Water, the price we have to pay

While the films like the ‘Thirst’ take a side and portray the fate of the people who are victims of water privatizations and while the discussions in water symposiums strive to proclaim water as a fundamental right, and even still, while we question the obligation and the extent of the efforts the various government organizations put in providing water; we forget one thing, the price we have to pay for water.

I talk not of the production and distribution and delivery cost, not of the profit margins of the firms that provide water and never of the price that a person have to pay to quench his thirst; but of the price that our future generation will be forced to pay thanks to our unsustainable utilization of the invaluable resource, water.

Well where am I going with this? Did we not talk of the issue of exclusivity of water rights for a company? How unfair it was? Why not try and take this a step forward and ask ourselves as to whether this generation has signed an exclusivity agreement with the Creator.

To prove the point let me point at some statistics. Do you know how many tube wells are there in India? Well today it is close to 21 million and each year farmers who use these bring into service another million or so every year^[1]. The farmers in India (I take India because I am an India; the situation in China or for that matter any other developing country is no different than this) who a generation ago used to pull up water with bullocks from shallow wells; today use cutting edge (literally) technology to pull water from over 300m deep. What has this done? Well for the start this turned India, in less than a generation, from a place common to famine to a rice exporter.

But the other side is quite disturbing. The amount of water that is pulled out is by no means comparable to what is being replaced by the monsoons. Water table is falling; salt water intrusions are becoming a more common problem

The problem does not end here, but merely begins. Think about what happens to farmers when the water table recedes given that today they no longer rely on government water supply as it is quite often erratic and for that matter on monsoons as they are unpredictable. Then the question remains; what do they do. It is clear; and the answer is; some of them, the larger farmers dig deeper ^[1] and continue to prosper, and the rest gets featured in the news.

Why is this happening? One; we can always blame the government inefficiency in providing irrigation water. Two; again we can blame the government for not monitoring and regulating water extraction from the tube wells. Three; we can yet again blame the government policies on subsidized electricity for the farmers. But four; we can only blame ourselves.

Ourselves, as the technical and intellectual leaders of the modern day world, in not being capable of providing better and more efficient and most importantly, implementable, irrigation methodologies, better variety of crops that require less water and so on.

Ourselves, as the members of the media, in unhelpfully interfering in the promotion and development and deployment of better technologies. Don’t we remember the brinjals that were all over the papers and news not so long ago?

Ourselves, as leaders of the political community in not taking into confidence the people that matter. Whether or not the projects are PPP is an altogether different issue; there are quite a few cases of water irrigation projects that were rejected by the community on grounds like, loss of reservoir land for instance, that are different from anti-private sentiments.

So what am I trying to say? Well the blame game can go on, but what is the point if there is no change in the scenario?

So the inevitable change has to happen and it needs to begin from each one of us from the farmers to the democrat to the scientists. As farmers we need to form better unions, we need to reach a consensus on the amount of ground water we would draw, we need to invest in water conserving irrigation technologies like drip irrigation. As democrats we need to monitor effectively the implemented regulations and the right kind of feedback and make the necessary amendments. As scientists we need to be concerned about the long term effects of the research that we pursue.

So as often is quoted “Before you blame others, blame yourself; Before you change other, change yourself” and as often is common in safety instructions “Before you save others, save yourself” so that we can leave something behind for future ourselves.

Reference

1. Asian farmers sucking the continent dry, New Scientist

2. http://www.thirstthemovie.org

3. http://www.pbs.org/pov/thirst/

4. Thirst, by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_irrigation