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dam-l LS: Anil Agarwal on India's drinking water
A message from Centre for Science and Environment Director, Anil Agarwal:
Promising water
Politicians do more to deplete water than provide people a sustained supply
At the recent meeting of the World Water Commission in Stockholm - set up
last year
with the support of several governments and United Nations' agencies - to
develop a
vision for water management in the next century, one of the members
wondered how we
would get the world's politicians to understand the importance of water,
which is
going to become increasingly scarce and polluted in the years to come.
I immediately pointed out that I had not met a single politician at least
in India -
who did not recognise the importance of water, particularly drinking
water. But I
had hardly met a politician who knew what to do about the problem, except
to throw
money at it. And teaching people that it is going to be quite difficult.
The problem is that management of water is really a question of good
governance of a
natural resource - which includes a variety of issues ranging from the
establishment
of proper property rights and good stakeholder involvement to the
establishment of
varied forms of institutions - from the state level to the private and
community
level, proper pricing, transparency and accountability, strict regulation,
integrated economy-environment management, comprehensive environmental
management,
appropriate choice of technology, and good research, data collection and mass
education. How do we get politicians to govern properly?
In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a party and Shri Atal Behari
Vaypayee
as the leader of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) understand water is
important but are clueless of what has to be done. Both in its 1998
National Agenda
for Governance and the 1999 election manifesto, the NDA has promised that
it "will
spare no effort to ensure that potable drinking water is available to all
villages
in the next five years." This is an absolutely wonderful promise. Moving and
delightful. Water is a matter of life and death in some ways as important
as, if
not more, than Kargil. Have you ever suffered from cholera or cancer
because of
polluted water or walked miles to get yourself a pot of that wonderful liquid
because of all-round shortage?
But will the NDA be able to deliver this beautiful liquid in a potable form to
India's people? To that beautiful sentence, the 1999 election manifesto
merely adds
that "Age-old and traditional methods of water utilisation, in both rural
and urban
areas, will receive urgent attention." As one of the editors of The Fourth
Citizens'
Report on the State of India's Environment which focussed on India's
traditional
technologies and water management systems, I feel proud that the NDA has
taken note
of India's valuable traditions in this field. But will this be enough to
meet the
NDA's glorious objective?
The reality today is that nobody, absolutely nobody, today gets potable
water. Even
the rich and mighty who have dozens of taps in their houses. Otherwise the
bottled
water industry would not be recording a growth rate of 300-400 per cent
every year,
if indeed that is true of bottled water, which is more expensive than milk.
I was one of those who had heard Vajpayeeji wax eloquent about drinking
water in
Parliament when it debated the NDA's plan of action in 1998. Vajpayeeji had
pointed
out, "Water can also catch fire. The problem of water is going to become
even more
complicated. The problem of water is not limited only to India. This has
become a
world problem. It is possible that the next major source of tension in the
world
will be water, not petrol. The pollution of water is increasing. The
quantity of
water is getting reduced. The water-table is falling. We all see this in our
constituencies. We feel disturbed by the problems people are facing.
Sangmaji, we
have not given the assurance that we will do everything in five years. Only
in the
case of water, we would like to give the assurance that in five years there
should
be good drinking water everywhere. And this is our commitment." These are such
wonderful words. I was absolutely thrilled to hear them.
But my joy was shortlived. About a year later, after as much as 20 per cent
of the
time allotted by Vajpayeeji had gone by and after the country had exploded
atomic
bombs, fired missiles and what not, showing clearly where Vajpayeeji's
priorities
lay, I checked with the Planning Commission on what was happening as there
was total
silence about this issue in the media. I asked if the Prime Minister had
provided
any directions or vision on how the task should be accomplished,
recognising that
water management is a very complex problem and past experience has a lot to
teach us
about what to do and not to do. The simple answer was 'no'. So is nothing
happening,
I asked? "No, that is not true either" said my respondent, "we have been
asked to
allocate more money for this sector." But what about all the new learning
in this
field? "Well, it will all be written in the plan document." "Fine," I said,
"but how
will you ensure that this learning is implemented?" My respondent shrugged his
shoulder. It was obvious that no one in the NDA had learnt anything from the
innumerable Indian experiences of the past.
It was during Vajpayeeji's regime that an officer as senior as N C Saxena
who, as
secretary in the ministry of rural development, had produced stunning
figures on
India's deplorable record with drinking water programmes. In 1972, surveys had
revealed that there were 150,000 drinking water 'problem villages' in
India. By
1980, some 94,000 villages were covered and some 56,000 were left
uncovered. But the
1980 survey revealed that there were some 231,000 problem villages. By
1985, only
39,000 villages were left uncovered but the new survey revealed 161,722
problem
villages. Again, by 1994, there were only 70 uncovered villages but the
1994 survey
revealed 140,975 problem villages (See Down to Earth, February 28, 1998).
