India prays for rain as water wars break out | Hacker News Reader

India prays for rain as water wars break out

guardian.co.uk

31 pointschaostheory25 comments

This is a quote from the article: "India's vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut the water supply by 30% last week as levels in the lakes serving the city ran perilously low."

Heavy rainfall and flooding followed by severe drought. This is a standard pattern across India, not just in Mumbai. Indian villages always have had water storage ponds - in fact most Hindu temples have a pond attached to them, which serves to recharge the ground water level in the whole village.

What happened in the last 40+ years is a complete dismantling of traditional village governance, initially replaced with State-government appointed government bureaucrats (almost all of whom didn't reside in the village they were supposed to administer and rarely even visited it) and then much later, an elected village body that has few real powers, and still answers to a State-appointed bureaucrat.

It was all done with the best of intentions. But it ended up centralizing rural administration - destroying the village in order to save it. Simple tasks as desilting the water storage ponds were neglected, and eventually many of those ponds were encroached upon. This is true everywhere in India, in major cities as well as small villages.

So it is not simply just nature that is the problem here.

To the contrary, rural administrations are NOT centralized. Each village is governed by elected officials who are under the Panchayati Raj Ministry. These panchayati raj members are people who are elected from the very villages they govern (usually).

In fact the aim of the Panchayati Raj system is to maintain the traditional village governance system. Attributing the flooding and draught to lack of proper administration is a faulty assumption.

The real reason is the rampant abandonment of agriculture. In my own native village, the present generation no longer farms. The only people who continue to tend to agricultural duties are the previous generations. Also, not many temple ponds are maintained as they ought to be. Most temple ponds are empty, and most newly built temples do not have ponds.

Also, in an attempt to "restore and modernise" temples, the temple pond bottoms are generally cemented, thus leaving no way for rainwater to seep through to the underground water table.

The recent mandating of rain water harvesting facilities in many cities will somewhat rectify this problem. Also, we have a large coastline, but how many desalination plants do we have???

The article's not being told something about the real failure here, whatever that may be. India has monsoons, and anyplace with dependable monsoons and enough land to build reservoirs should never run out of water.

BTW, if you've never experienced a monsoon, I can't recommend it enough. Most westerners try to travel in the dry season. That's understandable, but they're missing out on one of the great wonders of the world. It's just unbelievable how much water the atmosphere can hold and how fast it can get rid of it.

India built a vast distributed system of small reservoirs - also known as village ponds or temple ponds. The fact that the rural system of governance was dismantled (and they realized the problem, and tried to reassemble it in a pale imitation) led to the neglect of these ponds, among other issues.

Thanks. I expected something like that. Local people have a strong incentive to make sure a local pond works. The people who run a centralized government have an incentive -- mostly their own thirst for power over others -- to make sure they control it, and little incentive to make sure it works.

From the article, I gather the people in the slums and the cities are more at risk than any villager. That makes sense: the denser the population, the larger the water shortage.

Water is the very reason of the Kashmir issue between Pakistan and India and why they will keep fighting over it - land has very little to do with it, its all about the water and who controls the flow.

I visited the Himalayan region just about this time last year and the glaciers have melted away at a very alarming rate. Our driver, who's been taking tourists to the region for over 30 years told us that he has never seen the snow pack and glaciers gone at such elevations. His taxi driver estimation was 50% less snow pack over the last 3-4 years.

Geopolitically, water may be important, but it is unlikely that a fair resolution to the water issue will resolve the Kashmir issue. Starting in 1947 during partition/independence both India and Pakistan have claimed Kashmir. Now it is a very emotional issue and one that is often seen has having 'national pride' attached to it.

I agree - Though during the partition era, one of the key issues of the region was water and its control, thus both countries laying claim. (There are more issues of course, but the strategic control of water was one of the main factors.)

Indeed, 'national pride' blinds folks in both countries. I do not see any resolution of the matter anytime soon as the water shortages become more acute over time, as clearly illustrated by the story.

I grew up in India and I half joke that I don't know how to swim because I grew up in a place where drinking water is hard to come by, forget the swim part.

At least where I grew up, water was always hard to come by. If you ever jumped into our water well, you would die at half way to the bottom from heart failure. It's probably half a mile deep :-)

I'm not affiliated with this, but if you want to contribute, consider a donation to this charity: http://www.wateraid.org/

Fate of entire civilization is dependent on monsoon rains. In my opinion, there is hardly any way to provision supplies in vast amount. Ground water tables, dams are all dependent on monsoon. Only way is to keep in check the transmission leakages.

Man that's heavy stuff.

So many people and such a basic requirement for life being scarce, that's going to be major trouble if there isn't relief in the immediate future.

Doesn't stuff like this fall under the red cross ?

I'm curious what relief will look like. When the population increases at alarming rates I'm wondering if there is any sustainable solution other than relocation places to areas with more water. Are there any clever ways to permanently increase the water supply?

If there is no water you have to pipe it in. The only other thing I can think of is to suck it out of the air.

desalination plants & water trucks ?

Rainwater harvesting. As @sridharvembu pointed out, even areas with heavy rainfall suffer water scarcity.

When the population increases at alarming rates I'm wondering if there is any sustainable solution other than relocation places to areas with more water.

Import water in the form of crops. The amount required by humans to drink, bathe, etc is literally a drop in the ocean next to the irrigation required for agriculture. If you import a ton of wheat from Kansas rather than growing it locally, that is essentially equivalent to importing 1,300 cubic meters of water, in a form factor which is conveniently transportable and storable.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water

I remember hearing about the Q Drum several years ago: http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/Design/q-drum

Basically, it's a low-tech solution to the problem of cheaply transporting water with manual labor.

Granted, it's not a large-scale solution for a city the size of Bhopal. (It seems like it works best at the family/village level.) But I love how ingenious the solution is. It's not high tech. It's not Web related.

People overuse the phrase "thinking outside the box," but I've got say this is truly an example of it. It's a good reminder that sometimes silicon isn't the solution to everything and that we need to consider other ways to hack.

I'd like to see a ballpark figure for how much water these small villages could use. The recovery of quite clean water from the moisture in the atmosphere is a useful byproduct of the compressed air energy storage system we're developing; on the order of .5 to 1 liters per kwhr. Each person in the USA uses about 30 kwhr per day, but I wonder what the water/electricity balance looks like in India?

Curbing water pollution should solve most water problems. There is plenty of rainfall, and there are plenty of rivers. But eventually, all this water becomes completely unusable.

Water shortages, and yet people still think paper bags are better than plastic ones.

Paper is worse for the environment in every way. It uses far more water, land, and energy. And it's not reusable and barely recyclable.

How? Care to elaborate on that?

Processing wood to create paper uses water. Recycling paper uses water. Growing the trees in the first place uses water. Paper bags are not reused more than plastic ones so they end up in landfills, where they take forever and a day to breakdown (paper decomposes very, very slowly in an anaerobic environment -- you can date the layers of landfills by taking a core sample and just looking for dates on the 20-50 year-old paper scraps that come up in the sample.) Paper bags are heavier and bulkier than an equivalent capacity of plastic bags so it takes much more energy to deliver them from the production facility to the end-user.

The only downsides to plastic bags are the fact that they are mostly produced from a small amount of fossil fuel (until bioplastic versions get cheaper) and that they are lightweight and therefore tend to blow around and get captured in unsightly places like trees when they are improperly disposed.

The problem is India is the heavy water pollution. The country receives plenty of rainfall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com