INDIA is not a water-scarce country. We have a manmade problem of water. If we are prepared to fundamentally alter our understanding of and approach to water, India’s water problem has a simple set of solutions. For the last 70 years since independence, water policy in India has been based on attempts to increase supply endlessly through damming rivers and extracting groundwater. This has overlooked the fundamentals of water science and has remained uninformed by the spiritual wisdom that finitude, interconnectedness and diversity are the defining features of our existence on planet earth.

As children we all learned the water cycle in school. But somehow policymakers in India have managed to forget this lesson. They have overlooked the integral interconnected-ness between the health of catchment areas and the rivers they feed. The healthier their catchments, the better will be the state of rivers. The unique medicinal properties of the Ganga can only be preserved if we protect the pristine Himalayan catchments from where it originates. This is why, for example, the residents of New York pay those in the city’s watersheds for the ecosystem services they provide, by protecting their catchment areas, keeping the river basin healthy and green. This is what ensures clean water supply to the city. Such examples of recognition of interconnected destinies have multiplied all over the world, including in China, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica and Ethiopia.

But we have continued to encroach upon, damage, block or pollute the channels through which water flows into rivers; naturally our river flows have suffered in quantity and quality. The natural morphology of rivers has taken hundreds of thousands of years to develop. Large structural changes to river channels lead to unforeseen and dangerous hydrological, social and ecological consequences. A 2018 study of 55 catchment areas, published in the prestigious international journal Scientific Reports, shows that there has been a decline in the annual run-off generated by India’s major river basins, including Baitarni, Brahmani, Godavari, Krishna, Mahi, Narmada, Sabarmati and Tapi, and this is not due to a decline in rainfall but because of economic activities destructive of their catchment areas. If this trend continues, most of these rivers will almost completely dry up.

 

Similarly, policymakers have overlooked finitude, diversity and inter-connectedness in India’s single most important resource, groundwater. We get over 70 per cent of our water from below the ground. India is, by far, the largest and fastest growing consumer of groundwater in the world. China and the US are in second and third positions respectively, but India uses more than the two of them put together. Over the last four decades, around 84 per cent of the addition to irrigated area came from groundwater. Most of this was from deep drilling of tubewells or borewells, which are the single largest source of irrigation, as also drinking water, in both rural and urban India.

Tubewells, which were once seen as a solution to India’s water problem, have tragically ended up becoming the main cause of the crisis, and in philosophical terms could be described as vicious infinite regress! This has happened because we have indiscriminately drilled borewells without paying attention to the diversity of our aquifers, and the rock formations within which groundwater is stored. Large parts of India are underlain by hard rock formations, which have limited capacity to store groundwater and have very low rates of natural recharge. Once we extract water from these aquifers, it takes very long for water to regain its original level.

 

For decades, we have drilled aquifers at progressively greater depths, lowering water tables and water quality everywhere. Water quality is impacted because at certain depths we encounter deposits that gravely pollute groundwater. Official estimates indicate problems of high fluoride in 203 districts, iron in 206 districts and arsenic in 35 districts. Fluorosis is estimated to afflict 65 million people and leads to crippling, skeletal problems and severe bone deformities. Arsenicosis affects around 10 million people, causes skin lesions and develops into cancer of lungs and the bladder. Overall, we have reached a situation where nearly 60 per cent of India’s districts have either seriously fallen water tables or low groundwater quality or both.

It is also not often understood that perhaps the single most important cause of our peninsular rivers drying up is over-extraction of groundwater. After the rains stop, for these rivers to keep flowing, they need base flows emerging from below the ground. But when we over-extract groundwater, the direction of these flows is reversed and ‘gaining’ rivers get converted into ‘losing’ rivers. In a similar way, springs, which have historically been the main source of water of people in the mountains, are drying up.

To understand how we can reverse this dire situation requires a careful reflection on the nature of groundwater and a recognition that it is a common-pool resource. By its very nature, it is a shared heritage. We can divide the land under which this water is located but we cannot divide the water, which moves in a fluid and fugitive manner, below the surface. Competitive, individual extraction of groundwater leads to a mutually destructive cycle, wherein each user tries to outdo the others in drilling deeper and deeper, till the point – which is being reached in so many aquifers in India today – where virtually no groundwater is left.

