So the papers are full of news that the ground water table in northern India is being seriously depleted, and so it threatens destroy our agricultural output. Of course while the media may have just caught up with this story, common people have known this for 20 years now. Ever since the agricultural revolution was based on tube wells in the 1950″s, ground water is being steadily depleted.
In my youth, my Grandfather used to have a vegetable garden in Delhi, to which the water source was a hand pump. It took just one downward stroke to bring the water gushing out. My sister and I had endless joy bathing underneath the hand pump, and munching away at the vegetables in the garden. I don’t think our Grandfather liked us very much. He was constantly shooing us away from his beloved vegetables !
Over the years it was more and more difficult to suck water out of the ground however hard you tried, and today the hand pump stands alone in a dried up vegetable patch as a monument to an ancient time when water was plentiful,
None of us would have believed that water would run out on us, but it has. We have disrespected something that all cultures, in some form or the other, have worshipped. And now it is gone, and we still are too lazy, or have too much inertia to do something about it. Only when the taps run dry will we know the worth of water.
Problem is that all the media and the policy makers and most of us are basically urban dwellers, believing that somehow it is the government’s responsibility to ensure we have running water in our taps or pipes. It is, and bad water management is one of the worst crimes of successive Indian governments over the last three decades. But we too are to blame.
Do not believe that a lack of water in the agriculture sector is not affecting us in the Urban sectors. Other than the obvious conversation about food prices, some of the greatest migrations to urban cities over the last 10 years has been due to collapse of rural communities as agriculture is unsustainable due to disappearance of ground water which supports almost 60% if Indian Agricultural output.
We are growing into unsustainable overloaded Mega Cities now, where the infrastructure is collapsing and taps are running dry. How long before Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai run out of Water ? Where will the people go then ? People learn to live with no food for 3 days at a time sometimes, but no one can go through a day without water…….
Continue reading “Mumbai underworld set to take over distribution of Water ? ?”
