DINESH KUMAR
Water problems are not new in India. They have been there for many millennia in different forms—water scarcity, droughts, floods, water logging, water contamination, etc. We have been finding solutions to these problems at different points in time, according to our society’s capabilities defined by the science, technology, social and human capital and financial resources. In many cases, we succeeded, and in many cases we failed (like when we had famines). In some cases, we succeeded in solving one problem using science, but ended up creating new sets of problems.
But science again came to our rescue in finding solutions to those new problems. As time passed, the nature and magnitude of the problems also kept changing and we also kept devising new solutions, based on the scientific, technological and other requisite capabilities. For example, ponds, shallow wells and tanks that dotted our irrigation landscape were slowly replaced by large irrigation systems based on big reservoirs, diversion systems and deep tube wells.
The defining character of our water management history is that we tried to find solutions to our water problems from within the water sector itself. All that has changed now. During the last 30 years, we have tried to bring in the energy sector and the food/agriculture sector (and rightly so for many situations). But the recent trend is somewhat disturbing. Too much of jargon is being introduced in the sector (almost one in every week) by the new generation stalwarts which only confuse people.
One often wonders how these new (fashionable) terms or ideas are relevant or useful to the sector and how they will help solve our water problems in the foreseeable future. These new generation stalwarts are totally disconnected from the real world. At times, the pressure is so much so that we keep wondering whether those who worked on water problems tirelessly for decades using the conventional approach (of taking the help of science, technology and institutions) have any role to play in the current scheme of things. Here are some of the fashionable ideas that are being pushed:
1 Zero Waste and Zero Discharge: No doubt, a fantastic idea that can change the way we live on this planet. But the reality today is that there is no activity (biological, physical) on this planet which does guarantee zero waste and zero discharge. Even when the municipal wastewater (sorry, the new term is ‘used water’) is fully treated (for recycling), and the contaminants are removed from the water and valuable resources are recovered from those contaminants, there will still be some waste left out.
The more we try to recover resources from the wastewater or the sludge (that is produced after treatment), the more expensive will it be, and we need more infrastructure & equipment, and every manufacturing process uses energy, water and materials and produces waste and therefore impacts the environment! So instead of parading such Utopian ideas, please do the homework to find out how much we value the environment and come up with a pragmatic approach to waste management.
2 Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF): first of all, there is no such thing called ‘zero budget farming’. It is just a fad like zero waste and zero discharge. Every farming activity mainly requires four things, viz., carbon dioxide, solar energy, water and nutrients (and it requires space to grow). When the food/crop is produced out of farming activity, there will be a loss of water (through evapotranspiration) even if it is rain-fed farming, and nutrients. If we do not use any external nutrients for crop production, it will take nutrients from the soil (provided the soil has) or else, the yield will suffer.
If there isn’t sufficient water (rainwater or irrigation water), then also the yield will suffer (as biomass yield is directly related to ET). While we might be able to plough back some of the nutrients from the biomass produced, not all. If we do not use the artificial fertilizers, then we may end up cutting the trees and using the leafy biomass for producing manure. Growing trees again takes water and nutrients. We have to account for that. That is how accounting works! So the solution to our resource (land and water) degradation problems doesn’t lie in this ‘silver bullet’ called ZBNF, but changing the consumption behaviour.
3 Finding Local Solutions for the Problems: when it comes to dealing with water problems in an area, the new generation stalwarts somehow feel that the solutions have to be found from within the area (this however doesn’t apply to the numerous conferences they attend in different corners of the world, where they present their local issues). It looks like there is a taboo attached to the idea of bringing water from outside. It has been proven time and again that large cities in India (like Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Bhopal, Jodhpur, etc.) cannot survive without exogenous water. But our champions of local management, do not think so.
They think that the ‘shallow aquifer’ underneath will solve all our problems. If you (rightly) point out that that groundwater in your area is depleted and bore wells are dried up, they will shout at you saying: “All these years, you have been only taking water out; now you should put in back”. They will eventually come up with an answer: “Recharge the shallow aquifers”. Luckily, there are several technologies now available in the ‘market’ to recharge dried-up bore wells (Please ‘Google’ it and you will find them).