 

Unfortunately, as the water crisis has deepened, so has our desperation and the extent we are prepared to go in violating the basic principles of both science and spirituality. Instead of learning from our errors, we have moved even further in the same mistaken direction. The proposal for interlinking of India’s rivers (ILR) is one such example. The entire idea is based on a series of erroneous presumptions. It is claimed that since some parts of India chronically face floods and others droughts, the solution is to divert water from surplus river basins to deficit ones, so that everyone can live happily ever after.

Is it actually true that some areas in India have too much water? Try telling the north-eastern states that. Sohra (previously called Cherrapunjee), which is one of the highest rainfall hotspots on the planet, today suffers from an acute shortage of drinking water. The reason for it lies in the old paradigm of water management, where we failed to protect our catchment areas, destroyed springs and over-exploited groundwater.

Climate change has further aggravated the situation. Today, my organization, Samaj Pragati Sahayog, is working to find a solution to this vexed problem but I can tell you that in Sohra, with only 70,000 people and as much as 8000 mm of rain (ten times that of Delhi), we still have no water to spare for anyone else in the country. Given the dependence on the monsoon in the subcontinent, the periods when rivers have ‘surplus’ water are generally synchronous. A recent study found a significant decrease in monsoon rainfall over water ‘surplus’ river basins in India, thus raising questions about the basic presumptions of the ILR project.

The Himalayan component of the ILR project plans to store water in dams on the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, in the supposedly surplus northern and eastern states, and then transfer that water via canals to the water-short central, southern and the western regions. The peninsular component attempts something similar on peninsular rivers, again transferring supposedly surplus water from the east to the south and west.

 

Overall, the attempt is to connect 44 rivers via 9,600 km of canals at an estimated cost of Rs 11 lakh crore. This is only an approximation of the actual cost, which is likely to be much higher (given expected delays in implementation) and does not include costs of energy, farm and forest submergence and human displacement. It is truly ironic that given the topography of India and the way the links are envisaged, they might totally bypass the core dryland areas of central and western India, which are located at elevations of 300 to 1000 metres above mean sea level.

In recent years, scientists have begun to carefully examine the potential impact of such large interventions in India’s river systems. A 2018 study of 29 of these 44 rivers, published in the renowned international science journal Elementa, finds that the ILR project will submerge 3,400 sq km of land and displace approximately 700,000 people, other than the huge additional displacement that would be caused by the vast canal network. It will also decrease river flows for 24 of the 29 rivers (as much as 73 per cent), reducing freshwater deliveries to wetlands and estuaries. Waterways will be exposed to new contaminants, invasive species, and disease-causing agents and the already vulnerable deltas of the Indian subcontinent will be further compromised due to reduced silt deposited by rivers in their deltas, by as much as eighty seven per cent.

 

Reduced stream-flows will likely affect delta salinity conditions, under a future rising sea level scenario, the salinity of groundwater and river channels is expected to increase. Climate related salinity incursion in rivers and deltas will be exacerbated by the decrease in river mouth discharge. Rare ecosystems and vital agricultural areas would become more vulnerable to storm surges, river flooding and heightened salinity. Already, reduced inflows due to natural and manmade processes, have led to shoreline losses in the Krishna, Godavari and Mahanadi rivers. The ILR project will further aggravate the problem. This scenario is very much in line with the past experience of the Colorado, Nile, Indus and Yellow (Huanghe) river systems, where similar but smaller projects have been attempted in the past. As the Elementa study argues, India’s ILR project is ‘fifty to one-hundred times the volume of the largest inter-basin water transfer system in the United States and will likely constitute the largest construction project in human history.’

We must also recognize that the ILR project could profoundly impact the very integrity of India’s monsoon system. The continuous flow of fresh river water into the sea is what helps maintain a low salinity layer of water with low density, in the upper layers of the Bay of Bengal. This is a reason for the maintenance of high sea-surface temperatures (greater than 28 degrees C), which create low pressure areas and intensify monsoon activity. Rainfall over much of the subcontinent is effectively controlled by this layer of low salinity water. A disruption in this layer, because of massive damming of rivers under the ILR and resultant reduction in fresh water flows into the sea, could have serious long-term consequences for climate and rainfall in the subcontinent, endangering the livelihoods of a vast population.

 

A similar short-sightedness is evident in our approach towards flood management. The central focus of flood policy in India has been engineering solutions. Apart from large dams, India has constructed 35,000 km of embankments parallel to rivers in their flood plains. But the problem has only got worse over time. In 2008, a breach in an upstream embankment of the Kosi river led to a thousand deaths and the displacement of 3.35 million people. In North Bihar, despite continued construction of embankments, flood prone area have increased 200 per cent since independence, partly because embankments end up obstructing natural drainage that impede natural building up of river deltas and flood plains. In the Kosi, embankments have dramatically increased the accumulated sediments in this river of already exceptionally high sediment load, whose roots lie in massive erosion of its upper catchments. The consequent super-elevated river bed leads to breaches in embankments, further worsening the flood situation, especially because settlements have been encouraged on flood plains and drainage lines.

