NY Times, September 29, 2006
In India, Water Crisis Means Foul Sludge
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
NEW DELHI, Sept. 28 The quest for water can drive a woman mad.
Ask Ritu Prasher. Every day, Mrs. Prasher, a homemaker in a middle-class
neighborhood of this capital, rises at 6:30 a.m. and begins fretting about
water.
It is a rare morning when water trickles through the pipes. More often, not
a drop will come. So Mrs. Prasher will have to call a private water tanker,
wait for it to show up, call again, wait some more and worry about whether
enough buckets are filled in the bathroom in case no water arrives.
Your whole day goes just planning how youll get water, a weary Mrs.
Prasher, 45, recounted one morning this summer, cellphone in hand and ready
to press redial for the water tanker. You become so edgy all the time.
In the richest city in India, with the nations economy marching ahead at
an enviable clip, middle-class people like Mrs. Prasher are reduced to
foraging for water. Their predicament testifies to the governments
astonishing inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at
a time when India asserts itself as a global power.
The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent
years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast
and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public
water and sanitation network.
The combination has left water all too scarce in some places, contaminated
in others and in cursed surfeit for millions who are flooded each year.
Today the problems threaten Indias ability to fortify its sagging farms,
sustain its economic growth and make its cities healthy and habitable. At
stake is not only Indias economic ambition but its very image as the
worlds largest democracy.
If we become rich or poor as a nation, its because of water, said Sunita
Narain, director of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
Conflicts over water mirror the most vexing changes facing India: the
competing demands of urban and rural areas, the stubborn divide between
rich and poor, and the balance between the needs of a thriving economy and
a fragile environment.
New Delhis water woes are typical of those of many Indian cities.
Nationwide, the urban water distribution network is in such disrepair that
no city can provide water from the public tap for more than a few hours a day.
An even bigger problem than demand is disposal. New Delhi can neither
quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of
sewage that it produces. Some 45 percent of the population is not connected
to the public sewerage system.
Those issues are amplified nationwide. More than 700 million Indians, or
roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation.
Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5
die each year, according to the United Nations.
The government says that 9 out of 10 Indians have access to the public
water supply, but that may include sources that are going dry or are
contaminated.
The World Bank, in rare agreement with Ms. Narain, warned in a report
published last October that India stood on the edge of an era of severe
water scarcity.
Unless dramatic changes are made and made soon in the way in which
government manages water, the World Bank report concluded, India will
have neither the cash to maintain and build new infrastructure, nor the
water required for the economy and for people.
The window to address the crisis is closing. Climate change is expected
only to exacerbate the problems by causing extreme bouts of weather heat,
deluge or drought.
A River of Waste
The fabled Yamuna River, on whose banks this city was born more than 2,000
years ago, is a case study in the water management crisis confronting India.
In Hindu mythology, the Yamuna is considered to be a river that fell from
heaven to earth. Today, it is a foul portrait of crippled infrastructure
and yet, still worshiped. From the bridges that soar across the river, the
faithful toss coins and sweets, lovingly wrapped in plastic. They scatter
the ashes of their dead.
In New Delhi the Yamuna itself is clinically dead.
As the Yamuna enters the capital, still relatively clean from its 246-mile
descent from atop the Himalayas, the citys public water agency, the New
Delhi Jal Board, extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its
largest single source of drinking water.
As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New
Delhis waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river
each day.
Coursing through the capital, the river becomes a noxious black thread.
Clumps of raw sewage float on top. Methane gas gurgles on the surface.
It is hardly safe for fish, let alone bathing or drinking. A government
audit found last year that the level of fecal coliform, one measure of
filth, in the Yamuna was 100,000 times the safe limit for bathing.
In 1992, a retired Indian Navy officer who once sailed regattas on the
Yamuna took his government to the Supreme Court. The retired officer,
Sureshwar D. Sinha, charged that the state had killed the Yamuna and
violated his constitutional right, as a practicing Hindu, to perform ritual
baths in the river.
Since then, the Supreme Court ordered the citys water authority to treat
all sewage flowing into the river and improve water quality. In 14 years,
that command is still unmet.
New Delhis population, now 16 million, has expanded by roughly 41 percent
in the last 15 years, officials estimate. As the number of people living
and defecating in the city soars, on average more than half of the sewage
they pour into the river goes untreated.
A government audit last year indicted the Jal Board for having spent $200
million and yielding very little value. The construction of more sewage
treatment plants has done little to stanch the flow, in part because sewage
lines are badly clogged and because power failures leave them inoperable
for hours at a time.
It has not improved at all because the quantity of sewage is constantly
increasing, said R. C. Trivedi, a director of the Central Pollution
Control Board, which monitors the quality of the Yamuna River. The gap is
continually widening.
Making matters worse, many New Delhi neighborhoods, like Janata Colony
Hindi for Peoples Colony are not even connected to sewage pipes. Open
sewers hem the narrow lanes of the slum. Every alley carries their stench.
Some canals are so clogged with trash and sludge that they are no more than
green-black ribbons of muck. It is a mosquitoes paradise. Malaria and
dengue fever are regular visitors.
Not long ago, a 2-year-old boy named Arman Mustakeem fell into one such
canal and drowned. His parents said they found him floating in the open
sewer in front of their home.
