Big hype about water crisis

The NITI Aayog recently came out with a sensational report, which claims that 40 per cent of India’s population will have no access to drinking water by 2030 and that cities like Delhi would run out of groundwater in the next two years (by 2020).

The report is high on the sensational quotient. It is long on cool looking tables but short on accuracy and woefully deficient on strategies to solve the problem. By NITI Aayog’s own admission, water data either does not exist or where it is available it is unreliable. So essentially — garbage in; garbage out. The report parrots the World Bank and UN hype about a water crisis and is based on a complete misunderstanding of the water problem.

By freaking out about water supply, reports like these do a great disservice because they detract from the real problem: inadequate water infrastructure and poor management of existing resources. Our planet is not running out of water, nor is it losing water. The earth’s hydrologic cycle is a closed system of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration and so on. In fact, there is probably more water on Earth today than there was a few decades ago, in part, due to global warming and melting polar ice caps. Nor is the world running out of freshwater. It is not raining any less these days than it did millennia ago.

Also unlike oil, water is never completely consumed. Almost 99 per cent of the water that comes to your house goes back as wastewater. But the water isn’t lost. It can be reclaimed. The fundamental issue, therefore, becomes how we manage waste water so that it can be used and reused again and again. This is an issue of efficiency. Israel and Singapore are the two most water-scarce nations in the world. Yet, both the countries have demonstrated that by investing resources in modern technologies to treat and recycle water, water shortage can be overcome. Singapore only has a supply of about 80 litres per person per day, yet they don’t have a water problem because they recycle 100 per cent of their wastewater. So does Israel, which treats 100 per cent of its municipal wastewater and recycles it back for agricultural use. Almost half of the country’s water needs for irrigation are met through recycled wastewater. India, on the other hand, treats less than 40 per cent of its wastewater and less than 1 per cent is recycled back for agricultural use.

To find real solutions, it’s important to understand the problem. There is no water shortage. In fact, it is hard to know how the NITI report, without access to reliable hydrological studies on available groundwater supply, concluded that Delhi would run out of groundwater in the next two years. That is irresponsible sensationalism, unworthy of the nation’s think tank. Everybody has access to water, otherwise they would be dead by now. The more relevant issue is whether the water is clean, drinkable, and how convenient is it to get that water.

The first scientific study to calculate the earth’s total supply of groundwater was published in the journal Nature Geoscience in 2015. To determine the planet’s total volume of groundwater, scientists measured global levels of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen fused into groundwater. They calculated that the earth’s supply of groundwater is about six quintillion gallons — that’s 6 with eighteen zeros. While the vast majority of it is too far underground to be useful to humans, about 6 per cent is close enough to the Earth’s surface to be readily available for drinking and agriculture. That water is considered ‘modern’ groundwater because it’s less than 50 years old. Unfortunately, this modern groundwater is also most vulnerable to anthropogenic contamination.

India’s ‘water crisis’ is not so much an issue of scarcity as it is of inadequate water infrastructure and poor management. All causes of water scarcity are related to human interference with the water cycle: from source to distribution, economic use, treatment, recycling, reuse and return to the environment. The city of Shimla, for example, draws its drinking water from a water reservoir called Ashwini Khad, which also receives the bulk of the cities untreated sewage. As a result, the city has an acute shortage of clean water, and there are thousands of cases of jaundice in the city every year. The fix is simple — treat the sewage before throwing it in the reservoir from where the city gets water. Better still, since sewage is 99 per cent water, recover the water, treat it and recycle it back into the water system. Singapore does that. It takes used water and treats it with high-grade membrane filters and other treatment technologies to provide ultra-clean water that is safe for consumption. This water called NEWater supports up to 50 per cent of Singapore water needs.

India’s water crisis is entirely man-made — or shall we say government-made. Poor policies and the lack of strategic planning, especially as it relates to water recycling, and water usage in agriculture, have been the primary cause of the problem. There is no understanding or focus on the concept of reusing water.

The vast majority of engineers of the State Public Health Engineering Departments (PHED) are ignorant about modern technologies available to treat and recycle water. Modern wastewater technologies have reduced treatment plant sizes, which allow for a decentralised approach. Each apartment building, or community, has its own containerised water treatment and recycling plant.

The days of large centralised wastewater treatment plants requiring massive investment in infrastructure to transport wastewater are gone. Yet, the vast majority of treatment plants installed in India over the last ten years are these large and expensive centralised behemoths that use decades-old technology to only fractionally treat the wastewater and make no attempt to recycle and reuse the water.  

India’s ‘water crisis’ is entirely solvable within five years. It requires less drama and more focus on building a reliable water infrastructure by deploying innovative wastewater treatment and recycling technologies.

The author is the founder, contractwithindia.com. Views expressed are personal.