Could doomsday be upon us?

The NITI Aayog recently reported that by next year, 21 Indian cities will run out of groundwater. With this year’s monsoon expected to be below par, pre-monsoon rain lowest in 65 years and 43.4 per cent of the country already reeling under drought conditions (as per the real-time drought monitoring platform Drought Early Warning System) — could doomsday finally be upon us? Perhaps. However, the newly formed ministry for water resources and related issues Jal Shakti could help postpone this eventuality by implementing proper policies to harvest rainwater, regulate groundwater usage and most importantly, recharge groundwater through rural ponds and reservoirs. Let me tell you the story of a pond in Lalpur village of Mohanlalganj block in Lucknow to illustrate how. 

Till 2017, Lalpur’s pond was a waterbody choking with sewage and garbage. It stank so much that even animals did not go near it. Its bed had become hard with years of accumulated dirt, so its water could not recharge the water table. But when I visited Lalpur last month, I saw a very different picture. The pond was relatively clean, the stink had disappeared and so had most of the garbage. A kingfisher was swooping on the water surface and fishing nets indicated that the pond was actually being used for fishing. What had changed? 

A December 2017 intervention by WaterAid India and Lucknow-based NGO Vatsalya had trained the villagers to empty the pond, clean its bed and create four levels on it. Today, the highest level stores dirty water that drains from the village. Solid contaminants settle at the bottom and the relatively cleaner water on the top decants to the second level, and so on. By the time the water decants to the third and fourth levels, it can be used in irrigation, pisciculture and animal husbandry. 

The impact of the pond cleanup is discernable already. “Earlier, we used to find water at a depth of 40 feet here,” a resident, Hari Shankar Verma, told me. “Now it’s available at 30 feet.” This agrarian community has profited by the improved availability of water. Some farmers have started planting a third crop of mentha arvensis (wild mint) between the two main crops of wheat and rice. Its short growing time and high yields make it a good option to supplement agricultural revenues, but it requires a lot of irrigation. “Till last year, marginal farmers like me who depend on rains for irrigation, couldn’t have successfully planted this crop,” said Verma, standing in a lush field full of this fragrant herb. Now, they can. Last year, Verma extracted 18 litres of mentha oil from the crop grown on a bigha of farmland. “I was able to sell it at about Rs 900 per litre,” he says. 

The Lalpur case is easily replicable across rural India where wetlands and ponds have been traditionally used to collect rain and groundwater. Cleaning their beds and employing natural filtration methods is a relatively inexpensive way to recharge underground aquifers today — and could ensure greater water availability in future. If the new ministry does not act on this now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of providing piped drinking water to every household by 2024 could end up as nothing more than a pipe dream.