By Cheryl Colopy, The New York Times, October 8, 2012
INDIA’S monsoon
rains are retreating this week, a delayed end to a yearly wet season that has
become ever more unpredictable as a result of global
warming. Of all the challenges that face India, few are more pressing than how
it manages water. In vast cities like New Delhi, where showers and flush
toilets have become necessities for a rapidly expanding middle class,
groundwater has been depleted. New Delhi once had many ponds and an open
floodplain to absorb the monsoon and replenish aquifers; now the sprawling city
has more concrete and asphalt than it has ponds and fields to absorb water.
India’s capital has
come to rely for half its water on dams in the Himalaya range that capture
monsoon runoff. But the dams disrupt the ecology of the Himalaya, South Asia’s
precious watershed. Much of the waste from New Delhi’s overwhelmed sewage
treatment system ends up in the Yamuna River, one of the main tributaries of
the Ganges, which winds down from the Himalaya and flows 1,500 miles across
India to the Bay of Bengal. Combined with under-regulated industrial effluents,
urban waste has turned India’s mythic and misused rivers into cesspools.
In the countryside, where a vast majority of Indians still live, a
combination of free electricity and inadequate regulation has led farmers to
deplete untold groundwater supplies. In some places the water table is so low
it no longer helps sustain roots, so even more water must be pumped up. In
addition, soils have been degraded by chemical fertilizers, so they require
even more water.
But in some parts of India, communities are turning to “rainwater
harvesting,” capturing rainwater in ponds and allowing it to percolate into the
ground to feed wells and springs. Such techniques were once commonplace
throughout the South Asian subcontinent, where rain falls for only a few months
in the summer monsoon, and often not at all for the rest of the year. Now
villagers are returning to these ancient methods to secure the future.
In northwest India, near Almora, a town of 40,000 in the Himalayan
foothills, farmers are restoring ponds that have fallen into disuse in order to
once again replenish groundwater and feed springs. They are also digging new
ponds to use for irrigation and fish culture. In one village near there, I
visited a one-room preschool — a balwadi, or child’s garden — where mothers in
brightly colored saris told me that they needed a toilet so that the kids
wouldn’t have to run to the woods to relieve themselves. I took that to
indicate that this area, while still poor, was progressing; the rural villagers
expected to have some form of indoor toilet. However, there isn’t enough water
for full plumbing — and there is barely enough in the town itself, where many
people have plumbing, but the river cannot satisfy all the needs of both the
town and irrigation systems in farms nearby.
India’s challenges — how to keep the economic engine moving while
making government more effective and efficient; how to raise hundreds of
millions of people out of poverty while protecting the environment — are
staggering. Efforts like Almora’s hold great promise, and more are needed.
Even though much of the water resource planning in India looks
anachronistic given what we now know, a large contingent in government and
engineering circles still advocates big, highly engineered, concrete-based
solutions: large dams and deep reservoirs to generate electricity, urban water
and sewer systems like those in the West. Many of these projects address the
needs of industry and city dwellers, but some of the big dams and concrete
canals proposed are meant to sustain rural areas, and many Indian water
specialists say they’ll do more harm than good.
In a region known as Bundelkhand, for example, a drought has driven
farmers to desperation: part of the year they go sleep on the streets of New
Delhi by night and build new high-rises there by day. The solution proposed for
Bundelkhand is to dam a river to the east and transport its water through a
long concrete canal. So far it has not been approved, thanks in part to the
opposition of people who say the proposal is foolish, expensive and disruptive.
They contend that the region can gain as much or more by going back to its
traditional rainwater harvesting: ponds, small dams and an older, more
sustainable style of farming.
In the Indian state just west of there, Rajasthan, some villagers have
already gone back to the style of rainwater harvesting their ancestors
practiced. In the hilly topography of eastern Rajasthan — part of an ancient
mountain range that long predates the upthrust of the Himalaya — villagers
built small damlike obstructions so that water could be trapped in depressions.
Within a short time the groundwater table rose, a dead river became perennial
again, and the land was green.
These successes hold lessons even for the megacities. In recent years,
environmental groups in New Delhi have advocated the harvesting of rainwater
from the roofs of houses and high-rises; the effort has begun, though not yet
on a scale large enough to halt the destructive dam building.
For a long time now, centralized solutions for India have appeared to
New Delhi’s bureaucracy as easier to manage than local initiatives. It would of
course be naïve to think a return to indigenous ways is the only answer in a
country that is on track to become the world’s most populous within a decade or
so. But for millenniums, the distinct regions of the subcontinent developed
ingenious ways to manage their water, and they prospered. Retrieving those
methods, perhaps reinventing them, could give rural Indians some control over
their destinies, even in the face of the wrenching changes wrought by
globalization and the continued warming of the planet.
Cheryl Colopy is a former
broadcast journalist and the author of “Dirty, Sacred Rivers:
Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis.”
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