Precious fluid: Dinyar Godrej on the challenge posed by the world's freshwater crisis - Water: Keynote

New Internationalist, March, 2003 by Dinyar Godrej

THE city doesn't sleep easy. It sleeps with an ear cocked to the fully opened taps with buckets dangling from them. At the first spluttering sounds of the water ration's arrival through the pipes in the predawn dark, bodies spring from beds to fill buckets and pots. In larger houses tanks are monitored whilst the taps run. In the slums they have been awake before the first drops arrived. Queuing listlessly, half-asleep, with their pots by the communal tap, waiting. Sometimes the water runs for an hour, sometimes just a few minutes. Sometimes the water company skips a day or two, sometimes more. Sometimes it places a discreet notice, after the event, in the local papers. It usually takes the telephone receiver off the hook on such days. Rumours fly... another burst supply pipe? Everyone's in a fever, repeatedly babbling their fears about when the water might return.

My mother reminds everyone who will listen to use less water. Several trips are made through the day to inspect the level of the tanks -- one on the roof, one in the ground.

The city's poor, with limited means of storage at their disposal, are forced to buy exorbitantly priced water brought in by tanker. Fights erupt. There have even been murders.

The city is Indore, a bustling hub of 1.5 million inhabitants located atop central India's Deccan plateau. It's where I grew up. There has been a 'water problem' here as far back as I can remember. Today it is estimated that water supply to the city is half of what is actually required. A rise in population and a steady decline in rainfall are usually blamed. But there are other culprits too.

Ironically, chief among them is the Government's vision originally intended to quell the shortfall. 'Modernity' and 'development' have been its burnished aims. They brought forth grandiose schemes to engineer water supplies to India's thirsty cities, complete with political rhetoric about delivering piped water to the rural poor. In Indore's case a project to suck up water from the Narmada River lay unfinished for years. It then failed to meet ever-increasing demand. Meanwhile Indore's own streams, an historical source of water, were neglected and turned into stagnant drains. Ecologists argue that the promise of a modern' tap in every home turns people into passive consumers of state-provided water and erodes the traditional role of communities in maintaining local water supply.

Water shortage is accompanied by a glorious inequality in. supply. A street where the bureaucratic top brass live is conspicuous for its lush gardens even during the season of dust that is the central Indian summer. An industrialist's mansion down the road from my parents' house has an indoor swimming pool. And then there are whole localities with either a very tenuous supply or none at all.

Running low

It's the kind of crisis that is mirrored in cities right across the so-called developing world -- with no end in sight. Today, for the first time in history, as many people live in urban concentrations as in rural areas. As cities swell unplanned and the newly dispossessed crowd into shantytowns and slums, their collective thirst grows. Old and leaky water infrastructure -- an estimated 70 per cent of the water supply is lost as a consequence -- combined with listless, cash-strapped and often corrupt administrations result in a situation that rarely improves. In grand development terms, to bring a reasonable supply to the billion people worldwide who lack a clean source of drinking water, the tab would run to the amount currently being spent on the deployment of troops against Iraq. But these aren't the kinds of priorities that political bigwigs juggle.

If we consider that somewhere in the logic of bombs, regime change and Iraq, oil plays a significant part, then what should we make of the business magazine Fortune's assertion (in May 2000) that 'Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century.' It implies both that water has a commercial value and that it is scarce. That it is invaluable to life cannot be questioned -- humans can last for a maximum of three days without water. The Turks have a saying: 'Iraq has oil, we have water. Let them drink their oil.'

But water scarce? Surely there's so much of it... Sadly only 0.01 per cent of our planet's water is available for our use (for a roundup of water facts turn to page 18). Even this would be sufficient for our needs, were it not for its uneven distribution: the amount of water available depends on the location of water bodies and the amount of rainfall. On the one side are nations like Brazil, the former Soviet states and Canada with an abundant natural supply; and on the other there are the arid zones of the Middle East and numerous African nations where nature is less generous. Some countries, like China, have plentiful water but experience stress due to mismanagement, pollution and the increasing demands of a large population.

Crisis and challenge

Today in almost every area of the world one chooses to look at there is a water problem -- scarcity, depletion, pollution, lack of sanitation, failing rains due to global warming, big dam projects blocking up rivers, privatization, inequities of distribution, cross-border conflict, profligate use and mismanagement. Take your pick. But let's start with overuse.