I always thought watersheds were a great way of defining state-level regions. They're more stable than boundaries set by rivers, and are more natural than arbitrary lines of latitude/longitude. In the (near) future, there's going to be a lot of hand wringing over who has what rights to which water. The only way to completely solve it is to have one region be in control of the entire course of the water's flow.
Granted, redrawing the map based on watershed doesn't solve India's problem. But, it sounds like that in the future their drinking water is going to come from careful management of groundwater, which will require a lot of state level agreements. Right now, I'm not optimistic those agreements will happen smoothly.
> Granted, redrawing the map based on watershed doesn't solve India's problem
Thats a recipe for political disaster. Identity based politics is the only paradigm of politics in India. Currently southern states in India are organised on linguistic identity and every now and then there are statements from main-stream politicians calling for secession and establishing a separate country to counter the influx for North Indians who are painted as separate racial and ethnic group by these politicians. Breaking up existing units of governance organised on the linguistic identity will add fuel to the fire of separatism and powers like China and Pakistan will be more than happy to assist the separatists movement that starts because of this stupidity. BTW this is the wet dream of Pakistan and China as to India's future. Be noted the human cost a separatist movement will cause. India's bulk of fighting forces is made up by youths from north India. Do this and we have a Syria or Bangladesh with a scale of 1 billion plus people.
Let's take a moment and remember that a lot of the bad aspects of what happened to India after the brits left was because they divided up the country and then washed their hands in innocence. Now you propose to do it again. Why? It did not work well last time, and somehow you imagine dividing it along the lines of a single relatively minor (as in it's eminently solvable, not because it has little impact) problem that it will go better now.
There have been a flurry of alarmists posts like these but somehow I cant wrap my head around how will we run out of water. I stay in Bangalore and some people do have the problem of water - but for the most part it doesnt seem to be an issue of 'lack' of water perse but mostly distribution issues.
Bangalore has been having intermittent rains throughout the summers and even though few people use them now, but if situation gets dire almost everyone should be able to setup a rain water harvesting system and get by.
India is also installing solar at a rapid pace and the cost of electricity is going down. The next level solution could be just to use sea water that India is surrounded by, and use some of that solar power to filter this water.
Somehow I dont get all this alarmist news. Maybe im missing something.
If you already have rainwater harvesting, good for you, but if you depend on borewells and tankers for water, then news like this is not alarmist and is worrisome. Borewells are already becoming dry throughout the city, and digging deeper results in more brackish water. Cementing every single part of land, and not building recharge wells only adds to the problem. (Tankers are reliable for now, but it's silly to put the control of a vital resource in the hands of a private entity that will always be attracted to the highest bidder. The poorer sections of society will be affected first and hardest)
As the population of Bengaluru increases, the demand for water will increase. It's not just a distribution issue, it's a civic planning and ecological issue. Encroachment of lakes[0] and the booming real estate market aren't helping the situation at all.
Also, desalination is not as easy as one thinks [1].
Better solutions to this problem are effective civic planning, ensuring that the groundwater table is recharged, (as you rightly mentioned) rainwater harvesting, and preserving the lakes Bengaluru has.
There is a water shortage and you propose to solve it with two solutions that don't currently exist. Not everyone harvests rain water right now. The solar that you speak of doesn't exist, and filtering sea water is definitely not as simple as "using some of that solar power".
It is a problem because the situation currently is looking pretty bad. As far as I can tell people are not denying that a solution is possible. When is it not?
So, I am confused about whether we really have a problem or there is some other agenda. I know lot of people in Bengaluru don't get govt water supply (Cauvery water). Was speaking to a friend just yesterday who was complaining about the quality of the tanker water they get in their apartment, that some people are getting skin diseases because of it and that they use filtered water for washing their baby and their hair.
Desalination seems to be expensive:
>"Rs 1.36 crore a day for just 200 million litres of water; can Chennai really afford desalination plants?"
>Our water problems are essentially due to mismanagement of water bodies, and Chennai is not a rain-starved city. “Chennai’s average annual rainfall of 139 cm is sufficient to recharge its aquifers. We don’t have perennial rivers, but we have abundant surface water resources. The city of London, with just 60 cm of annual average rainfall, relies on surface water resources. It is shameful that we have opted for the extravagant choice of desalination plants instead,” said Sai Praneeth, Director, Hydro-Meteorological Innovative and Explorative Solutions (HYMIES).
