|
EDITORIAL DESK
THE WRITING ON THE WELL
Ten years ago, the renowned architect and conservationist
Ismail Serageldin said: “If the wars of this century
were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be
fought over water.” Though some sections of the United
Nations system disagree, that bleak, doomsday assessment is
now being shared by many people in this country including
B H Jain, Chairman, Jain Irrigation Systems, one of the luminaries
of India’s water sector. Indeed there is no doubt that
water scarcity is a looming problem of our time.
India has close to 20 percent of the global population but
it struggles to meet water needs with just five percent of
the world’s available water. The gap between these numbers
continues to widen. The view obtaining now is that by the
year 2020, demand will exceed supply. A recent World Bank
report noted that India has no proper water management system
at all - her groundwater is disappearing and her river bodies
are turning into sewers. Indiscriminate pumping out groundwater
is fast depleting the underground ‘aquifers’–
and many reports show that even this water is becoming increasingly
unfit for irrigation, far less for drinking.
In this scenario, it becomes imperative for India to improve
and expand irrigation from its surface water. Unfortunately,
while Indian planners and engineers like to build large dams,
they are much less concerned about constructing the canals
and irrigation works to actually get the water to farmers.
In fact dams like the controversial one at Tehri in the Himalayas
(which constrains the River Ganges almost at source) are geared
more towards generating highly saleable electricity than towards
providing farmers with water
What environmentalists tend to overlook is that solving the
world’s water problem requires solving the irrigation
problem. Both in the developed and undeveloped world, irrigation
is a boon to agriculture, and in some ways a boon to sustainability,
allowing farmers to increase production of their land without
having to convert more forests or other wild areas into cropland.
However, inefficient irrigation wastes more water than all
the people of the world use (efficiently or inefficiently)
for all their drinking, bathing, manufacturing, and industry.
The UN’s World Water Assessment Programme says that
almost 60 per cent of irrigation water is wasted, more so
in a country like India. Why does all this irrigation water
get squandered, and how can it be fixed? For farmers, irrigation
water is usually squandered by lack of infrastructure - bringing
water from river or dam to field using canals without linings
or covers, which would prevent water soaking into unfarmed
soil or evaporating into the air. The solution to this is
smart investment, which some government programmes and micro-credit
organisations are making possible, but funding is wanting.
The government of India has woken up to the problem and is
looking to give a much-needed push to irrigation through various
schemes. Even the most recent budget dubbed ‘farmer
friendly’ has upped allocation for the irrigation sector
dramatically; new projects have been launched both by the
Centre and the state governments.
But these measures for a leap in irrigation remain at best
superficial and will not be enough without proper water discipline.
It is high time the government saw the writing on the well.
| |
