Nightmare at Noon* – What if I had no water to drink?
30th Nov, early afternoon. I am about to have my lunch. As my hand reaches out to a glass of water, a nightmarish thought crosses my mind: “What if I had no water to drink?” This somewhat abrupt post is an attempt to banish that thought.
I am pretty sure most people who are reading this take “Water” for granted – if not all the time, at least most of the time..and if not all kinds of water, at least drinking water. Unfortunately, we belong to a very privileged minority in India.
In reality, at least a fifth of our population does not have access to clean drinking water. Worse, more than half of all primary schools lack basic drinking water facilities and/or access to clean drinking water.
Even those that do have access to it, do not have enough of it – and it is rarely “clean enough”. Needless to say, this impure water is the leading cause of a number of diseases and infections – particularly amongst children. World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that impure drinking water kills more than 1.5 million children per year across the world – thats well over 2 children every minute. I am certain India has a disproportionate share in that tragic number.
Yet, the issue barely finds a mention in mainstream media.
Talking about water is not *sexy*. It has zero gossip value, no prospect of titilation, little room for sensationalism and it rarely causes outrage amongst the well-fed.
Yet, water – or to be precise – its scarcity, has the potential not just to trigger massive social unrest but also wars over river resources.
Although as a country we do not receive much rainfall (according to this article, India receives only about 100 hours of rain a year), the land is blessed with abundant ground water and river resources. But these have either been poorly utilised, or over-exploited. Rapid urbanisation over the last two decades, expanding cities and swelling urban population have adversely impacted groundwater quality and led to significant drops in the water table in most parts of India. And although rainwater harvesting and conservation practices are being adopted by a few cities, the effort comes nowhere close to the challange we face.
World Watch Institute believes if present trends continue, India will be a highly “water stressed” country by 2020 – i.e. having less than 1000 cu. mtrs of water per person per annum (today the average is at 2700 cu mtrs, down from 6500 cu mtrs).
A recent report in The Economist – citing official estimates – mentioned that India will run short of water by 2050 (when the population is expected to peak at 1.7bn), unless massive improvements are made.
Are we – the well-fed and the well-read – aware of the seriousness of the problem and the magnitude of the challenge? And are the powers that be seized of the matter?
In a short series of posts around “Water”, I will try to get deeper into these questions and explore some of the issues around water quality, water scarcity and water security. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, comments and thoughts welcome – as always.
* With apologies to Nico Mastorakis
Next in this series:
PlayPumps – An unusual innovation in “Waterâ€
Nightmare at Noon: Thinking of Water Footprints
Nightmare at Noon* – Water Wars and finally, Concluding the Series..
Related Post: Now Thats What I call Music..sorry, *News*
Shantanu
After having done a significant amount of work on water for Mumbai city you will be not be surprised to know that this is a very simple problem to solve.
However it requires one fundamental mindset shift: you have to respect water as a commodity (like petrol, or electricity or whatever). And then husband it.
gins.
And finally, i think the whole “the middle class needs to talk about it” is overhyped. The middle class has been talking of invading pakistan for 60 years. Its not happened.
Like RC noted so insightfully: this whole noise about public private partnerships is an attempt to let the government off the hook. Private citizens elect public leaders; this PPP exists: its called democracy.
See this superlative post:
http://realitycheck.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/best-way-to-remember-2611/
At last my wait is over! I really wonder why people are not talking about water(scarcity of water)! The damn care attitude towards all the source of energy, let it be electricity, petrol, water or anything else. Now being in MIT campus, I cant see many of the students coming on bicycle. Its sad to see this. The marketing strategies of the western companies are paying off today. The consumerism has led to heavy use of soaps and shampoos without even bothering about the amount of water wasted. The future is dark which is for sure! An add or two on DD1 between those village centric prime time TV programs will never help.
AG, is it so obvious that companies will/can be made to carry water to the poor in slums? Who will do that? It seems to me that the only “private” guys who would do that will be spiritual organizations.