Also just came across this Twitter account. They seem to be posting a lot of info about India's water situation.
https://twitter.com/zenrainman
Water relations are complex and require sophisticated culture. You are right there were cities thriving in arid climate like Karakorum dessert or Palestine. Ancient Rome had been able to supply more fresh water to the Rome via aqueduct system then entire New York used up to 1980s.
Some societies created intricate cultures like subak in Bali.
The practical question is if India can reform its water policy within years left before certain cities will start to die. Because they will otherwise.
Let me give the PoV from Hyderabad.
Hyderabad gets water from mainly 3 sources;
1. Musi river water/Manjeera
2. the Large lakes like Hussain/Osmania Sagar etc.
3. ground water/borewells
My apartment society in Gachibowli area, just ran of water for a few days back in June. The borewell just couldnt get the water. There is no lake around us.
Getting the river water connection would be around Rs.15_00_0000. To add to the issues, the gov is not giving out new river water connections without a longdrawn process and the river water itself is too low to sustain all the existing connection.
Right now several apartment societies with 3000+ apartments in them are coming up in my immediate neighbourhood.
So next year, we can expect the borewell water to be over way before june (early may?). We will certainly don't have river water connection by then. So, we will be dependent on water takers for a few months.
this year the tankers are charging 8k (from 2k last year) for each refill. next year, the price would be over 20k for each refill.
Rain water harvesting doesnt works greatly in areas like ours which only get a few months of rain. Where will you keep the harvested water for the next 8-9 months? How do you maintain the quality of this stagnant water? So, most likely people would end up using it and the hope would be that an equivalent amount of ground water will be spared. It really doesnt works out in practice. People don't ration the water usage and will not until it gets dire. Also rain harvesting infra will take years to set up. Desalinating water is not much help as transporting the water is a logistical issue. So yes, while there are possible solutions, they will take a lot of political will to execute and will certainly take more than a few years to bear fruit. The situation, till then will be bad.
2020 is going to be bad for us in Hyderabad. Not Chennai level bad. but we will get there in the next few years.
And what i do know of Bangalore form my other friends who live there, its pretty bad there already. A lot of large societies are dependent on tanker waters despite Bangalore having much more rainfall than Hyderabad.
All in all, I think this level of alarm is not just necessary, it should have come a decade ago, when it would have been easier to circumvent. Hyderabad's population will cross 12MM by 2030.
Now, whatever approach we end up taking, its gonna be costly, hard to execute and will take a lot of time.
And will probably will not be enough.
EDIT: I am wildly off on the Hyderabad population growth. The existing census data is from 2011. Apparently we crossed 12MM in 2019. https://indiapopulation2019.com/population-of-hyderabad-2019...
If correct, this is over the population of major mega cities like NY, LA etc.
Same issue in Pakistan, it's a very watery place in comparison to say, Europe or Southern USA, but you have hard time finding a place with reliable tap water:
1. Water theft from utilities
2. Gigantic and wasteful usage of water in agriculture
3. Leaky pipes and contamination from sewage
4. Utilities are just starting to recover from decades of extreme mismanagement
5. Tanker mafia of course doing its worst to keep all of above going
Agricultural irrigation is a far bigger problem, particularly because existing systems are hugely wasteful due to subsidies (water and even the electricity to pump it is often free), leakage and corruption.
India does not have a water issue, they have a population issue, but it’s really hard to mange the population, so natural resources are being consumed beyond sustainability.
This problem is not confined to India, it’s a problem with humanity. Nature is working on a correction.
You could also say that resources of India had been depleted by greed, overexploatation and the lack of proper governanace. You can't run a multimilion city on borewells and groundwater - the government should had built proper infrastructure - pipelines, reservoirs, water meters, sewage treatment plans etc.
I beg to differ, India's population density is comparable to many Western European countries. They a problem of population distribution. Like many developing nations, populations cluster in large cities leading to pressures on resources.
I suppose it's more of the density than the population. India is massive by all measurements, but west and east sides are completely different. In the west, you have Mumbai, a city full of dust, slums, and millions of people riding trains in a single evening, all fighting for resources.
