WATER POLITICS

India is the 13th most water-stressed country in the world, but its population is triple the combined population of the other 16 countries facing extremely high water stress, according to the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit group with offices around the world that tracks water use and other global environmental and resource issues.

Water resources in India have been mismanaged for decades. Critical groundwater resources, which account for 40% of India’s water supply, are being depleted at unsustainable rates, the NITI Aayog report said. Droughts are becoming more frequent, creating severe problems for India’s rain-dependent farmers.

By 2030, water demand in India is projected to be twice the available supply, according to the report. “If nothing changes, and fast, things will get much worse…with severe water scarcity on the horizon for hundreds of millions,” the report said.

In the southern city of Chennai, drinking water reserves almost completely dried up this year. Although a 200-day streak with no rain ended recently, the first month of the annual monsoon brought one-third less rain than the 50-year average, which makes it the driest June in five years, according to the India Meteorological Department.

Two of Chennai’s four reservoirs went dry, and the other two nearly did. Millions of residents of the city, India’s fifth largest, with a population of about 10 million, have to get their drinking water from trucks—either sporadically from government vehicles or by purchasing it from private companies.

In the agricultural heartland of India’s northern plains, where almost one-third of the country’s food is grown, farmers generally pay little or nothing for the groundwater they use or the energy needed to pump as much as they desire. That has led them to plant water-intensive crops, creating shortages, especially during lapses in the annual monsoons, that endanger the country’s food supply.

Various Indian states are locked in legal and political battles with one another over the control and use of water flowing through the nation’s legendary rivers, such as the Ganges.

Some tourist centers have run short of water. Last year, in the former British hill station of Simla, dozens of hotels had to cancel bookings and temporarily shut down, and the city’s major summer festival was canceled. Government schools were closed for 10 days because they lacked water for the children and teachers.

“Until now, it’s been relatively easy to increase supply without thinking too much about demand. But parts of India are beginning to hit the natural limits of water supply,” said Mervyn Piesse, manager of the global food and water crises research program at Future Directions International, a research institute based in Nedlands, Australia. “Unless there is a reduction in the rate at which those resources are being used, they are eventually going to run out.”

Beset by the multitude of water problems, Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his second term recently by appointing a ministry of water, combining previous ministries that oversaw wetlands and riverways development and drinking water and sanitation.

A warming climate is making water supplies more unpredictable throughout the Himalayan region, upon whose watershed some two billion people ultimately depend. A recent study by a nongovernmental organization that focuses on regional developmental issues, called the Hindu Kush Monitoring and Assessment Program, warned that glaciers feeding rivers in the Himalayan region could start disappearing after 2050.

Ladakh, which borders China and Pakistan in the nation’s far north, became a formal Indian state earlier this month when the central government separated it from Jammu and Kashmir. It has long been isolated, especially in the winter, when many roads snow over and temperatures drop well below freezing. In the 1970s, the Indian government opened the region to tourism, drawing a trickle of mostly Western travelers who came to trek and to visit the ancient Buddhist monasteries along the Indus River.

Then came a 2010 hit Bollywood movie called “Three Idiots.” The final song-and-dance extravaganza had two Indian megastars reuniting in love along the shores of Lake Pangong, then a small-time Ladakhi tourist attraction. Indian fans of the movie flocked to Ladakh to visit the lake. 

The number of visitors to Ladakh, which has a year-round population of only 133,000, has soared fivefold since the movie came out, reaching 327,000 last year. Most stay in Leh. Local tourism officials and hoteliers say many of the new tourists, unlike the adventure travelers who preceded them, tend to stay in hotels where they shower twice daily and use flush toilets instead of the waterless dry-pit latrines traditional to Ladakhi villages. They also favor vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers over the region’s traditional potatoes and barley, which require far less water to grow.

The new tourists consume about 25% more water per person than longtime residents during the summer and double what the average resident uses in the winter, when cold weather curtails running water, according to Iftiqar Ahmed, an engineer in the Leh government’s office of Public Health and Engineering, which oversees water use.

A hotel building boom in Leh has increased the number of rooms since 2010 to 16,000, from fewer than 2,000.

In need of a constant water supply, the new hotels drilled their own wells. By the time authorities started monitoring wells last year, they estimated hotels were pulling up more than a million liters of water a day during the June through August tourist peak, from ground water reserves fed by melting snow and glaciers, said Mr. Ahmed. They now account for 20% of the water used in the city, he said.

Outside Leh, where farming still underpins village life, water has long been treated as a precious commodity. To preserve it and assure equal distribution, the villagers appoint water managers, known as churpons, to oversee the collection of snowmelt into catchment ponds and dole it out through an ancient network of canals and sluices that run downhill past family farm plots. They ensure that families with plots at higher elevations who get the water first leave a fair share for families with plots at lower down.

In Saboo village, where some 300 families live a few miles outside Leh, Jigmat Stanzin, 47, has held that job, which rotates annually among village families. “We can’t waste a drop,” he says.

April to July 2018 were anxious months in Saboo. Villagers decided the home gardens that provide food to most households should get water first, then water would go to apricot and apple trees, which would take a decade to replace if they died. Then, wheat and barley fields, and, finally, the poplar trees used as building material.

Mr. Stanzin and a team of five other churpons worked around the clock. Some fields weren’t planted and some crops were stunted. But the village made it through.

Leh, however, stopped using churpons in 2015 as farming gave way to tourism and other development. Mr. Wangchuck, who tends the family’s farm with his wife, couldn’t plant half his fields, forcing him to buy feed for his cows. His family cut back on what they ate and had less to sell in local markets.

The city itself came to the brink of catastrophe. Some hotel wells went dry as the paltry snowmelt failed to recharge underground springs fast enough.

As many as 100,000 seasonal migrant workers reside in and around Leh during the summer. Nearly all of them live in areas where water must be delivered by tanker truck, once every three days.

Longer term, Leh has an $11 million project to pump drinking water from the nearby Indus River. The project was planned in 2006, to be built through the year 2042, for a summer population projected to be 84,000 by then. But the summer population already is at least 90,000, Mr. Ahmed says. The project timeline has been accelerated for completion two years from now. 

 

 

In parts of Leh, water must be delivered by tanker truck, and residents store the water in plastic vats that they padlock to prevent theft.

Until it is completed, water needs will be met with a patchwork of delivery systems. Some 4,500 households now have drinking water piped to their homes a few hours each day as part of the plan to deliver drinking water to all homes. During the winter, though, the pipes can freeze if they aren’t drained at night.

Tanker-truck deliveries will continue to thousands of other households. Residents store the water in plastic vats that they have taken to padlocking to prevent theft.

Stanzin Namgyal, 52, grew up in Leh and is trying to revive the churpon system to supply meltwater to remaining farmers and the many residents with home gardens. Yet for the 23-room hotel he is building in the city center, he intends to bore wells. “I’ll need one well, maybe even two,” he said.

Last year, Leh began requiring residents and businesses to register their wells, but only a fraction of them did so. This year, the municipality is conducting inspections door-to-door to try to get an accurate count.

The eventual goal is to charge a fee for wells, and ultimately to begin metering and charging for water usage, although officials concede such measures may be years off.

Sonam Parvez, who also grew up in Leh, opened a 20-bed hotel and heads an association of some 300 hoteliers. When his parents operated a small guesthouse in Leh decades ago, he said, their water was allocated under the churpon system.

“The churpon system is people coming together and trusting each other,” he said. “With the coming of the present day, that trust is gone because everyone is tapping into the bore well system. Everybody thinks there’s free water down there. Last year, for the first time, Ladakhis discovered there’s no free water.”