These canals empty into a wide storm drain. It, in turn, runs through the
eastern edges of the city, raking in more sewage and cascades of trash,
before it merges with effluent from two sewage treatment plants, and
finally, enters the Yamuna.
Carrying the capitals waste on its back, the Yamuna meanders south to
cities like Mathura and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. It is their principal
source of drinking water, too. New Delhis downstream neighbors are forced
to treat the water heavily, hiking up the cost.
With New Delhi slated to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010, the
government proposes to remake this riverfront with a sports and recreation
complex. In the meantime, the Yamuna, vital and befouled as it is, bears
the weight of New Delhis ambitions.
At dawn each morning, men sink into the still, black waters to retrieve
whatever can be bartered or sold: rings from a dead mans finger, coins
dropped by the faithful, the remnants of rubber sandals, plastic water bottles.
The dhobis, who launder clothes, line up on one stretch of riverbank,
pounding saris and bedsheets on stone tablets. A man shovels sand from the
river bottom: every bullock cart he fills for a cement maker will fetch him
a coveted $5.50. Men and boys bathe.
This river is worshiped, said a bewildered Sunny Verma, 24. Is this the
right way of worshiping it?
So shaken was Mr. Verma on his first visit to the Yamuna this year that he
now works full time to shake up others. He joined an environmental group
called We for Yamuna.
If you want to worship the river, you should give it more respect, he
said. You should treat it the right way. You should question the
government. You should ask the state to actually do something for the river.
Deluge and Drought
Mrs. Prasher has the misfortune of living in a neighborhood on New Delhis
poorly served southern fringe.
As the citys water supply runs through a 5,600-mile network of battered
public pipes, 25 to 40 percent leaks out. By the time it reaches her, there
is hardly enough.
On average, she gets no more than 13 gallons a month from the tap and a
water bill from the water board that fluctuates from $6 to $20, at its
whimsy, she complains, since there is never a meter reading anyway.
That means she has to look for other sources, scrimp and scavenge to meet
her familys water needs.
She buys an additional 265 gallons from private tankers, for roughly $20 a
month. On top of that she pays $2.50 toward the worker who pipes water from
a private tube-well she and other residents of her apartment block have
installed in the courtyard.
Nearly a fourth of New Delhi households, according to the government
commissioned Delhi Human Development Report, rely at least in some part on
such wells. It is one of the principal reasons groundwater in New Delhi is
drying up faster than virtually anywhere in the country: 78 percent of it
is considered overexploited.
Still, the new posh apartment buildings sprouting across New Delhi and its
suburbs sell themselves by ensuring a 24-hour water supply usually by
drilling wells deep underground. Imagine never being thirsty for water,
boasts a newspaper advertisement for one new development.
Warning of an unparalleled water crisis, the study released in August
found that 25 percent of New Delhi households had no access to piped water,
and that 27 percent got water for less than three hours a day. Nearly two
million households, the report also found, had no toilet.
The daily New Delhi hustle for water only adds to the strains on the public
system.
A few years ago, for instance, to compensate for the low water pressure in
the public pipeline, Mrs. Prasher and her neighbors began tapping directly
into the public water main with so-called booster pumps, each one sucking
out as much water as possible.
It was a me-first approach to a limited and unreliable public resource, and
it proliferated across this me-first city, each booster pump further
draining the water supply.
The situation for New Delhi, and all of India, is only expected to worsen.
India now uses an estimated 829 billion cubic yards of water every year
that is more than guzzling an entire Lake Erie. But its water needs are
growing by leaps. By 2050, official projections indicate, demand will more
than double, and exceed the 1.4 trillion cubic yards that India has at its
disposal.
Yet the most telling paradox of the citys water crisis is that New Delhi
is not entirely lacking in water. The problem is distribution, hampered by
a feeble infrastructure and a lack of resources, concedes Arun Mathur,
chief executive of the Jal Board.
The Jal Board estimates that consumers pay no more than 40 percent of the
actual cost of water. Raising the rates is unrealistic for now, as Mr.
Mathur well knows. It would be easier to ask people to pay up more if we
can make water abundantly available, he said. A proposal to privatize
water supply in some neighborhoods met with stiff opposition last year and
was dropped.
So the citys pipe network remains a punctured mess. That means, like most
everything else in this country, some people have more than enough, and
others too little.
The slums built higgledy-piggledy behind Mrs. Prashers neighborhood have
no public pipes at all. The Jal Board sends tankers instead. The women here
waste their days waiting for water, and its arrival sets off desperate
wrestling in the streets.
Kamal Krishnan quit her job for the sake of securing her share. Five days a
week, she would clean offices in the next neighborhood. Five nights a week,
she would go home to find no water at home. The buckets would stand empty.
Finally, her husband ordered her to quit. And wait.
I want to work, but I cant, she said glumly. I go mad waiting for water.
Elsewhere, in the central city, where the nations top politicians have
their official homes, the average daily water supply is three times what
finally arrives even in Mrs. Prashers neighborhood.
Mrs. Prasher rations her water day to day as if New Delhi were a desert.
She uses the leftover water from the dog bowl to water the plants. She
recycles soapy water from the laundry to mop the balcony.
And even when she gets it, the quality is another question altogether.
Her well water has turned salty as it has receded over the years. The water
from the private tanker is mucky-brown. Still, Mrs. Prasher says, she can
hardly afford to reject it. Beggars cant be choosers, she said. Its
water.
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