Reuters: In the Vivekananda Camp slum, adjacent to the US embassy in New Delhi, communal taps supply brackish water for about two hours a day. Water delivered by tankers provides one additional bucket to each of its 1,000 residents for drinking and cooking.
In parts of the arid state of Rajasthan, southwest of the Indian capital, tap water is available once every four days for an hour. In rural areas near Mumbai, women and children travel more than a mile to get water.
Bengaluru, India’s tech hub of 14 million people, reeled under a water shortage this year and had to rely on tanker deliveries.
“We don’t wash the floor or do the laundry for days sometimes,” said Sampa Rai, a 38-year-old in Delhi’s Vivekananda Camp, who scrambles before dawn every day to meet the first tanker delivering water. “Not even the dishes. We have to manage with what we have.”
The world’s most populous nation has suffered from water shortages for decades, but crises are coming around with increasing frequency. This year, for example, the summer has been one of the hottest on record and the crunch has worsened with rivers and lakes drying up and the water table falling.
The shortages are affecting rural and urban Indians alike, disrupting agriculture and industry, stoking food inflation and risking social unrest. Contaminated water kills about 200,000 Indians each year, according to the government. People and the economy are suffering.
That is adding urgency to public and private-sector efforts to conserve the resource, find ways to recycle waste water and reduce the country’s over-reliance on the annual monsoon, especially in the agricultural sector.
Rating agency Moody’s warned last week that India’s growing water stress could affect its growth, which at a projected 7.2% this April-March fiscal year is the highest among major economies.
“Decreases in water supply can disrupt agricultural production and industrial operations, resulting in inflation in food prices and declines in income for affected businesses and workers, especially farmers, while sparking social unrest,” Moody’s said.
The government plans to more than triple waste water recycling by the end of the decade to 70%, according to a federal government policy document dated Oct 21, 2023 that listed priorities for the next five years.
Krishna S. Vatsa, a senior official at the state-run National Disaster Management Authority, confirmed the targets in an interview last week.
Authorities also plan to cut the extraction of fresh water – ground water and surface water from rivers and lakes – to less than 50% by the end of the decade from 66%, the highest rate in the world, said the document, which has not been made public and was reviewed by Reuters.
It will also launch a national village-level programme this year to recommend crops to farmers based on local water availability, Vatsa said.
Details of plans to address the water crisis have not been previously reported.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already ordered authorities to build or refurbish at least 75 lakes in each of the 785 districts of the country. The government says work has been started or completed on more than 83,000 lakes. Experts say such lakes can help recharge the water table.
Modi launched a nearly $50-billion programme in 2019 to provide all rural households with tap water. The government says it has now covered 77% of more than 193 million such families, up from 17% five years ago, but residents and experts say not all pipes have water.
“It makes the issue of conservation far more urgent,” Vatsa said. “You cannot sustain such a national pipeline without the availability of water. The pipes will run dry.”
He agreed some taps could already be dry.
