By Sunita Narain
Summer of 2018, the Himalayan town of Shimla literally ran out of water. Summer of 2019, Chennai at the end of all rivers in India faced its day zero. These are not the only towns to confront this crisis. According to the 2018 Composite Water Index of the Niti Aayog, 600 million people—roughly half of Indians—face high to extreme water crisis; worse 70 per cent of the available water is contaminated. And by 2020, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad will run out of groundwater and by 2030, as much as 40 per cent of India will have no drinking water.
But this is one future we can change. Water is a replenishable resource—it snows and rains each year. More importantly, other than in the case of agriculture, we don’t consume water. We use and discharge. Therefore, it can be treated and then re-used and recycled. The agenda is also clear: first to augment available water by capturing every drop and doing this everywhere. In a climate-risked India, when rainfall is extreme and variable, it means doing more to capture rain and to recharge groundwater.
The second and most important agenda is to combine water augmentation with efficiency. Each drop must bring more crop and more of everything. This means designing deliberately to reduce water usage. In agriculture it means changing cropping patterns so that we stop growing water guzzling crops like rice, wheat and sugarcane in areas where water is scarce. It means re-designing policies to incentivize farmers to diversify crops; promoting diets that value water-prudent crops.
If water efficiency is the agenda for agriculture, then water-recycling has to be the agenda for cities and industries. Till date we have no data on how much water is used today in urban and industrial India. The last estimation was done in the mid-1990s, which said that agriculture uses some 75-80 per cent of available water. This is completely out of date. As cities grow they will require water. This water will be brought from longer distances, which increases cost and losses in transmission. Whatever water cities have is, therefore, expensive and is supplied inequitably to residents. Where people get none or little water they dig into the ground, which in turn depletes groundwater.
Worse and criminally, cities do not discharge clean water back into the environment—80 per cent is discharged as waste. The question is how much of it is cleaned and made available for reuse. We can do this. But we don’t. Instead we flush, we forget, use and abuse. Whatever is there is contaminated.
The fact is that toilets are mere receptacles to receive waste; when we flush or pour water, the waste flows into a piped drain, which could be either connected, or not, to a sewage treatment plant (STP). This STP may or may not work. The key is to build toilets that work and toilets that are connected to systems that will safely dispose of human excreta so that it does not become another source of pollution and another source of bad health. So, building toilets, however essential, must not be confused with sanitation.
But if we reinvent the way we treat our sewage, we can save water – first by not allowing it to be polluted and secondly by turning waste back into a resource. This is a potential game-changer.
Till now, the paradigm for urban sanitation has been costly. It requires first the supply of water, which if transported from longer distances, increases cost of supply. The more the water that is supplied, the more the sewage that is generated. So, the next part is to build underground conveyance systems to connect each household and to transport the waste-water also to longer distances to sewage treatment plants so it is cleaned before discharge. But even this is not enough. The fact is that our rivers have little clean water to assimilate even treated effluents. This means sewage treatment plants have to clean waste to near bathing water quality before being release into rivers. This never happens. Pollution grows even as governments chase pipe-dreams of building more sewage treatment plants, underground drains and toilets. It never adds up.
This approach also misses the opportunity. My colleagues at the Centre for Science and Environment have worked on what we call, “shit-flow” diagrams of cities – maps of journey of sewage. This shows up two realities. One, nearly all Indian cities do not treat or safely dispose the bulk of the human excreta. Two, most toilets in almost all cities, are not connected to underground pipes, but to individual septic tanks. This is on-site treatment, which needs to be recognized and worked with.
This on-site system would work, if the septic tank is built to specification; if the system for collection of the human excreta is regulated and if the sludge, so collected is taken to treatment points so that it can be made safe for reuse.
The fact is that sludge is nutrient rich. Today, the global nitrogen cycle is being destroyed because we take human excreta, which is rich in nutrients and dispose it in water. In this case, we can return the human excreta back to land, use it as fertilizer and reverse the sanitation cycle. The faecal sludge, after treatment, can be given to farmers and used as organic compost. Or, it can be treated and mixed with other organic waste—like kitchen waste—and used for biogas, or to manufacture fuel pellets or ethanol.
