Thirstproof

Go back to the basics: that’s what experts tell the Indian cricket team when the team is not performing. Exactly the same advice is relevant for the huge challenge that India’s water sector faces

Himanshu Thakkar Delhi

Consider the contours of the future water demands for a population that could be anywhere between 1.4 billion and 1.65 billion in 2050. Demand for food grains will be going up to 450 million tonnes per annum (84 per cent of water use is in agriculture sector today). Per capita water demand will be going up everyday, and the demand for industries and cities will be increasing almost on a daily basis. More rivers and groundwater aquifers will be getting polluted day after day, and power demands (every major option of power generation requires water) are likely to be four times than what they are today, while half of the households remain without access to electricity.

This will be accompanied by looming climate change, making rainfall (the primary source of water), droughts and floods more destructive and more frequent and at unusual places and times. Add to this the real possibility of diversion and damming of our rivers in the upstream by China and the challenge could not be more daunting.

Now consider the responses the various governments have come up with. More big dams. Bigger hydropower projects. More long-distance water transfer, interlinking of rivers and desalinisation on a large scale.

The response cannot be more off the mark, for it shows governments have learnt nothing from the experience and have wilfully decided to ignore the realities about our resources, the nature of the nation’s needs and the infrastructure and options available. In short, the governing establishment has chosen to ignore the basics.

Ignorance seems to be bliss for the decision makers. This was transparent when Union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz said on December 13 that the government will go ahead with the gigantic river-linking plan and the Ken-Betwa link is a success story. The truth is that even the detailed project report of this ‘success story’ is yet to be done and the differences between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh seem difficult to resolve. The minister also said that the Polavaram dam project is good and the government should go ahead with it. This, despite the fact that the Central Water Commission is yet to give final clearance to the project and Orissa and Chhattisgarh are yet to agree to the project, while there is a strong protest movement taking shape.

Remember, India has the largest irrigation infrastructure in the world, but, as Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram said in his last Budget speech, performance of that infrastructure is possibly the poorest in the world. The World Bank’s report card on India’s water sector, in June 2005, (interestingly titled India’s Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future), said, "The cost of replacement and maintenance of India’s stock of water resource and irrigation infrastructure would be about $4 billion a year, which is about twice the annual capital budget in the Five-Year Plan." Needless to add, we do not allocate even a tiny fraction of that amount for the maintenance of existing water infrastructures.

The implication is clear. As the International Water Management Institute’s study in early 2006 showed, the proportion of canal-irrigated areas is going down across the country. In a number of states (for instance, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh), even the actual area irrigated by canals has been going down for a decade. Besides, our reservoirs are rapidly silting up. The latest data from the Central Water Commission proves that and we are doing nothing to reduce the silting. Indeed, generation of electricity per megawatt installed capacity from large hydropower projects has reduced by over 20 per cent in the last 12 years as a result of aging machines, silting reservoirs and over development in some of the river basins.

The clearest sign of how wrong we are is evident in the way we are dealing with water resources development, while water-related conflicts are growing at every level. What is the response of the government to this reality? The water resources minister said on December 13 that this trend is prevalent because the Union government does not have much power over the states, as water is a state subject. He could not have been more off the mark. The trouble today is that the centre and state governments are already too powerful and people have little role to play as a collective force. There is no democracy in water resources development. And the solution lies in changing that situation in fundamental ways.

Understanding the ground realities of the state of our water resources has to be the first step of an outline of future solutions, as Mahasweta Devi said in another context. An objective stocktaking throws some interesting pointers for future action.

Average food-grain yield from irrigated areas in India is around 2.5 tonnes per hectare. This can be increased to four tonnes per hectare without involving rocket science or toxic dreams. Our water use efficiency is around 25-35 per cent in canal-irrigated areas and a little higher in groundwater-irrigated areas. As the mid-term review of the 10th Five-Year Plan showed, a 10 per cent increase in irrigation efficiency can add 14 million hectares of additional irrigated area. That’s higher than the target of the entire Bharat Nirman Yojana. And the cost of each additional hectare of irrigated area will be much less than the cost from such benefits from new projects.

While over 90 per cent of the additional irrigation in the last decade came from groundwater and while about two-thirds of our irrigated food grain output comes from groundwater, we do not seem to have understood the dire implications of plunging aquifer levels and the irreversible nature of pollution of the aquifers. One major consequence of depleting aquifer levels is the rising energy costs. This can be arrested and reversed if we take up groundwater recharging on a massive level (the plan for this has been submitted by the Central Ground Water Board to the Planning Commission). This will prolong the lifeline that groundwater provides. We need to remember that groundwater availability and its use and recharging options are much more widespread than other options, like large dams.