@AG: it requires one fundamental mindset shift
It is here that I believe talking about it can help…The Pakistan analogy is compelling but somewhat flawed since citizens on their own are pretty much powerless to do anything about it – unlike water conservation which can be started at an individual, local level.
Secondly unlike Pakistan, the seriousness of the matter is not apparent to even otherwise well-read people..so I feel posts like this can help – a bit.
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@ Sagar: You are right that an ad or two will not be enough…but that does not mean we stop all efforts…Let each one of us ty and do something in our own little way.
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@ froginthewell: I agree..beyond a point, private initiative cannot solve this problem (as AG has noted too).
AG, Shantanu : Sorry I misread what AG said.
I was not aware of this…Apparently Mumbai Municipal Corporation has announced that it would reduce supply by 15% until next monsoon. (source)
Shantanu,
I would point you to an article in the most recent edition of Forbes India – there is no water scarcity, there will be no water scarcity, only mis-pricing of water.
According to Biswas in the article, the municipal corporation of Phnom Penh (sp?) in Cambodia has only 7% of its water is NOT billed – this compares with 40% for the city of London and 100% for the city of Kolkata.
I will see if I can get you a link to the article, or I will scan it and email it separately to you.
Water, like any other resource, needs to be priced properly to prevent wastage and inefficiency and to fund the building of pipelines – a tierred pricing could even take care of the “social inequality” paradigm.
Think about it and do not spread fraudulently scary stories!!
Cheers
Patriot: Will await the link…The headline was meant to grab attention!
Having said that, I am not entirely certain that there will be no scarcity…or to be more precise, I am not entirely certain that the population will have *access* to clean and safe water without doing something dramatically different.
Shantanu – I will scan and send the article to you separately from the paper magazine – it is currently not available on their website.
I agree with you that water scarcity may exist in the future, just like it does today, even in Mumbai. But, the cause is not an actual “shortage” of water but wrong price signals and market domination by one player – the state.
First, if you look at the Cambodia model – in Phnom Penh, 97% of water lines are metered – up to a certain consumption level, you are not charged anything – and then above that level, there is an inverted price structure, where the more you consume, the more you pay per unit – two advantages of this model – the poor get access to the same quality of potable water as the rich and the inverted structure ensures that all the water is paid for, and second, the pricing gets you to conserve water.
Second, water is not like oil – it is like gold – from a commodity perspective. All the water that has been on earth from day one continues to reside on earth even today – the forms may change – sea to glaciers, back to sea, etc – but not a single molecule of water has been destroyed on earth. It is not possible to destroy water. Therefore, the policy framework has to be different – starting from the premise that there is sufficient water for 6bn people, for 12bn people, etc – it is just the form of consumption and storage and recycling that becomes important.
Therefore, the pricing models for water is what is the most critical part of policy making – and, it is useless to argue, as the jholawallahs do, that water is a right that you should not have to pay for. Food is equally a right (from a life persepective) – yet you pay for it, right? Why should water be different – it is just a different food group.
Second point and equally important point – the poor already pay for water, in more heinous ways – either, via extortion rates, to the water mafia in Mumbai or by the cost of time and health by walking 5-20kms each day for water – that also has a cost. And, these are fungible – if the woman of the family did not walk 20kms every day, she could be more productive in other ways, increasing income for her family – so, there is a putative and direct money cost. Never figured out why the jholawallahs do not get this simple argument.
Anyway, the main point is there is sufficient water for everybody and there will be sufficient water for everybody on this plant for the foreseeable future – they key is to get the price model right.
I will get off my soapbox now, thanks!
Cheers
Good points, Patriot, esp. the one about the inverted price structure.
However..
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Second, water is not like oil – it is like gold – from a commodity perspective. All the water that has been on earth from day one continues to reside on earth even today – the forms may change – sea to glaciers, back to sea, etc – but not a single molecule of water has been destroyed on earth. It is not possible to destroy water.
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Yes, it’s not possible to destroy water, but it is very much possible to pollute water and make it unfit for consumption. Ever heard of dead zones caused by runoffs from chemicals used in agriculture? Shouldn’t there be no dead zones, given that we’re living in the wonderful age of science and technology, and with so much information at our hands?
