Is There A Hidden Agenda Behind India’s Water Crisis?

rainwater harvesting systems also played a major role in exacerbating the crisis. While TV news channels ran reports all day about the causative factors, they didn’t venture another step deeper into precisely what’s behind them.

Same Story In Delhi

The lapses in Chennai were repeated in New Delhi, India’s capital city, which has also witnessed a population explosion with people from financially broken parts of the country descending for jobs, businesses, and better living. In a research article published in the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, Arindam Biswas and Druti Gangwar studied the impact of excess urbanisation on water supply.

“The rapid urbanisation of Delhi is leading to population-resource imbalance due to the limited surface water allocation for domestic consumption, for example, drinking water supply. Groundwater, the other source of water, is being widely extracted to meet industrial and agricultural demands.

May 1, 2023:

Rapid, unplanned, and uncontrolled urbanisation gift-wrapped as ‘development’ and ‘progress’ in thickly populated cities that are bursting at the seams is sending India hurtling towards a deepening water scarcity crisis.

Widespread construction work taking place across India’s cities and townships at the behest of greedy real estate corporations, both indigenous and overseas, has disturbed the hyperlocal climate and damaged ecosystems.

A disaster such as Joshimath – a northern Indian Himalayan town that is alarmingly sinking into the ground – is only one such fallout. The clock seems to be ticking for another famed Himalayan city, Shimla, as Empire Diaries showed in a recent investigative report.

A similar tragedy could befall many other cities and towns in the coming decades if those in power continue to ignore repeated warnings from activists and scientists about the vital sources of freshwater drying up because of overuse and anthropogenic changes to the climate.

When Chennai Ran Dry

The horrific experiences of the residents of India’s sixth most populous city and fourth most populous urban agglomeration, Chennai, the capital of the country’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, is a case in point. In the peak of summer in June 2019, all four major reservoirs or lakes – Poondi, Cholavaram, Redhills, and Chembarambakkam –supplying water to the expanding metropolis and its adjoining areas, almost went dry, sparking a massive crisis.

Taps ran dry, schools were shut down, countless restaurants and hotels ran out of business due to lack of basic water supply, and the police had to throw security rings around water resources to prevent law and order breaches. The state government was forced to truck in 10 million litres of water a day to feed the giant, thirsty city.

Ironically, Chennai was drowned by massive floods only in 2015, and it gets on an average 1,400mm of rainfall annually – more than double of what London receives.

The poor were the worst hit by the water crisis as the waiting period for the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply & Sewerage Board’s (CMWSSB) tankers stretched to 15-25 days due to skyrocketing demand, even as private tankers fleeced the residents desperate for water. Those residing in slums or lower-income societies saw almost half of their monthly income drained out in buying water.

While it is true that ahead of the 2019 crisis, Chennai received two years of deficient monsoon rains, experts said the calamity resulted from long-term indiscriminate groundwater extraction, mass-scale encroachment, and rampant illegal constructions – all resulting from uncontrolled migration from broken villages to the big city in hopes of a better life.

Apart from these causative factors, poor implementation and lack of maintenance of

“Some percentage of the groundwater is also used to meet the domestic or municipal water demand. The total municipal water requirement for municipal and drinking water demand of the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi is nearly 913 million gallons per day (MGD). The Delhi Jal Board (DJB) supplies 835 MGD (including around 100 MGD from groundwater). The net deficit in the drinking water supply is approximately 88 MGD,” said the 2020 paper titled “Studying the water crisis in Delhi due to rapid urbanisation and land use transformation”.

“The planning department of the government of NCT Delhi aims to meet this drinking water deficit by additional groundwater extraction, although this initiative may lead to overexploitation of groundwater,” the authors noted.

In 2015, a study by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) underlined the depleting groundwater situation in the northwest, southwest, and southern districts of Delhi.