It’s appropriate to write about water in the monsoon season. But although half the rainy season is over, apart from the initial ten-day downpour, it’s been dry and humid with no rain in the Mumbai-Alibaug belt where I plough my patch of earth. We don’t know, as yet, what other calamities global warming is likely to visit on the country’s 100 million households dependent on farming.
According to some reports, wealthy landlords are happy about this dry spell. They can finish their endless construction, buy tanker water and sleep in air-conditioned comfort. But the great majority of the country’s poor farmers can only pray for the azure skies to open up and visit nature’s bounty upon their parched land. Respite from the heat, much worse than in summer, is a fringe benefit if their prayers are heard.
The late Nari Gandhi, a famous nature-lover architect, used to disappoint many rich clients by building small toilets when they wanted huge magnificent bathrooms. He was labeled an eccentric because no one understood why he persisted with small bathrooms. Some of his physically well-endowed clients had to actually enter and exit their washrooms sideways. But he was well aware that the larger and fancier the bathroom, the more time and water wasted in it!
Even this Gandhi was ahead of his times. His parsimonio-usness about water usage 20 years ago made me (an ardent admirer of his) aware of its true value and importance. Therefore I’m hardly surprised to hear that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water. In India, several states and districts are already at loggerheads over the sharing of river waters.
From my very simplistic way of thinking, I have never understood how governments seem to have time and money for everything except this basic need of the poor. Half a century after the First Five-year Plan accorded high priority to irrigation and management of India’s abundant water resources, the country’s farmers are still hopelessly dependent on the monsoon rains for their survival.
Indeed, it’s astonishing how even rational and intelligent people in urban India don’t make the connection between efficient water management and national food security — that putting food on their tables is dependent upon rural India’s water situation. Myopically, politicians at the Central, state, district and panchayat levels, mostly exercise their powers to improve water management for their own benefit rather than of the public which votes them to office.
Therefore, given the vital importance of water resources management, self-serving politicians should not be trusted with the distribution of this precious resource which is an absolute human right. But given the official apathy, water management has become a private duty. Thus when I was looking to purchase a farm, my brief to brokers was to look for a track of land with an open well. Not only do open wells collect rain water, they also enable one to drop a bucket into the well and draw water for immediate needs when the electricity goes haywire.
Although I have heard of the benefits of rain water harvesting, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to put it into action. Nevertheless as a back-to-the-land farmer, each day I learn more from the experiences of neighbouring farmers and by observing, studying and applying common sense. It’s plain that so much which needs to be done by the State is being left to the individual. Most of the great-on-paper schemes announced by the Central and state governments for farmers are non-starters. Recently I was told by a well-meaning founder of an agricultural trust in Gujarat that if I wanted government help, I first need to learn the strategy involved!
Yet even private initiatives such as sinking or building wells are no guarantee of farm prosperity. One has to continue working at efficient water management by keeping the well clean, tending its environs so that water is trapped to reach the surrounding acquifers. It’s also useful to build reservoirs in low lying areas of farmland allowing water to collect naturally, and if finances permit, to construct overhead tanks to collect water and canalise/pipe it to points of collection, so it can be redirected to the fields. Planting trees, shrubs, anything with roots is, of course, a given. As is being frugal with use of water.
Despite so many water management technologies and systems available within the country, rural India suffers a perennial water shortage and village women have to trudge miles for their daily supply. However, water is available in plenty to produce Coke, Pepsi and other aerated and bottled water with city folk preferring bottled to well water. But don’t take the tall claims made for bottled water at face value. The inevitable heating (in tropical countries) and freezing of plastic bottles makes bottled water unhealthy.
Tragically although the country is blessed with great perennial rivers, (usually) abundant monsoons and heal-thy subterranean acquifiers, government mis-management of national water resources (its solution is to build huge dams which cause heavy silting and massive displacement of people) means for hundreds of millions of citizens, a tragedy of water, water everywhere, but little to drink.
(Kavita Mukhi is a Mumbai-based eco-nutritionist and director of Conscious Food)