The water crisis: Better conservation and efficiency in use are a must

The NITI Aayog’s water management index, viewed alongside the simultaneously released report of a study sponsored by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) on water productivity of different crops, depicts the country’s water stress as more grievous than generally perceived. But these dissertations fail to offer practical and politically acceptable solutions to overcome it. Dubbing the current water crisis as the worst in history, the NITI Aayog maintains that about 600 million people (nearly half the population) face high to extreme water scarcity. About 200,000 people die every year due to lack of safe water. The think tank projects the crisis will escalate with the water availability dwindling to merely half of the effective demand by 2030. Groundwater resources, which account for 40 per cent of the total water supply, are also predicted to deplete rapidly, accentuating water paucity in both rural and urban areas. Some 21 cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, will almost run out of groundwater by as soon as 2020, affecting about 100 million residents. Should the NITI Aayog’s prognosis come true, around 40 per cent of the population will lose access to water and gross domestic product (GDP) will take a hit of about 6 per cent.

Nabard’s study, conducted by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), holds the splurging of water in the agricultural sector responsible for the present adversity. Over two-thirds of the nation’s available water is consumed in the farm sector with about 80 per cent of it going just to three crops — rice, wheat and sugarcane. The most intensive cultivation of these water-guzzling crops is in vogue in water-stressed regions, such as sugarcane in Maharashtra and rice and wheat in Punjab and Haryana. These reports rightly attribute perpetuation of such unsustainable cropping trends to ill-advised incentives like liberally determined minimum support prices and assured marketing through open-ended procurement besides subsidised or free supply of water and power.

However, the suggestions mooted in these reports to remedy the situation seem largely academic in nature without due regard to their practicality. The notable ones among these include effective pricing for water and power, greater marketing support for water-efficient crops in water-constrained areas and a general shift from price support to cash transfer to let the actual crop prices be determined by market forces. Another proposal is to dis-incentivise the cultivation of water-intensive crops such as sugarcane in Maharashtra and rice in Punjab and Haryana and shift them to water-rich eastern and north-eastern regions. 

The fundamental truth that needs to be appreciated is that the present water crisis is largely man-made. India is not an inherently water-starved country as it receives annually about 2,600 billion cubic metres (BCM) of water through rain and snow. However, only around 258 BCM (or less than a tenth) can potentially be stored in available water reservoirs. Measures such as rainwater harvesting to conserve water and its efficient use in farming through micro-irrigation (read drip irrigation) are, therefore, better solutions — technically, economically and politically — than enforcing a change in the cropping patterns in order to withstand the water crisis.