India is facing an unprecedented drought. Over 70% of the country’s population is struggling to meet its drinking water needs. Reservoirs around the country have dried up and groundwater levels have plunged to all-time lows. As a symbol of this catastrophe, Chennai has ground to a halt for want of water.
According to both governmental and non-governmental data sources, more than 70% of India’s surface water and groundwater is unfit for domestic use because it has become contaminated. This leaves only a little more than a quarter of the freshwater to meet the needs of 1.3 billion people.
The World Health Organisation has calculated that an individual needs around 25 litres of water a day for basic hygiene, food, mopping, cleaning, etc. and 2.5 litres a day for drinking.
Water experts have said that the two principal unpolluted and perennial sources of water are the water in the ground underneath forests and the aquifers beneath rivers’ floodplains, which account for 10-15% of India’s total groundwater recharge.
Vikram Soni, an emeritus professor of physics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, who has worked on issues of public water consumption, believes, “The rain and the monsoons provide natural recharge year after year, and it is this recharge which can be tapped to provide water for our cities.”
“While the forest aquifers can provide healthful mineral water purely for drinking purposes, the floodplains are a great perennial source for bulk water for cities,” he added.
However, he emphasised that they would have to be tapped in a “strictly ecological manner”.
Officials have already tapped such water in the past. According to Soni, “The Borivali National Park, with its thick cover of trees spread over 68 sq. km and its two major lakes, Tulsi and Vihar, have been used from the time of the British to supply water to Mumbai.”
The same is true of Shimla as well, “which has a large forest sanctuary spread over three hill ranges set up before independence to provide the city with water.”
Soni has conducted studies showing that this mineral water, in the deep aquifers, is very clean. “Drinking this water can substantially improve the health of citizens who have increasingly become dependent on RO[footnote]Reverse osmosis[/footnote] or filtered water, which is known to remove the … minerals present in water.”
But unlike how RO and other systems allow us to access clean water at any time of day inside our homes, Soni proposes that this water must be distributed at nominal charges through public kiosks, etc., at about Rs 3-2 per litre. “The government should have no difficulty in providing this water because even when it is sold at 20-times less than the market price, as they can still reap great economic returns from it.”
All cities in the sweep of the Western and Eastern Ghats are proximate to such forest aquifers. For example, Bengaluru’s drinking needs could be met by water from the Bannerghatta forest sanctuary; the hills around Visakhapatnam can provide for the same resource for its seven million inhabitants. The Aravalli hills can provide natural mineral water to all the major towns of Rajasthan, and Delhi can derive its drinking water from the Asola Bhatti.
But before this can be launched, these water reservoirs will have to be accorded the status of water sanctuaries, similar to wildlife sanctuaries, national parks, tiger reserves, etc. This is to prevent overexploitation.
“Our national parks and tiger reserves stand protected only because they come under this law. In the same way, these water sanctuaries will have to be protected by a special law passed” by the Union environment and water ministries.
Take these steps could help alleviate the now-individual burden of meeting India’s water needs as well as rejuvenating natural water systems.
The Jal Biradiri group led by Narendra Chug in Maharashtra has been working since 2013 to revive the Agrani river basin. “We have involved the local villagers who possess traditional wisdom but to whom unfortunately the government does not lend an ear,” Chugh said. Over a hundred villages are located in the basin, and its residents have been working to protect the forest since officials axed over 9,000 hectares of green cover for “so-called ‘development’ projects”. “The result is that although there is drought in large parts of Maharashtra, this river has standing water,” he said.
Sudershan Das, head of the Human Development Foundation, has been working to revive Odisha’s rivers since 2004. “We started a people’s movement to revive the Karow and Suna rivers by ensuring no industrial effluents were dumped in the rivers and their ecological flow was maintained. We have also placed stress on reviving our traditional forests.”
Another equally important step is for the government to determine how it is going to meet its bulk water needs. For example, Soni has found that river floodplains are exceptional aquifers, where any withdrawal is compensated by gravity flow from the surrounding area. “Some of these floodplains contain up to 20-times more water than the virgin flow in rivers, and since recharge here is by rainfall and during late floods, the water quality is good,” he said.
Together with the government of Delhi, Soni demonstrated 15 years ago that the Palla floodplain at the northern end of the Yamuna in the National Capital Territory, could provide clean drinking water for almost one million people every day. The state spends Rs 12 crore to access this water.
“Besides providing a huge revenue to the Delhi Jal Board, piezometers and a control system have been installed to monitor water levels around the year, but sadly they are not working.”
He believes the scheme can be extended to other riverfront cities like Prayag, Agra and Mathura; most towns in Bihar and West Bengal; to Cuttack and Bhubaneswar in Odisha; to Amravati, Vijayawada and Rajamundary in Andhra Pradesh, and many cities in Tamil Nadu.
This isn’t to suggest we abandon our polluted water. Starting in 2014, the Narendra Modi government at the Centre has pumped crores of rupees into cleaning rivers under the Central National River Conservation Plan, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, the Smart Cities Mission and the Namami Gange mission.
One of their objects has been to increase the number of sewage treatment plants to prevent raw sewage from entering rivers, lakes and ponds, and to make grossly polluting industries comply with water quality regulations. The Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment has been saying that using water to flush down excreta is not sustainable and that India needs on-site faecal sludge management systems that use modern septic tanks and other technologies so excreta doesn’t contaminate rivers. When aquifers become contaminated, they take centuries to fully recover.
Building mammoth infrastructure projects and spending crores of rupees may create huge water reservoirs but won’t help create more water. Each panchayat has to be entrusted with regenerating the forests that used to be the hallmark of our nation. The interconnection between living forests and un-encroached river basins is the only way forward.
Rashme Sehgal is an author and a freelance journalist based in Delhi.