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WATER POLITICS

Via Circle of Blue, two interesting short videos (transcripts below) on Delhi’s water crisis:

It’s a typical morning as Delhi awakens to its usual chaos.

Legendary traffic jams.

Vendors on the street.

Beggars faces longingly pressed against car windows… selling flowers.

But like many of the word’s urban centers, Delhi is thirsty… even parched. As the 3rd largest population center in the world, its 25 million people need water, — and lots of it — to survive.

On this day, I want to learn more about how millions of people live literally bucket to bucket, not necessarily knowing when and if their water will come.

So I take my camera to the neighborhood of Sangram Vihar — one of the city’s countless informal, poor communities — where every drop counts. On this summer day, on a street made muddy by leaking sewage pipes, we come across women who have gathered to fill buckets and barrels from a water truck as it makes its delivery.

They pay for the tanker to deliver water because the city’s connections aren’t reliable, are unsafe, or aren’t available at all.

As the truck leaves, there are smiles of relief on this steamy day. While they may or may not have a toilet, they take comfort in knowing that their families will have water to drink and wash in the week ahead.

Yet many parts of India are not even as fortunate.

Unlike the delivery truck, the water never came.

Areas of the nation like Rajasthan to the west have faced one of the driest periods in history — and, in May, the hottest weeks ever recorded when temperatures reached 51 degrees Centigrade — that’s 124 degrees Fahrenheit.

Water scarcity and blinding heat have disrupted farming and energy production — the two largest users of water in the country.

The cruel irony here in Delhi… is that many living in the poorest informal neighborhoods like this one… are water refugees.

They are families from nearby states like Rajasthan and Bundelkhand where fiercely persistent drought and over-pumping has caused wells to go dry… farms to go bankrupt… and some farmers… even to take their own lives…

It’s clear that how India responds in the next months and years will have effects for generations. How will it mange the intensifying competition between water, food and energy in a changing climate?

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Beyond climate predictions and long-term managing long-term supplies, it’s clear that getting enough water day-by-day is foremost on people’s minds.

When the challenge is so great and their children so thirsty, they often take their water sources  into their own hands.

Some entrepreneurs bring water by tank pulled by a tractor, and sell at an inflated rate… while others drill their own unsanctioned wells… some even in the middle of the street…

Across town, in southwest Delhi, we arrive at the Vasant Kung informal community, a barrio, just as residents press against each other to reach a city-owned water tanker. Each person carries their own hose to siphon water from the truck into a mass of salvaged plastic containers.

Just as quickly as the truck arrives, its tank is empty and it moves on.

Like many of the world’s megacities, Delhi relies heavily on groundwater supplies. The surface water is too polluted or limited.

But Delhi is sinking. Too many wells, too much water extracted. What water there is left underground is increasingly contaminated with agricultural runoff and industrial chemicals.

But some believe that hope may yet fall from the sky.

The FORCE center for rainwater harvesting… along the outskirts of Vasant Kunj, is just across the street from the poorest neighborhoods where wells save lives. Jyoti Sharma shows me how efforts to capture and store the heavy rains from the summer monsoons may become the literal lifeblood of Delhi’s water supplies.

A few blocks away though, in the Harijan Basti block of Vasant Kunj, water flows freely from the ground.

It’s not an artesian well, but rather an oasis of sorts created by a persistent leak in a city water main. The community has cleverly built a make-shift cement catchment system to collect the flowing water and redirect it to pipes where children fill buckets and take baths.

Our guide,  describes the scene.

Ram Rati is president of this community of about 300 families, mostly immigrants from rural districts. She tells me that, ironically if the pipe was repaired, the water would pass them by… and the community would literally dry up.

It’s a stark reminder that in many major cities basic infrastructure is in shambles and is doesn’t have the capacity to reliably deliver safe water and treat the sewage of millions.

And the tradeoff between sanitation and drinking water can be stark.

In another camp along the edge of Vasant Kunj, neighbors disassembled public toilets just to get to the water supplies that made them flush.

“They need water more than they need toilet.”

Toward the end of the day, we stop in another camp in southwest Delhi. I hear women laughing, children playing and flying kites, and… water splashing.

We make our final stop, as a pall of dust and smog catches the sun’s glow over the city. Brightly colored saris are saturated by the evening light. About 50 women line up to fill their buckets from a single rubber hose that will flow for about 2 hours each morning and evening.

Nearby, the young boys I heard are playing near a putrid, green sewage lagoon and, in the bushes, is where the residents go to the bathroom.

In 2014 Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swash Bharat initiative in a drive to end open defecation within 5 years, and to upgrade the nation’s sanitation infrastructure. But today, the sewage still  flows freely down hill.

While the women filled their tanks, and one stopped to pose for a picture — “I am going into business, the 20-year-old proclaims with confidence” — I wondered where this water comes from…

Following the hose, I find that it’s connected to a small pipe which disappears off into the trees.

I take the path through garbage and feces to a single rusting well, poking out of the ground, pulling from the shrinking supply beneath the city.

A woman approaches… I had seen her watching from as distance as the others filled their buckets. She cradles her arms as if holding a baby and points to the clouds above. Through tears, she tells me that her baby became sick from the water and recently died.

A young girl wanders through the rubbish and stands on the rusting well as the last bit of light fades through the trees.

Together, we can hear the women in the distance haul their buckets home, hoping that the water will flow again in the next morning.