Why this
extraordinary discrepancy between government records and reality? Because of
corruption and incompetence resulting in bad water supply schemes, because of
excessive exploitation of groundwater forcing the traditional wells to run
dry,
because of people giving up their traditional sources in the hope that the
government will help them and because of growing pollution. Who had heard
of arsenic
in groundwater?
Another experience with Vajpayeeji's party also left me equally cold.
Despite the
BJP's professed and repeated respect for Hinduism, I had not seen any
statement by
its leaders on the utterly deplorable state of Bharat's rivers - rivers
which are
worshipped by Hindus unlike any other religion in the world. What is the
BJP doing
to clean up Mother Ganga, Mother Yamuna and Mother Bhavani? Should we keep
throwing
filth on the faces of our mother? What kind of Hindus are we? One-half or
one-third
Hindus? Hinduism, in fact, more than any other religion, is practice rather
than
religious ideology. So I asked a correspondent of Down to Earth to
interview BJP
leader Kushabhau Thakre.
Thakreji was livid when he heard the questions. He answered, "This is
political
jingoism." Meaning this is not an environmental question. Of course, it is not
entirely so, but don't India's citizens have a right to ask their politicians
questions about their professed ideology and actual practice? Even more
disturbing
was Thakreji's answer on the subject of water supply which the party leader
had
talked about with such eloquence. Thakreji merely had three things to say.
One,
politicians cannot solve the problem of water. Two, this is a problem to which
solutions can only be provided by experts. Three, experts unfortunately
never speak
with one voice and are often one-sided. So what do politicians do? (See
Down to
Earth, June 30, 1998) If I was interviewing Thakreji, I would have said,
"This is
precisely why politicians must provide experts with the framework of a
clear vision
and priorities for them to do their job." Thakreji was behaving like any
bureaucrat
when confronted with a problem: Just pass the buck.
It is obvious that the BJP and its alliance partners have done nothing to
understand
an issue on which they had given such a solemn promise. It was Rajiv Gandhi
who had
first given a high profile to drinking water programmes by making it one of
the five
technology missions, whose progress would be directly reported to him. A
reasonably
good programme was developed but a part of it soon deteriorated into a
standard
pumps and pipes programme which more often fails to yield water. With such
a complex
issue as water, mistakes are inevitable. But the NDA had made no effort to
learn
from that experience. Nor did the alliance politicians learn from Digvijay
Singh's
work in Madhya Pradesh which would have told them that water rises in
drinking water
wells only when an effective watershed programme is taken up with the people's
participation as in Jhabua. The programme had nothing to do with water; it
was a
programme for watersheds. No one has realised that to get rid of 'ecological
poverty' one first has to get rid of 'mental poverty'. It is clear that NDA's
promise on water is nothing more than words. And at best it means a lot of
valuable
taxpayer money literally thrown down the drain.
The trouble with water is that it quickly collects all the muck of human
society and
pollutes itself. Equally, the state of water in any country reflects the
madness,
mismanagement and misgovernance of that country. The Yamuna today is
polluted only
because there is total lack of foresight in national planning, immense
corruption in
implementing the country's innumerable laws, total lack of transparency and
accountability amongst water supply agencies, lack of stakeholder
involvement and
unbelievable level of 'mental poverty' in dealing with this problem. The
Dal Lake -
the jewel of the Kashmir Valley - is today dying because of the extraordinary
ingenuity of the hapless local people who are turning the entire water body
into a
mass of floating agricultural fields. Development that has not reached the
poor and
militancy which has further robbed them of something that they did have -
tourism -
is forcing the poor and the embattled to destroy their very source of
survival.
None of these examples are today unique. In fact, this is what is happening
to every
waterbody and India's water resources are in a deep state of crisis. People
in the
hills don't get water - their traditional springs are dying - because there
has been
massive deforestation. In the plains, innumerable wells - traditional
sources of
drinking water called kuas in the North - are losing their precious liquid
because
of the excessive use of groundwater by the agricultural rich for
irrigation. Even
Kerala which such high rainfall faces water shortages.
Does anybody know how to control river pollution? Does anybody know how to
sustainably manage and protect aquifers? Does anybody know how to control the
agricultural rich? Literally nobody does. Unfortunately, nobody is even
prepared to
learn from past mistakes. If the NDA were to instal more tubewells for
water supply,
you can be rest assured the water will disappear even faster.
- Anil Agarwal
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