water sharing, and heightened cross-border
tensions in the subcontinent.
The red light had been blinking for a while.
Now, it’s official. Government think-tank NITI
Aayog said in a 2018 report that India is facing
“the worst water crisis” in its history, with about
60 crore people facing high to extreme water
stress. About two lakh people are also dyingevery year due to inadequate access to safe water, the report
titled ‘Composite Water Management Index’ said. This hap-
pens in the same country where hundreds die every year due
to floods. Last month, Union water resources minister Gajen-
dra Singh Shekhawat sent out another warning. The water
shortage could impact agriculture and thereby cut food exp-
orts from India. The country urgently needs to revive its res-
ervoirs, lakes and other traditional water bodies, he said in a
statement (see interview, p.37). For a country where a majority
rely on the farm sector, this almost sounds catastrophic. For
the first time, water has entered our socio-political conscious-
ness. PM Narendra Modi talked about the need for
conservation in one of his Mann ki Baat episodes.Man-made disasters
Although the belief is that floods are caused by natural causes,
like high rainfall, the reasons for modern floods are, in most
cases, man-made. It is human mismanagement, either in the
implementation of water projects, or their maintenance, that
plays a key role. One of the prominent causes of the Kerala
floods in 2018 was said to be inadequate and
inefficient management of the dams. In many
states, deforestation has aggravated flood situa-
tions as green cover controls water run-off and
helps prevent soil erosion. So is the case with
droughts and water-scarcity.
Residents of Mawsynram in Meghalaya, which
receives the highest rainfall on earth, have to
travel several kilometres to get fresh water as
large-scale deforestation has left the land
barren. In 2017, nearly 5.5 million hectares were
affected by floods across India; 18.64 million
people faced the fury of the deluge. The damage
to crops extended over 5 million hectares, and
2,014 lives were lost. In a country highly depend-While hundreds die
annually in floods,
two lakh people
are also dying
every year due to
inadequate access
to safe water.
32 OutlOOk 5 august 2019