East side, is full of greenery, rainforest, and a peaceful living with hardly any population compared to west.
The Drought Early Warning System (DEWS) revealed that more than 42% of the country’s area is abnormally dry, which is 6% more than that of the previous year.
... as many as 26 out of 36 meteorological subdivisions in India have recorded deficit rainfall. This is the second driest pre-monsoon that the country has witnessed ever since 1954.
China managed in a similar situation. I think it may be harder to fight people for resources, or just reducing their resource use, than making sure they are never born.
When you cover large swarth of land with concert the rain water goes on the roof and on the road goes to gutter and makes it way to sevege. In absence, of this it is drawn underground and refills underground water.
When people were building these concert jungles, they didn't keep in mind where the water comes from and how exactly it's refilled and what we can do to replenish the capacity lost due to our development projects.
This is not a problem of city size but lack of planning for growth at the regional level. Look at New York City as an example, they started sourcing water from far distances early on and built an infrastructure to support a very large city. cities need to develop their surrounding areas to support themselves, sprawl isn't just because people don't want to live in a city sprawl is also required to support one
> If we do not limit the number of people who can get in, it will naturally result in whole population of India moving into these cities.
The population of France does not all live in Paris, nor that of the USA in New York. Even in as small a country as Luxembourg not everyone lives in Luxembourg City.
> This will result in people making wherever they live better instead of just moving to a better city.
Maybe in the long term. In the immediate future, it would lead to massive economic recession due to labour shortages in high-employment areas and economic genocide in low-employment areas. The only way to redistribute employment might be gradual with economic incentives and disincentives. It also requires long-term thinking and implementation and it is difficult to imagine this in the Indian context.
I've see a number of documentaries about indians that have used permaculture to turn desert into food producing forests. maybe they need to apply their knowledge in cities?
how much is Coca-Cola[1][2] to blame for this. Afaik it has been the center of criticism in India for over a decade now:
Coca-Cola operates 58 water-intensive bottling plants in India. In the southern Indian village of Plachimada in Kerala state, for example, persistent droughts have dried up groundwater and local wells, forcing many residents to rely on water supplies trucked in daily by the government.
I'll assume that every ounce of bottled water or soft drink replaces water that people would have drank anyway, and possibly with more efficiency - a larger percentage of the (expensive) bottled water gets used on the unalienable human need to drink than if the same water was piped to houses and used for both drinking and washing.
The plants may be blamed for transferring water scarcity from places where the drinks are bought and drunk to the places where the bottling plants are operated, but not for creating water scarcity.
abhshkdz|6 years ago
ecmascript|6 years ago
vinni2|6 years ago
ptah|6 years ago
King-Aaron|6 years ago
jdonaldson|6 years ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/19/m...
Granted, redrawing the map based on watershed doesn't solve India's problem. But, it sounds like that in the future their drinking water is going to come from careful management of groundwater, which will require a lot of state level agreements. Right now, I'm not optimistic those agreements will happen smoothly.
amrx431|6 years ago
Thats a recipe for political disaster. Identity based politics is the only paradigm of politics in India. Currently southern states in India are organised on linguistic identity and every now and then there are statements from main-stream politicians calling for secession and establishing a separate country to counter the influx for North Indians who are painted as separate racial and ethnic group by these politicians. Breaking up existing units of governance organised on the linguistic identity will add fuel to the fire of separatism and powers like China and Pakistan will be more than happy to assist the separatists movement that starts because of this stupidity. BTW this is the wet dream of Pakistan and China as to India's future. Be noted the human cost a separatist movement will cause. India's bulk of fighting forces is made up by youths from north India. Do this and we have a Syria or Bangladesh with a scale of 1 billion plus people.
krageon|6 years ago
I don't follow your reasoning about this at all.
thaumasiotes|6 years ago
modi15|6 years ago
Bangalore has been having intermittent rains throughout the summers and even though few people use them now, but if situation gets dire almost everyone should be able to setup a rain water harvesting system and get by.
India is also installing solar at a rapid pace and the cost of electricity is going down. The next level solution could be just to use sea water that India is surrounded by, and use some of that solar power to filter this water.