 

The origins of our approach to flood management can be traced to the colonial period. A study of experiments with flood control in delta regions of eastern India from 1803 to 1956 shows how this region was transformed from a flood dependent agrarian regime to a flood vulnerable landscape. The colonial administration developed the idea of flood control to secure its property regime and revenue collection strategies. Embankments designed to insulate lands from inundation were the first flood control works deployed by the British in the Orissa delta. When the iconic engineer Sir Arthur Cotton (in whose memory stands a museum in Rajahmundry) was called upon to survey the delta in 1858, he came up with one of those classic pronouncements, which (even though deeply flawed) have guided water policy in India till today: ‘all deltas require essentially the same treatment’, which meant that their rivers needed to be controlled and regulated into an invariable and constant supply.

So, how do we overthrow this colonial legacy to forge new solutions? First, by going back to the fundamentals of science and acknowledging the inter-connectedness of different elements in the water cycle. Let us understand this with the example of the Kerala floods last year, which have occurred for the third year in succession. Like the 2013 floods in Uttarakhand, the Kerala floods clearly illustrate the importance of the health of catchment areas, which deliver water to us. Reckless (and largely illegal) construction activity and quarrying in the eco-fragile Himalayas and Western Ghats has exponentially increased the probability of landslides. The Madhav Gadgil and Kasturirangan committees have already argued for recognizing the invaluable ecosystem services provided by the Western Ghats and to design a development paradigm that recognizes, values and protects them. Our insistent ignoring of this advice continues to imperil people living in these regions.

 

What is worse, most of Kerala’s dams are concentrated in the Western Ghats. And there is a constant conflict between the demands of power generation, which requires reservoirs to be full and the imperatives of flood control, which can only happen if the dams are relatively empty before the deluge. In any case, most of our dams are meant for either irrigation or power, with flood control being a secondary objective. Instead, as Secretary, Earth Sciences, Government of India him-self recently suggested, poor reservoir management has made dams an aggravating factor in floods, as seen in Surat in 2006, Chennai in 2015 and Bihar in 2016.

What has further aggravated the problem of floods, especially in urban areas, is the destruction of natural pathways of water through the city towards the river or the sea. Once we block these, where will the flood water go, but into our homes and work places? Hyderabad in 2000, Ahmedabad in 2001, Delhi in 2003, 2009 and 2010, Chennai in 2004, 2015 and 2017, Mumbai in 2005 and 2017, Kolkata in 2007, Jamshedpur in 2008, Guwahati, Kochi and Srinagar in 2014, Thiruvananthapuram in 2017 – it is a recurrent, endless saga of urban flooding.

But even as we recount them, we forget that Chennai had more than 600 water bodies in the 1980s. Today not even a third survive. Hyderabad has lost 3,245 hectares of wetlands in the last 15 years. Bengaluru had 262 lakes in the 1960s; today hardly 10 have any water. Bellandur lake even caught fire in 2015, 2017 and 2018 due to the chemically active sludge dumped into it. Alleppey, the ‘Venice of the East’, is struggling to clean and desilt its beautiful lake system, which protected it from floods in the past. We have criminally neglected and encroached upon these water bodies that act as sponges for excess water and whose natural drainages provided a safe exit for flood waters.

Copenhagen, London, New Orleans, Chicago, Rotterdam, Melbourne and New York are all acknowledging that the increasingly frequent cloudbursts of the 21st century demand a recognition that the economy is but a small element within the larger ecosystem. Their planning reflects exciting ‘building with nature’ and ‘room-for-the-river’ perspectives, with much greater emphasis on low cost blue-green infrastructure that connects urban hydrological functions (blue) with vegetation systems (green).

 

India can do well to learn from these ecological pioneers by carefully adapting learnings to our own conditions. We need to understand that rivers are not human creations like roads and power lines, to be twisted and turned at will. They are living ecosystems that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. In our arrogance we have already caused them much damage. It is time now for us to come together to regenerate our river basin ecosystems, weaving our interventions into the delicate fabric of nature, with humility and wisdom, heeding both science and spirituality.

