India's Water Challenge - Some Statistics and Some Solutions

Capturing and delivering the water to the right places at the right times across thousands of miles, without wasting or contaminating tremendous amounts along the way, is an enormous engineering challenge, which India needs to take up as a priority.

Let's look at some statistics.

• More than 600 million Indians face “acute water shortages,” according to a report by NITI Aayog, 2018
• 21 cities in the risk of running out of groundwater as early as next year, including Bangalore and New Delhi.
• 40% of the population, or more than 500 million people, will have “no access to drinking water” by 2030.
• 70% of the nation’s water supply is contaminated - owing to the toxic runoff from burgeoning slums and factories.

Meanwhile, to support our huge population, farmers often without efficient irrigation systems employ heavily subsidized electricity to suck up as much groundwater as possible. Agriculture, which accounts for around 15% of the country’s GDP, consumes more than 80% of the water.

India gets more water than it needs in a given year.

The biggest source is rainfall, the vast majority of which falls during the summer monsoon season (a four-month window).

The country’s other major source is melting snow and glaciers from the Himalayan plateau, which feeds rivers in the north.

But India captures and uses only a fraction of its rainfall, allowing most of it to run off into the ocean.

The Ganges basin alone supports 600 million people, provides 12% of the country’s surface water and accounts for 33% of GDP. Yamuna's water would be nearly enough to supply the whole city of New Delhi if it actually reached people. But around 40% of the water is lost due to the ageing (leaking and corroded) system of pipes and illegal tapping, and the water never reaches to nearly 20% of households.

One possible solution (that has been in discussion for quite some time) is to link all the Indian Rivers- a massive engineering project costing more than $80 billion that would stitch together 60 of the nation’s rivers into a network. The idea is to smooth out the imbalances across thousands of miles, sloshing water from a flooded area on one side of the country to a drought-gripped region on the other. This in addition to capturing and filtering rainwater in tanks; rehabilitating lakes, ponds and rivers; and using both to recharge aquifers.

Time is indeed running out!