Somehow I dont get all this alarmist news. Maybe im missing something.
throwaway_7718|6 years ago
As the population of Bengaluru increases, the demand for water will increase. It's not just a distribution issue, it's a civic planning and ecological issue. Encroachment of lakes[0] and the booming real estate market aren't helping the situation at all.
Also, desalination is not as easy as one thinks [1].
Better solutions to this problem are effective civic planning, ensuring that the groundwater table is recharged, (as you rightly mentioned) rainwater harvesting, and preserving the lakes Bengaluru has.
[0] http://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/bangalore-water-bodies-nd...
[1] https://www.hydrofinity.com/blog/why-desalination-is-not-the...
krageon|6 years ago
It is a problem because the situation currently is looking pretty bad. As far as I can tell people are not denying that a solution is possible. When is it not?
nonamechicken|6 years ago
>"Dear BBC, Bengaluru isn’t running out of water soon. Here’s why!" http://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/bangalore-water-scarcity-...
So, I am confused about whether we really have a problem or there is some other agenda. I know lot of people in Bengaluru don't get govt water supply (Cauvery water). Was speaking to a friend just yesterday who was complaining about the quality of the tanker water they get in their apartment, that some people are getting skin diseases because of it and that they use filtered water for washing their baby and their hair.
Desalination seems to be expensive:
>"Rs 1.36 crore a day for just 200 million litres of water; can Chennai really afford desalination plants?"
http://chennai.citizenmatters.in/chennai-cost-of-desalinatio...
The above article concludes that
>Our water problems are essentially due to mismanagement of water bodies, and Chennai is not a rain-starved city. “Chennai’s average annual rainfall of 139 cm is sufficient to recharge its aquifers. We don’t have perennial rivers, but we have abundant surface water resources. The city of London, with just 60 cm of annual average rainfall, relies on surface water resources. It is shameful that we have opted for the extravagant choice of desalination plants instead,” said Sai Praneeth, Director, Hydro-Meteorological Innovative and Explorative Solutions (HYMIES).
Also just came across this Twitter account. They seem to be posting a lot of info about India's water situation. https://twitter.com/zenrainman
chewz|6 years ago
Some societies created intricate cultures like subak in Bali.
The practical question is if India can reform its water policy within years left before certain cities will start to die. Because they will otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subak_(irrigation)
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/12/lost-cities-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct
rishav_sharan|6 years ago
1. Musi river water/Manjeera 2. the Large lakes like Hussain/Osmania Sagar etc. 3. ground water/borewells
My apartment society in Gachibowli area, just ran of water for a few days back in June. The borewell just couldnt get the water. There is no lake around us.
Getting the river water connection would be around Rs.15_00_0000. To add to the issues, the gov is not giving out new river water connections without a longdrawn process and the river water itself is too low to sustain all the existing connection.
Right now several apartment societies with 3000+ apartments in them are coming up in my immediate neighbourhood. So next year, we can expect the borewell water to be over way before june (early may?). We will certainly don't have river water connection by then. So, we will be dependent on water takers for a few months. this year the tankers are charging 8k (from 2k last year) for each refill. next year, the price would be over 20k for each refill.
Rain water harvesting doesnt works greatly in areas like ours which only get a few months of rain. Where will you keep the harvested water for the next 8-9 months? How do you maintain the quality of this stagnant water? So, most likely people would end up using it and the hope would be that an equivalent amount of ground water will be spared. It really doesnt works out in practice. People don't ration the water usage and will not until it gets dire. Also rain harvesting infra will take years to set up. Desalinating water is not much help as transporting the water is a logistical issue. So yes, while there are possible solutions, they will take a lot of political will to execute and will certainly take more than a few years to bear fruit. The situation, till then will be bad.
The water in all lakes is incredibly low. The lakes are also extremely dirty (http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2018/oct/07...) The water is already contaminated by industrial waste.
2020 is going to be bad for us in Hyderabad. Not Chennai level bad. but we will get there in the next few years. And what i do know of Bangalore form my other friends who live there, its pretty bad there already. A lot of large societies are dependent on tanker waters despite Bangalore having much more rainfall than Hyderabad.
All in all, I think this level of alarm is not just necessary, it should have come a decade ago, when it would have been easier to circumvent. Hyderabad's population will cross 12MM by 2030. Now, whatever approach we end up taking, its gonna be costly, hard to execute and will take a lot of time. And will probably will not be enough.
