Water What-err?

Painting: Precious Water, I Kiss You !! by Parkpoom Poompana, River of Words

There was gung-ho all around the news channels about the traces of water found on Moon and with the Indian connection in the form of Chandrayaan, the Indian news channels went overboard showed interviews after interviews with each of the scientists pointing out that this is a very, very important finding...because of the possibility that it will help find any trace of life on moon or it may be a big step in setting up a colony on Moon. This feat will see more money being invested in moon missions both manned and unmanned. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) did play a part in the discovery and rightfully so, NASA acknowledged the credit. This certainly has to be a big achievement for the scientists who have put in their efforts on the maiden moon mission called Chandrayaan-1 and that suffix means that this is not the only one. What was ironical was that the same media was criticizing ISRO for the failure of the sensor and therefore the loss of all contacts from the station not even 2 weeks ago – However this change of stance is very much to be expected from the Indian media.
Well, don’t be too fooled by the amount of excitement that the media is putting on this news, the satellite pictures have shown that the moon’s water is located within two millimeters of the surface, but the moon is still quite dry, with about a liter of water for every ton of soil. Even the driest deserts in the Earth have more water than are at the poles of the moon and there is still no confirmation about the water availability in the middle portion of the moon. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not at all disregarding a bit about the significance of the achievement and I am sure that this is a small step towards the final mission. But the excitement about this news was certainly overbound and when we consider this news in the context of another revelation, ironically again from NASA.
There was this small news that featured a fortnight back in the Times of India on a different NASA mission that revealed that Punjab and Haryana have lost 109 cubic kilometers of ground water in six years. This is a bad news for what we call as India’s bread basket. In fact this bad news is not restricted to only these states but Delhi, Rajasthan, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Daman and Diu, Andhra and Tamil Nadu. To anyone anywhere in the world, this would have set off loud alarm bells, but nothing of that sort like that would happen in India. The so called, mature media is sleeping over this news. This is certainly not news because many of the NGOs and other organizations had predicted this anyway. No, this is not a result of the low monsoon rainfall this year, but the report is from a study made in the previous few years when there was no rainfall shortage.
The report suggests that the decline is due to the increasing population and changing lifestyles which necessarily means excessive pumping of the ground water. Intense competition among users — agriculture, industry, and domestic sectors — is driving the groundwater table lower since the extraction of groundwater is at much a higher rate that often recharge is not sufficient. The quality of groundwater is also getting severely affected because of the widespread pollution of surface water from discharge of untreated waste water and unscientific disposal of solid wastes. Water sources like lakes and tanks have been encroached upon to build colonies and apartments and the past wells have either closed or have been now functioning as dumping garbage bins. The situation is not at all under control, when people despite being warned about the consequences very rarely change their lifestyles. Why shouldn’t I wash my car with liters of water every day? Why shouldn’t I water my lawn with a hose pipe even when it’s raining? Why should I bother about the leakages in my bath room pipe, anyways the water is running down the drain line. Basically, if I have the money to buy the tankers, why should I care, is the credo most believe in. But what would happen when even the areas that the tankers get their water from go dry? From whatever little I know, this water too comes from clandestinely dug bore-wells. Unfortunately, no amount of distillation processes of sea-water will be able to replace fresh water resources.
I was having a discussion with a relative of a close friend who owns about 2 acres of land within the city limits and he was expressing that he never intended to stop flower farming (his sole source of income) on his land but was forced to stop it anyways because of the lack of ground water, due to the uncontrolled number of bore wells on all the four sides of the land. Now that his income source has suddenly blocked for the last 2 years, he is now thinking of disposing off his treasured land – a temptation that he had resisted only 4 years back when all his siblings had disposed off their share of the land. Well, he would be certainly richer than his siblings because of the appreciation of land prices in the last 4 years, but his story reveals the fact that despite his honest efforts to continue with farming, he is forced to resort to selling off his land bowing to the urbanization pressure.
Well certainly with the way things are going, it requires no Jyotish or Pundit to predict that water is going to be the Oil of the next era. Well one more griming fact is that you could somehow avoid the usage of oil, but how could you stop using water? Water wars are already not unimaginable. We have had states fighting for water from inter-state rivers. It is only a matter of time that this goes international. If measures are not taken soon to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, the consequences ... may include a reduction of agricultural output and shortages of potable water, leading to extensive socio-economic stresses.
Well what needs to be done then? The effective answer to the freshwater crisis is to integrate conservation and development activities – from water extraction to water management – at the local level; making communities aware and involving them fully is therefore critical for success. Rainwater harvesting schemes have to be been taken up and to be made mandatory in all cities, as the pilot cities have found these schemes to be pretty effective. However for rain water harvesting, you need rains, which means you need to have more trees and mountains and therefore serious measures have to be taken in order to conserve forests and mountains, so as to increase the rainfall. Renovation of forest lakes, tanks and other water sources will have a significant impact in ground water conservation. Both rural and urban wetlands are to be protected to avoid the rainwater flowing into rivers and then back into oceans. All these will contribute to a rise in the groundwater level and a reduction of salt water ingress. No single action would alleviate the crisis on hand, but all these cumulative efforts will ultimately pave the way for combining conservation of the environment with the basic needs of people. And as they say “blowing with the wind is easy, against it tougher, stopping it yet tougher and reversing it the toughest” We all need to collectively reverse the flow of the wind.