So what would be the constituent elements of this new approach to water that could save both our rivers and our groundwater, and help resolve the water crisis at the same time? The single largest fact of India’s water is that 90 per cent of it is consumed in farming. And that 80 per cent of this irrigation is for three water guzzling crops – rice, wheat and sugarcane. Reducing this number is the most effective way of solving India’s water problem. But can we do this without hurting our farmers, who are already in so much distress? Yes, we can. Indeed, it turns out that the solution to India’s water crisis and that of the farmers, both lie in the very same domain.

 

India’s farmers, even in drought prone areas, grow these water intensive crops because these are the crops that have a stable market. The government over the past 50 years has primarily procured wheat and rice from farmers. And sugarcane is bought by sugar factories. If we diversify our procurement operations to include less water intensive crops like millets, pulses and oilseeds, especially in India’s drylands, farmers would have the requisite incentive to grow them.

But what will we do with these crops after procurement? The simple answer is to introduce them into the Midday Meal Scheme and Integrated Child Development Services, which are the largest child nutrition programmes in human history. This would create a ginormous and steady demand for these crops, and farmers in regions where it is ecologically appropriate to grow them, would be incentivised to shift away from water intensive wheat, rice and sugarcane. Of course, we must also ensure that India’s vast majority of small and marginal farmers are covered by and benefit from, these procurement operations of the government.

Official estimates indicate that around 300,000 farmers have committed suicide over the past thirty years in India. This is something that has never happened before in Indian history. Although there is no doubt that the Green Revolution played a key role in India’s food security in the 1970s and 1980s, in the 21st century, the return to chemical fertilizers and pesticides has steadily fallen. Meanwhile, costs of these inputs have risen steeply. This has sometimes resulted in negative net incomes for farmers.

 

Responding to this situation by raising Minimum Support Prices for these very same crops, or through loan waivers or cash transfers, completely side-steps the deeper crisis of farming in India. On the other hand, a paradigm shift towards a more diversified, low cost, low risk, non-chemical agriculture would help secure multiple win-wins: improvement in soil and water quality, higher and more stable net incomes for farmers, reduced malnutrition and obesity, and a simple solution to India’s water problem, through a huge reduction in use of water in agriculture.

As we diversify the cropping pattern, aligning it more closely with India’s agro-bio-geo-ecological diversity, voluminous quantities of water would be released for meeting drinking water needs in both rural and urban areas, and for the demands of both sustainable farming and industry. As we move towards non-chemical agriculture, the dependence of farmers on high cost external inputs will decline and even if there is a slight drop in productivity in the transition phase, this would be more than be made up by both hugely reduced costs of cultivation and steady demand for these crops through government procurement operations.

What is more, if our children were to eat these ‘nutri-cereals’, with much higher protein, iron and fibre and a significantly lower glycemic index, we would be better placed to solve our twin problems of malnutrition and obesity. Diabetics increased in every Indian state between 1990 and 2016, even among the poor, rising from 26 million in 1990 to 65 million in 2016. This number is projected to double by 2030. A major contributor to this epidemic is the displacement of whole foods in our diets by energy dense and nutrient poor, ultra-processed food products.

This has a clear relationship with the monoculture we adopted after the Green Revolution, where farmers mainly grew wheat and rice. In an intensely risky enterprise such as farming, it makes no sense whatsoever to adopt monoculture. With both high weather and market risk, resilience (as in the stock market) demands crop (portfolio) diversification. But we have subjected our farmers to exactly the opposite by creating incentives against diversity. Which has broken the back of Indian farming, even as it has engineered an artificial water crisis in a land where there is water aplenty, if only we were to manage it judiciously.

 

Allied to this paradigm shift in farming, we need to democratize water. Water, by its very nature, is a shared resource, which can only be nourished through participatory governance. Whether it is our rivers or India’s most important groundwater resource, we can only protect them if we recognize the integral interconnectedness of catchment areas, rivers and rural and urban aquifers. Here again there are countless examples from all over India where stakeholders have come together to form democratic associations to manage their shared groundwater and surface water collectively, equitably and for sustainability.

It is now for the government to take the necessary steps to learn from these pioneers and upscale their efforts in respectful partnership with the primary custodians in each context. This might, of course, be the harder part, as governments tend not to find it easy to respect, listen to, or learn from practitioners on the ground. But as a people we have no choice left in the matter. Only a jan andolan on water can save us now.

 

* Mihir Shah has spent the last thirty years, living and working with farmers in tribal central India, forging solutions to India’s water and livelihood problems.