Down to a trickle

As a blazing summer sets in and water stress is felt across the country, municipalities begin their annual struggle to quench public thirst.

Every year, it gets harder as the gap between water source and consumer becomes wider and the pipelines proportionately longer.

Mumbai is already heavily dependent on a tanker convoy to supply its need. Delhi is looking to Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand to satisfy its needs, Jaipur to Beesal, Haldwani to Jamrani, Bhopal to Hoshangabad, Indore to Maheshwar and so on. The policy-makers' efforts are geared exclusively towards the mining and transportation of water. This usually means damming rivers to create reservoirs and routing water over hundreds of kilometers through canals and pipelines. So focused are they on this exercise in engineering, they fail to consider the depletion of water sources to the point of no return.

Regeneration of river systems is not part of the planning process.

Flow rates of most Indian rivers and water quality have declined drastically, even as demand for water has increased. The drying of tributaries and the "order 1" and "order 2" streams is the first sign that water is not an inexhaustible resource. Overexploitation and pollution of rivers by factories, industrial farming and urbanisation coupled with the degradation of catchment areas have resulted in water stress even among communities living close to the river.

Delhi's insatiable demands for water have forced the state government to search for water sources farther and farther away. The city has financed — to the tune of Rs 2,000 crore —  the Renuka dam across the Giri river in Himachal Pradesh, in the hope of importing its water from there. This water for will come at a huge cost, not just for extraction and transportation, but in terms of the displacement of whole villages. The irony is that Delhi sits on the banks of the mighty Yamuna, but no thought is given to renewing the river.

The national capital is a n object lesson for cities across India, who will soon find themselves in the same predicament: having drained the Yamuna dry and converted it to a sewage canal, the metropolis now imports water from mountain rivers hundreds of kilometers away, disrupting lives and livelihoods of people who have never set eyes on Delhi.

While there has been a lot of focus on the Himalayan rivers because of climate change and melting of glaciers, the central Indian rivers are not much better off. Take, for instance, the Narmada, the lifeline of central India, on which tens of millions of people in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra depend for water. Between 1990-91 and 2004-5, the flow rate has declined by 177,766 cubic metres. The inflow from its 42 tributaries has reduced drastically. At the same time, demand for water has gone up. A new pipeline from Shahganj to Bhopal is to provide the city of lakes with an additional 180 million litres of water a day.

There are other side-effects to this profligate exploitation of river water. The Narmada's famous mahaseer fish is now on the verge of extinction, as are other endemic fresh water species, owing to the construction of dams and increasing pollution. A hundred sewage pipes dump their contents directly into the supposedly sacred river.

The Damodar is even worse off because the coal mines and washeries, steel and thermal power plants, coke ovens chemical industries on its banks dump their effluents into the river. At places, the flow of the river is a trickle and the quality of water varies from highly acidic to highly alkaline. High concentrations of toxic heavy metals are found in its sediment and the aquatic biodiversity has all but vanished. The river has now been linked to a high incidence of diseases among the communities living along its banks.

Regeneration of rivers is seen as a political risky exercise. For example, no policy-maker wants to be seen as opposing hydel projects, even in the face of a negative environmental impact assessment (assuming it is credible and transparent) report, for fear of appearing retrogressive. Similarly, political will is needed to stop deforestation and degradation of catchment areas through industrialisation and urbanisation, farming of land adjoining river banks and illegal sand mining — all undertaken in the name of 'development'.

Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan admitted as much when he inaugurated the International River Festival, 2010, on the banks of the Narmada last week. Even as he spoke, the many ills afflicting the river were starkly evident in the backdrop: constricted flow due to dams upstream; illegal sand mining; soil erosion due to riverside farms; sewers dumping their contents into the river, not to mention debris from religious rituals and animal carcasses.

A sea change in policy is needed to bring about a culture of "water discipline" and check wastage and this is possible only through a Gandhian approach to rivers: as a heritage to be preserved rather than a resource to be exploited.