Finally the rains have come to Mumbai, and parts of western India. The east and the south have been enjoying the monsoon for some time now. But Delhi – with parts of northern India – is still on a slow boil. The wise men and women of the Met department say the monsoons will come to Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and the still dry parts of UP and north Rajasthan by next week. That’s not too far away. But don’t get your hopes up when you see the sky cloud over, the clouds are possibly just passing through.
This year, our lament for rain has been long and loud. The rains have been delayed by almost a month. They have been scanty. Till now, we have got 43 per cent less rainfall than normal. Apparently central and parts of northwest India took the brunt of the dry spell, with the Gujarat region recording 91 per cent less rainfall than normal.
As groundwater sinks lower, it affects all our lives. In rural India, women may have to trudge several miles more to fill their pots with water for the whole household, village wells become centres of water politics that can devastate personal lives, farmlands and crops vie with human beings for water. Local reservoirs supplying water to cities dry up too. So even in ‘planned’ urban areas, there are impatient queues at tubewells, sleepless waits for water at home, and excited clustering around water tankers to buy water.
The reluctant rains have made our farmers panic and pray to keep the drought away. They have made our dairy farmers hugely anxious about milk production drying up and a crisis coming up in dairy supply. They have even made city slickers worried about further inflation. Relax, snort the wise, agriculture doesn’t contribute much to the economy now – the rise and rise of the sensex should not be affected by the delayed monsoon.
And to add to our fears, Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh has ominously warned of a possible drought-like situation in western India. Swiftly, Jitendra Singh, Junior Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, has denied that there is reason to panic. .
But is this panic really inevitable? Is this almost savage servitude to nature normal today? Is this slavish dependence on the rain gods normal for a country that pretends to be a global superpower? When smooth management professionals pounce on us at every opportunity to run our lives, why does our country not have adequate water management?
In this age of science, depending mindlessly on the monsoon to rejuvenate us, to quench the enormous thirst of our farmlands, to replenish our groundwater and to solve all our water woes without any help from us is bizarre.
For decades, we have been talking of harvesting rainwater. For more than a decade, our state governments have been attempting to do this in modern, carefully structured ways, for which taxpayers’ money has been deployed. For a decade, these plans have mostly been shelved, abandoned midway or not implemented as planned. As a result, we still do not have as much rainwater harvesting as we need. It remains a cute concept that only the environmentally-fashionable are interested in implementing.
Rainwater harvesting is perhaps the only way to counter our acute shortage of water, the only way to water security in a country that has generous monsoons. Lakes and ponds and wells and small dams are all vital to achieve this. Just as it is vital to be aware of not wasting water when we do have it.
Perhaps the saddest part of this tragic water tale is that India did have a culture of water conservation that could offer water security if practised properly. But in our enthusiasm to build big dams and to prioritise our modern urban lifestyles over rural needs and custom, we have neglected this traditional wisdom almost to the point of erasing the culture of water conservation. Activists like Anupam Mishra have worked very hard to promote rainwater harvesting and to preserve village India’s traditional rainwater harvesting techniques, particularly in arid lands like Rajasthan.
Successive governments have chosen to neglect our culture of water harvesting. Once the long-awaited monsoon arrives, will we try to hold it back longer? There are techniques – new and old, big and small – to harvest the wealth of water that the rain gods shower on us for a couple of months every year. Hopefully, we will not let it go waste this time. So that we do not need to burst into our ritual lamentations and prayer of ‘Allah megh de paani de’ again next summer.
Antara Dev Sen is Editor, ‘The Little Magazine.’ Email: sen@littlemag.com