So their problem is not with market, but which market to tap! That said, the only problem with ‘bore well recharging’ is that we still do not have the technology to find the water that can be used for recharging. An innocent question that can come to our minds is: “If there is so much water for putting it into the bore wells, why can’t we use it directly by storing on the surface?” But then the attitude is: “I have a solution, please give me a problem”. So the solution lies in managing the demand for water so that we can reduce the imports a bit.
4 Working with the Plumbers and Masons: What is vogue now is to do ‘out of box’ thinking, which essentially means that the old-fashioned thinking and the people who have spent decades in the sector carrying such thinking are out. I have been hearing this phrase for the past three decades.
Yet I have not seen a single problem in the water sector being solved through ‘out of box’ thinking. Too much of ‘out of box’ thinking has put us in a box where we are not able to look around and see how the world is changing in terms of advancements in water science and technology. To mitigate the water crisis in urban areas (especially to reduce the heavy leakage in the water distribution networks), the new mantra is to work with the stakeholders, i.e., ‘plumbers’ associations’.
One is clueless as to how a dialogue with plumbers’ association will help address this problem of heavy water loss. It happens because we don’t value the water. The utilities get the raw water almost free in most cases; and even when they have to pay for it, there is no incentive to go for large-scale leakage reduction measures, as it would cost more than the price that they pay for the raw water, and more importantly, they are not able to recover the cost of production and supply of water from the users.
To address the huge problem of poor sanitation in the rural areas, we are asked to work with the masons who construct the toilet pits! There is not much discussion on what influences the households’ decision to go for toilets, and other behavioural change issues.
So when the pipelines leak or burst, please do not blame the plumber, but the hydraulic engineer who designed or the engineer who supervised the construction (who did not do his/her job well due to obvious reasons).
5 ‘Warriors’ and ‘Crusaders’: They are the new Avatars (incarnations)! They can solve any problem, be it addressing water scarcity or mitigating climate change. We have water warriors of the state, ‘X’, ‘Y’ or ‘Z’ and sometimes even ‘watermen of India’. It doesn’t take much time for a person who had worked in a couple of remote villages of a backward Indian state to become a ‘water warrior’ of a state or the ‘waterman’ of India. It is all about how that person does lobbying with the influential media.
Friends, if your state doesn’t have its own ‘water warrior’, you can invite them to come and teach you how to solve your water problems. There are also ‘climate crusaders’ whom you can look up to. But the only problem is it is very hard to get them. Most of the time, they are ‘jet-set’ and ‘globe-trotting’. That said, I am not aware of any country or region within a country where water problems were solved by ‘crusaders’ and ‘warriors’.
6 ‘Climate Washing’: If one has an idea, which is quite stale (and outdated) and knows that any proposal built around that idea won’t sell so easily, then the smart tendency is to sprinkle a few words like ‘climate-resilient water supply’, ‘climate-resilient water resources management’, ‘climate-smart agriculture’, ‘building climate-resilient communities’, ‘climate-smart irrigation’, etc. in every paragraph of the proposal, depending on the central theme. Folks, everyone now knows ‘climate washing’ or ‘green washing’.
Merely putting a few catchy words like those mentioned above is not going to make any proposal attractive. Those days are gone as donors (whether government or private) are also increasingly made accountable.
The problems discussed above are just the symptoms of a larger malice gripping the society because of lack of powerful institutional regimes and strong leaderships in the water sector. It is a wakeup call for all those well-meaning people, before things become worse.
Dinesh Kumar is a renowned Distinguished Water Sector Expert, Executive Director, Institute for Resource Analysis & Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad & Honorary Advisor, IMPRI.
The article was first published in LinkedIn as Solving India’s Water Crisis: Barking up the Wrong Tree? on 02 May 2025.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
Read more at IMPRI:
Bharat Vandana Park: Integrating Ecology, Infrastructure, and Cultural Nationalism in Urban India
Biotech Industrial Training Programme (BITP)
Acknowledgment: This article was posted by Shivashish Narayan, a Visiting Researcher at IMPRI.