You do tend to get carried away with making certain assumptions in your statements or ignoring certain facts, with all that certitude that comes with the ideology of blaming the state for all ills. 😉
A brief excerpt from Water Tables and the Politics of Pricing by Mohit Satyanand (HT: Harsh):
The water table in north-western India is falling at an alarming rate. The reason is politics. Bad politics. And the bad pricing that follows from it.
Am I sure it isn’t because of global warming, or climate change? Well, I can’t say I’m sure, because I’m not a climatologist, but here are the words of Matt Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA, the US space agency that mapped Indian water tables: “We looked at the rainfall record and during this decade, it’s relatively steady — there have been some up and down years but generally there’s no drought situation, there’s no major trend in rainfall. […] We would expect the groundwater level to stay where it is unless there is an excessive stress due to people pumping too much water.”
And why were people pumping too much water? As an economist, I would suspect it had to do with the fact that the electricity for pumping was either free, as in Punjab, or hugely subsidised, as in most states of the country. And, with electricity being supplied by government entities, the pricing decision was fundamentally a political one. Groundwater, in any case, has no price attached to it – which is a fundamental disaster from an economist’s point of view.
When a good (or service) is under-priced, supply will overwhelm demand. There are only two ways of dealing with this – one is to ration the good; in other words, construct a political framework as to how to allocate the resource. The other is to allow the price to rise…
Pl read Sanjeev’s short but excellent post, titled “Why do our cities not have enough water?”:
…The problem is almost certainly related to bad management and bad policy, as this extract of an article from The Economist of 24 March 2011 shows. It also shows the way out.
The worth of water
Tim Chan Than lives inTuol Sen Chey on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.. A widow with three children, she earns about 6,000 riels ($1.50) a day for this. She lives nearby down muddy dirt roads, in a cluster of ramshackle huts of corrugated iron, salvaged wood and tarpaulins. Ms Tha’s life seems as miserable an example of urban poverty as could be found anywhere.
In one respect, however, she is lucky. Her home has a constant supply of running water, drinkable straight from the standpipe outside. Perhaps just as remarkably, she pays for it. The provider is a government-owned utility, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA), which actually makes a profit and pays tax. For its many fans in the world of development experts, its achievement in doing this while serving the very poor makes it a model—proof that all that stands between poor people and a decent water supply is mismanagement.
Asit Biswas, of the Third World Centre for Water Management, an NGO, agrees: “Lack of money, scarcity, and so on—they’re all excuses. The problem everywhere is bad management.â€
To achieve all this Mr Chan solved problems that dog water-suppliers across Asia. One, the physical infrastructure, was relatively easy with the help of aid agencies and development banks. Another, identifying who was using water and putting in meters to measure their consumption, was painstakingly time-consuming.
Harder still, though, was to improve the quality of the staff.
Another difficulty was to overcome the prejudice against running a public utility as a business. When PPWSA’s proposal for universal tariffs went to the cabinet in 1993, it was unanimously rejected. But Mr Chan earned the trust of Hun Sen, then one of two prime ministers, and, since 1997, the only, increasingly autocratic, one. His support has helped Mr Chan show that the poor will gladly pay for water if it is cheap, reliable and safe.
An experimental screencast in Hindi based on these posts can be seen at these links:
Part I: à¤à¤¾à¤°à¤¤ में जल समसà¥à¤¯à¤¾ पर à¤à¤• संकà¥à¤·à¤¿à¤ªà¥à¤¤ पà¥à¤°à¤¸à¥à¤¤à¥à¤¤à¤¿ – शांतनà¥, à¤à¤¾à¤— १ http://www.screenr.com/3Us7
Part II: à¤à¤¾à¤°à¤¤ में जल समसà¥à¤¯à¤¾ पर à¤à¤• संकà¥à¤·à¤¿à¤ªà¥à¤¤ पà¥à¤°à¤¸à¥à¤¤à¥à¤¤à¤¿ – शांतनà¥, à¤à¤¾à¤— २ http://www.screenr.com/Kts7