The bottom-line is that unless our system of waste management is affordable, it cannot be sustainable. We need solutions that can reach water to all; take back the waste of all and do this in ways that can be Re-inventing the business of sewage so that it works the current on-site technologies will not only provide employment, it will also provide sustainable solutions so that waste, is not waste, it is a resource.
This is even more important in today’s climate risked world.
Each year, without fail we have a vicious cycle of crippling and backbreaking drought and then devastating floods. But the fact is that this cycle is getting a new ‘normal’. First, floods and droughts come together. Today, even as 40 per cent of the districts face prospects of drought, close to 25 per cent districts have had heavy rainfall of more than 100 mm in just a matter of hours. Rainfall is variable and extreme.
In 2017, Chandigarh, a city of open parks, was submerged under water. It had deficient rains till August 21 of that year, and then it got 115 mm of rain in just 12 hours. It drowned. In other words, it got roughly 15 per cent of its annual monsoon rain in just these hours. Also, in 2017, Bengaluru hardly had any rain and then it poured. It got 150 mm of rain in just about a day, which is close to 30 per cent of its annual monsoon rain. No wonder the city drowned.
This is a double-whammy. The fact is that on the one hand we are getting our water management wrong – we are building in floodplains, destroying our water-bodies and filling up our water channels. On the other hand, climate change is beginning to show its impact on the monsoons. It is leading to, what scientists predicted would happen, more rain in fewer number of rainy days. More rain and more extreme rain events!
It is time we got this reality. This means learning to cope with twin scenarios simultaneously. This means being obsessive about how to mitigate floods and how to live with scarcity of water. The good news is that doing one, can help the other. But we need to stop debating, dithering or dawdling. We know what to do. And we have no time to lose – climate change is only increasing with time as weather and rainfall will only get more variable, more extreme and more catastrophic.
The answer to floods is what has been discussed for long and was in fact practiced in flood-prone regions of India many decades ago. It requires planning systems that can divert and channelize water so that it does not flood land and destroy life. It means linking rivers to ponds, lakes and ditches so that water is free to flow. This will distribute the water across the region and bring other benefits. It will recharge groundwater so that in the subsequent months of low rainfall there is water for drinking and irrigation. It will also ensure that there is food during the flood period, as wetlands are highly productive in terms of fish and plant food.
Mitigating floods and droughts have only one answer – obsessive attention to building millions and millions of connected and living water structures that will capture rain, be a sponge for flood and storehouse for drought.
Our water future is about our water wisdom. We need to learn from the fascinating case of ancient Rome and Edo, the city out of which grew Tokyo. Romans used to build huge aqueducts that ran for tens of miles to bring water to their settlements. These aqueducts even today are the most omnipresent symbols of that society’s water management. And many experts have praised the Romans for the meticulousness with which they planned their water supply.
But, no, these aqueducts represent not the intelligence but the utter environmental mismanagement of the great Romans. Rome was built on the river Tiber. The city did not need any aqueduct. But as the waste of Rome was discharged directly into the Tiber, the river was polluted and water had to be brought from long distances. Water outlets were few as a result and the elite appropriated these using a system of slaves. On the contrary, traditional Japanese never discharged their waste into the rivers. Instead they composted the waste and then used then in the fields. Using the rivers, Edo had numerous water outlets and much more egalitarian water supply.
Water and culture go together. Water shortage is not about mere failure of rain. It is about the failure of society to live and share its water endowment.
The challenge is to confront the reality of current water management strategies and have the courage to stand for a different and more water secure future. The problem is in our mind – and in our inability to think and do things differently.
We are at a new juncture where livelihoods are threatened because of water mismanagement. We are also at a juncture when urban-industrial growth will demand more water for its development. The question then is how will India balance the needs of the old – agriculture and drinking of its rural populations – with the needs of the new – urban and industrial sectors? How will water productivity be enhanced so that it remains affordable and hence sustainable?
We can be water-secure, because we are water-wise.
(The author is Director General, Centre for Science and Environment)