India has the largest number of big dams under construction today, more than any other country. The most important justification provided for large dams in India is that it helps store water available in monsoon to use it in non-monsoon months. However, there are many options available for storing monsoon water. One of the most important option is that of storing water in underground aquifers. Another option is to store it in small, decentralised projects, nearer to the location where the demand of water exists.

It’s time to assess the performance of large storages. Our analysis of data from the last 12 years shows that, on an average, in each year, 36.25 billion cubic metres (BCM) out of the 133 BCM storage capacity (through large dams monitored by the Central Water Commission) remain empty. This means that in each year, the capacity equal to 6.4 Sardar Sarovars is not used. We can achieve better performance of the existing capacity, instead of hankering for more such huge storage capacities, creating mass displacement, ecological destruction and social unrest.

The concept of virtual water (water content of the products we consume and trade) is going to be important in the future. Can we afford to export sugar and basmati rice, produced after consuming so much water, even as large parts of India continue to starve for water for basic needs?

Large-scale adoption of new methods, like the system of rice intensification (SRI) can get us huge benefits. One crop that is grown over the largest irrigated area in India is paddy. It is an extremely water intensive crop. Under SRI, tried in dozens of countries over the last decade and in thousands of hectares in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Orissa and West Bengal, some basic modifications in the cultivation method have shown that rice yield can be increased to eight tonnes per hectare like.

The methods include increasing the spacing between plants, transplanting younger seedlings and one plant in place of 2-3 plants per location and no flooding of the fields. In the process, other requirements (as also other inputs like seed) are reduced by over 50 per cent. Even if these methods, endorsed by the union agriculture ministry and the Andhra Pradesh government (though not pushed wholeheartedly for some unknown reasons), are adopted over just half of the 24 million hectares paddy-growing areas and even if we achieve half of the possible gains, we can still add six million hectares to irrigated areas with the water saved.

While the biggest projected USP of large hydropower projects is supposed to be the provision of peaking power, we neither monitor the power generation nor do the consumers pay anything extra for consumption of power during peaking hours. If we can create a peaking hours demand management system and ensure optimum peaking power generation from existing hydropower projects, the need for such projects would go down.

Similarly, regular independent assessment of the performance of large hydro (and large irrigation) projects would help us understand why the generation per megawatt installed capacity is going down and what we can do to arrest and reverse the same. Indeed, 90 per cent of our existing dams do not have hydropower components, whereby we can have the water storage and heads available for generation of hydropower without additional social and environmental costs. We need to assess at how many such existing dams we can add hydropower projects.

Similarly, hydropower can also be generated through small projects. According to an American Department of Energy study, published in January 2006, the US has the potential of generating 3,00,000 MW through small hydropower projects of lower than 30 MW installed capacity. It was assessed that 1,00,000 MW of that is feasible even according to the feasibility norms of 2005. That capacity is three times larger than existing projects in the US currently. Considering the way energy costs have gone up over the last one year, that figure would go up substantially.

We in India have not even assessed our potential with a similar study. We are fond of giving the example of China, but we can do better by learning appropriately from the Chinese experience, as they already have more than 88,000 small hydro projects, and the number is fast going up.

Some other options that are relevant in the power sector include demand side management (DSM—the potential of 25,000 MW, as per a Union power ministry study), off-shore wind power, solar and biomass power, use of decentralised power generation systems, reducing transmission and distribution losses, ‘time of day’ meter readings and increasing end-use efficiencies. A study by Prayas energy group recently showed that if every electrified household in India replaces just one 60-watt incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent lamp of sufficient wattage to give the same light, the peak load demand of electricity can be reduced by 5,000 MW. That should open up many eyes and minds.

MK Midha, Commissioner, Hissar Division, Haryana, said on Energy Conservation Day, December 6, "The DSM has the potential to address the needs of filling the gap between demand and supply of electricity and providing uninterrupted electricity supply to consumers at reduced rates." This is like double benefits. The DSM can not only bridge the demand, since it saves electricity, it will also make the cost of power much less.

In the years to come, the water requirements for urban and industrial use is going to increase in a big way due to increasing population, per capita demands, urbanisation and industrialisation. This will add to the load of pollution in the rivers and aquifers; many of them are already unusable currently. Among the big unexplored options in this area include DSM, pollution control, the re-use of water after adequate treatment and local supply side solutions, like rainwater harvesting and decentralised water treatment. Evidence of this working is being reported from all over the world.

The best that science is able to tell us today about the impact of global warming is that the frequency of extreme weather incidents would increase. However, that is no great help, as we will never know where and when such instances will occur. We need to put in place better systems of measurement so that the impact of such extreme incidents is minimised. Adaptation is the keyword. Unfortunately, we have done little in that direction.