The Danger of Making Water Everybody’s ‘Business’

Nitin Bassi, Mahendra Singh Verma, Harish Kumara and M. Dinesh Kumar

With some delay in the arrival of monsoon rains this summer, the theme ‘India’s growing urban thirst’ is back in the news rooms. While part of the blame has gone to lack of preparedness of the urban local bodies, a major cause according to some opinion makers is lack of adequate community efforts at rainwater harvesting. A panic button was pressed when the NITI Ayog predicted that several Indian cities would soon run out of water. With a rainfall deficit at 33% in June 2019 and with unregulated pumping, most of the underground reserves that are tapped for domestic water supply, are now emptied. During such crisis situations, supply of drinking water is usually managed with the help of surface reservoirs. The latest data from the Central Water Commission shows that reservoirs in western and peninsular India are 23-84% cent below the normal levels.

Even under normal situation, water from the reservoirs located in far off catchments is the main source of water supply in most large cities of India. Delhi gets its water from a source which is about 220 km away in Haridwar through the upper Ganga canal; Bengaluru from Cauvery river at a distance of about 100 km; Hyderabad from Krishna and Godavari rivers, with withdrawal sources located several hundred kilometres away. As the cities grew, the distance of transfer has only been increasing. Further, only a tiny proportion of water supply in these cities is met by local water sources which include lakes, tanks and wells. For instance, in Delhi, less than 10% of the total water supply is from groundwater. The reason for depending on distant reservoir is that the local sources (including groundwater) cannot meet even a small fraction of the water demand of these cities.

Yet, when it comes to offering solution for addressing urban water scarcity, some self-proclaimed 'urban water experts cum socialites’ parade ideas such as recharging groundwater by rain water harvesting. Some even advocate using open (dug) wells as storage structures for harvested rainwater. Interestingly, they conveniently forget the fact that water scarcity strikes these cities when the monsoon fails (with no recharge to the local aquifers and no fresh inflows into the dried-up reservoirs that were supplying water). The question is: ‘when there is no water that can contribute to natural recharge or inflow into reservoirs, where does one find water for artificial recharge?’ Moreover, when the land is sold at a premium in the cities, one wonders where do we find the space for digging new open wells, and who would dug out the old wells that were filled up, for recharge work? While these ideas are Utopian, it is also difficult to understand the logic behind going back to old disused open or dug wells, when water level has already gone so deep.

But in the garb of environmental activism, which some scholars have called “bourgeois environmentalism”, what these people actually do is aggressive marketing of their ‘products’. To do that, they would often cite anecdotes from Chennai, Bangalore etc., wherein ‘water activist X saved millions of litres of water using an entirely new approach in water conservation, and that it has already become a movement spreading to more cities and towns', etc. These days, the newspapers and social media are flooded with such stories and the poor citizens are forced to believe them as there is hardly any mechanisms to cross check these tall claims. Question like “If these approaches are so effective, how come Chennai faces severe water scarcity?” will be treated as persona non-grata. The basic point is even if these interventions are done properly, what they can contribute is only a miniscule in comparison to the magnitude of the problem that we need to tackle.

For the advocates of rainwater harvesting, water is like a seasonal agenda, which gets fillip only during the times of scarcity. As part of the new narrative of water management, they ridicule large dams and reservoirs on which large and medium cities most depend for their water supply, making occasional jibes like ‘The Era of large dams and deep wells is over’. They often cook up data to show that the contribution of imported water from large reservoirs to urban water supply is much less than what the utilities claim it to be. If anyone comes up with data to counter this narrative, the professional integrity of the agency which provides the data would be questioned. The hidden agenda of these groups is to create an environment of distrust in the minds of the community members about the public utility so that it will be easy to push them back to informal system of water supply (by promoting roof top rainwater harvesting, dug well recharge, tank desilting, etc) where they can rule the roost.    

An analysis done by Arghyam/IRAP (Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy) in 2012 showed that roof top rainwater harvesting systems are prohibitively expensive in terms of cost per cubic metre of water harvested, when done in very low to medium rainfall (200-1,000 mm) regions—in the range of Rs. 150-200 /cubic metre of water at current prices. However, systematic effort is made by the proponents to downplay the cost aspect, and virtues like ‘saving the huge municipal water bill’, ‘having own source of water’, are talked about.

Needless to say, there are limits to augmenting water supplies from surface sources to quench the growing urban thirst. However, the solutions do not lie in water harvesting especially in regions which are naturally water stressed but in adopting policies which can promote judicious use of available water.  

The need for reducing unaccounted for water losses (which are up to 50% in many cities), installing household water meters, and efficient pricing of water that includes resource cost, the cost of water treatment (raw and wastewater) and cost of conveyance and distribution, has been discussed by researchers in recent past. Yet most Indian cities are struggling hard to implement them due to lack of political commitment due to the fear of losing votes, shortage of human resources, and an expanding population which live in urban fringes and not connected to the formal water supply and sewerage networks.

Under such circumstances, what is also required is expansion of the water supply and sewerage network and investment in wastewater treatment plants and technologies for cost efficient treatment of wastewater. As per the estimates of the Central Pollution Control Board, capacity exists to treat only 37% of the 61,754 million litres of sewage generated (per day) from urban centres in India. The sewage treatment capacity in the metropolitan cities is substantially higher (51%) than in Class I cities and Class II towns where it is 18% and 9%, respectively. Hence there is enormous need for treatment and reuse of wastewater.

However, this is not going to be easy. There is a social stigma attached to reusing treated wastewater in households. Some states in India, including Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Haryana, have framed policies to promote treated wastewater reuse but they are mainly for industrial and non-potable purposes. Nevertheless, with highly variable rainfall and growing urban water demand, time has come to make it mandatory for all the industries, large hotels and public parks in the urban areas to use treated wastewater for their operations. Subsequently, with the use of better treatment technologies, efforts should be to bring treated wastewater to a quality which is acceptable to the community for human consumption. Or else, these self-proclaimed ‘urban water experts’ will continue creating panic in the minds of the people; and exploit the situation by making emotional appeals and murdering the basics of science behind good water management with their ‘voodoo science’.

 As a senior colleague from the water sector puts it: “When water was made everybody’s business, all those who have business interests got involved in the water sector”.

Nitin Bassi is a Principal Researcher with the Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP), Mahendra Singh Verma is Advisor-Projects and Partnerships with IRAP, Harish Kumara is consultant to IRAP, and M. Dinesh Kumar is Executive Director of IRAP. Email: [email protected]