Mains Marathon

Approach

• Introduce the abundance of water resources in India with Data.
• Discuss the causes of water scarcity in India and steps needed to overcome it.
• Conclude suitably

Answer:

India is a monsoonal country with abundant surface and ground water across its length and breath. It accounts for 18% of the world population and about 4% of the world’s water resources.

Water resources in India include precipitation, surface, groundwater storage and hydropower potential. India experiences an average precipitation of 118 cm per year, or about 4,000 cubic kilometers of rain annually that is about 1,720 cubic meters of fresh water per person every year.

This amount of water is much more than what is mandated by the UN. The rainwater alone can fulfil the water demand of India regardless of other water resources in India.

Although nature gifted India enough water resources for its need, it struggles to meet the daily water demand of its people ranging from agricultural, industry and domestic demand.

Let’s examine the causes of the India's water scarcity:

• India is a tropical monsoon country and the 2/3rd of total precipitation occurs in just 3 months by the monsoonal rain. Rain is so intense, and it is said that it pours, not rain in India.
• Intensive rain in small amounts of time leads to accelerated runoff and very less percolation. It makes very little use of rain.
• The erratic nature of monsoon due to its late arrival or early withdrawal brought drought in agriculture and led to extraction of groundwater to satisfy water needs in agriculture.
• The monsoonal rain is not uniform as it is influenced by the topography of the region. Ex. Abundant monsoon rain in foothills of Himalaya, north-east India and western ghat is due to mountains parallel to hills.
• The surface water of India is also dependent on monsoon in a major part of the country and has very little water in the lean season. Ex. In Godavari and Narmada very, little water remains during their lean seasons.
  • It makes the importance of any storage infrastructure less usable and also poses risk of overflow during the monsoon season.
• The recharge of groundwater and its uses are also influenced by the geography and topography in a number of ways.
  • The hilly, rocky and plateau nature of south India and northern mountainous region prevent the groundwater recharge on one hand and the extraction of groundwater in valley area and the accelerated runoff exaggerate the problem of water cycle.
• Agriculture consumes more than 80% of extracted groundwater and domestic need is only confined to 5% of total extracted groundwater. It shows the mismanagement of groundwater on a very large scale.
• One-way intensive use of all the resources of water without the recharge and preservation of the waterbody in both rural and urban areas.
• The concretization in urban areas and encroachment of water bodies in both urban and rural areas not only prevent surface storage and groundwater recharge but also causes disasters like floods.
  • Guwahati’s Deepor Beel, for example, is used by the municipal corporation to dump solid waste.
• The water harvesting and reuse technology is still a luxury in India, the people in rural and small towns face hardship for purchase, use, and repair because of less motivation among both public officials and general public for use of these equipment.

It is true that India is blessed with enough water for its needs. But it has to work on the management of the water cycle for sustainability. For this step need to be taken:

• To cut the demand for water in the agriculture sector-
  • Prefer the crops as per the nature of agro-climatic region
  • Installation of water efficient technologies like Drip irrigation, sprinkle irrigation etc.
  • Provisions for the shed over the crop to reduce transpiration because plants use only 2% of the absorbed water and rest is to reduce heat in the form of transpiration.
  • In the long term, we need to develop more water efficient crops by genetic modification and biogenesis and need to adopt practices like Aquaculture, Aeroponics etc.
• In the industrial sector, we need to adopt practices like Zero liquid discharge or minimum liquid discharge for maximum use of the same water and reduce the water budget of industry.
• Domestic sector must adopt the cyclic use of water for maximum use of water.

Steps need to be taken to increase the availability of water:

• Need to implement more intensively the small water storage and preservation facilities like Amrit Sarovar and pond making under MGNREGA for rainwater storage and local need of water in rural areas.
• There needs to be a mandatory provision to install a domestic water harvesting system in every newly constructed house.
• Installation of water ATM to sell drinkable water to fulfil need of drinking water at roadside. It will also curtail pet plastic bottles.
• River linking with small canals in local areas can mitigate the demand of flood and drought in neighbouring watershed areas. Ex. Ken-Betwa water link.
• The need to install ground water recharging systems in rural and urban water bodies for ground water recharge and the rejuvenation and encroachment prevention of these water bodies is equally important.
• Need to upgrade the technology for efficient prediction of monsoon.