EDIT: I am wildly off on the Hyderabad population growth. The existing census data is from 2011. Apparently we crossed 12MM in 2019. https://indiapopulation2019.com/population-of-hyderabad-2019... If correct, this is over the population of major mega cities like NY, LA etc.
easytiger|6 years ago
Population growth + increased quality of life = more resource use
baybal2|6 years ago
1. Water theft from utilities
2. Gigantic and wasteful usage of water in agriculture
3. Leaky pipes and contamination from sewage
4. Utilities are just starting to recover from decades of extreme mismanagement
5. Tanker mafia of course doing its worst to keep all of above going
martincollignon|6 years ago
Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive):
- https://climateaction.tech/
- https://techimpactmakers.com/
- https://www.tmrow.com/
ForFreedom|6 years ago
9nGQluzmnq3M|6 years ago
benj111|6 years ago
How does that compare with a kg of lettuce, or tomatoes, or beef?
Bottled water has its problems, water use isnt really one of them.
carboy|6 years ago
This problem is not confined to India, it’s a problem with humanity. Nature is working on a correction.
chewz|6 years ago
You could also say that resources of India had been depleted by greed, overexploatation and the lack of proper governanace. You can't run a multimilion city on borewells and groundwater - the government should had built proper infrastructure - pipelines, reservoirs, water meters, sewage treatment plans etc.
In a way India is a minature to the entire world.
bobosha|6 years ago
Ayesh|6 years ago
East side, is full of greenery, rainforest, and a peaceful living with hardly any population compared to west.
jussij|6 years ago
But at least for this year, the climate also seems to have played a very big part in the issue:
https://weather.com/en-IN/india/monsoon/news/2019-06-03-indi...
The Drought Early Warning System (DEWS) revealed that more than 42% of the country’s area is abnormally dry, which is 6% more than that of the previous year.
... as many as 26 out of 36 meteorological subdivisions in India have recorded deficit rainfall. This is the second driest pre-monsoon that the country has witnessed ever since 1954.
chmod775|6 years ago
China managed in a similar situation. I think it may be harder to fight people for resources, or just reducing their resource use, than making sure they are never born.
gingabriska|6 years ago
When people were building these concert jungles, they didn't keep in mind where the water comes from and how exactly it's refilled and what we can do to replenish the capacity lost due to our development projects.
gingabriska|6 years ago
What if they start requiring a domestic visa process to let in the people from other states?
Everyone wants a life of high standards of living which cities provide along with employment.
If we do not limit the number of people who can get in, it will naturally result in whole population of India moving into these cities.
This will result in people making wherever they live better instead of just moving to a better city.
josephh|6 years ago
Mobility rights is seen as a fundamental human right and is protected by constitution in most countries.
What needs to happen is to provide economic incentives for people to spread out, not through laws that limit ones right to movement.
Shivetya|6 years ago
.
gridlockd|6 years ago
However, people are willing to endure a lot if living standards are generally low.
barry-cotter|6 years ago
The population of France does not all live in Paris, nor that of the USA in New York. Even in as small a country as Luxembourg not everyone lives in Luxembourg City.
kranner|6 years ago
Maybe in the long term. In the immediate future, it would lead to massive economic recession due to labour shortages in high-employment areas and economic genocide in low-employment areas. The only way to redistribute employment might be gradual with economic incentives and disincentives. It also requires long-term thinking and implementation and it is difficult to imagine this in the Indian context.
peterbraden|6 years ago
ptah|6 years ago
fredgrott|6 years ago
DyslexicAtheist|6 years ago
Coca-Cola operates 58 water-intensive bottling plants in India. In the southern Indian village of Plachimada in Kerala state, for example, persistent droughts have dried up groundwater and local wells, forcing many residents to rely on water supplies trucked in daily by the government.
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion-in...
[2] https://waronwant.org/media/coca-cola-drinking-world-dry
PeterisP|6 years ago
The plants may be blamed for transferring water scarcity from places where the drinks are bought and drunk to the places where the bottling plants are operated, but not for creating water scarcity.
nippler|6 years ago
[deleted]
WhateverWorks|6 years ago
[deleted]