What human need could be more basic than the need for water? Next to Oxygen, it is surely one of the substances most critical for human survival. Water is also the basic requirement for agriculture, industry, and many other economic activities — not to mention domestic ones such as cooking, washing and personal hygiene. Lack of clean water is, in one way or the other, the single most important cause of human discomfort, disease and early death.

And, which natural resource is more abundant in the sub-continent than fresh water? The monsoons and the snows that melt in the Himalayas bring more water through the rivers of India than perhaps any other comparable area of the world, with the possible exception of the Amazon basin. These rivers and the fertile lands they irrigate have, for thousands of years, supported some of the most densely populated regions of our planet and provided the foundations of some of the highest civilisations ever known.

Yet, there is growing talk in our country today of impending "Water Wars". The hydrological cycles of our country have been so disturbed and destroyed that in many parts drought and pervasive, unquenched, thirst have become a way of life. Neighbouring states have already drawn daggers over sharing of river waters and taken their fights not only to the courts of law, but also to the streets. Each year, growing numbers of villagers in drought stricken districts squabble endlessly over access to dwindling water sources. And, farmers in different parts of the country find their crops dwindling as their groundwater recedes from aquifer to deeper aquifer.

Indeed, we do not have to wait any longer for the war over water to take place. In a very real way, it has already broken out – in the form of the desperate skirmishes, frantic fights and bitter battles that hundreds of millions of our compatriots daily go through to get their bucket of water. Sometimes, these battles are with each other, sometimes with nature. And the outcome is not reassuring. For many in our biggest cities – Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai to mention a few — the municipalities can supply no more than a few hours of water a day. Sometimes, not even every day. The prime daily task of the women and girls of our villages is now to walk three, four and even five hours a day to fetch small quantities of water for their families. In towns and cities, they don’t have to walk: they wait in long lines instead, but the human costs are similar. Not to mention the economic costs of so many people engaged in unproductive work, work that should be unnecessary in the first place.

The battles are not only being fought every day, but they are being lost, on a grand scale.

Water, the limiting resource

We are now at a point where water scarcity is constraining not only agriculture and industry, but severely jeopardising the health of our people. As the population grows and each person demands more and more goods and services that depend on water, this scarcity can only get worse.

This growing scarcity is further accelerated by the way we manage our water resources, an issue that falls into three broad categories:

n Destruction of local water cycles
n Overuse and waste
n   Contamination and pollution

Unavailability of water in adequate quantities to meet the basic needs of people is at the root of two of the prime examples of the vicious cycles that socio-economic processes can get caught up in. In the first case – the vicious cycle of poverty and water – lack of clean water leads to disease, loss of productive time and financial costs, which in turn lead to loss of disposable income and the inability to pay for clean water, which in turn lead to further deterioration in health and productivity, which in turn leads to loss of income….

The second, perhaps not so obvious, example is the vicious cycle of affluence and influence. Those who can afford to do so, buy high quality water for all their needs, and ensure that they are adequately insulated from the impacts of the general scarcity of the resource. This is not a minor phenomenon: the money spent in India today on bottled drinking water will soon exceed the total funds spent by public agencies on drinking water supply. The rich no longer have a major stake in the quality and performance of the public service and little incentive to use their influence to change policies or investment priorities. The cycle of affluence and influence leads directly to privatisation of services to the rich and marginalisation of the services accessed by the poor. However, short-sighted this might be even from a self-interest point of view, those who are affluent and influential rarely realise this until it is too late.

Neither type of vicious cycle can be good — for anyone, rich or poor.

To achieve a viable balance between supply and demand for water is not an easy task. The issues are complex and causes often get mixed up with effects. Moreover, supply and demand are sometimes not independent of each other: Interventions that increase supply can also increase demand, often resulting at best in little net improvement and at worst in a counter-productive boomerang effect. Most present policies and actions unfortunately have a tendency to deal with symptoms rather than cures, getting short term gains at the expense of long term societal goals.

Over the past twenty years, Development Alternatives has designed and implemented numerous programmes and projects aimed at demonstrating better management of water resources. Many of them have been reported over the years in this Newsletter. This issue aims at highlighting, through random examples, some of this work to give a glimpse into the range and variety of alternatives that are needed to solve the problems of water scarcity.

No problem that is complex can be solved with simple, one dimensional solutions. So, particularly, it is with water. Even so, it is useful to work on such issues through conceptual frameworks that are easily and widely understandable. The experience of Development Alternatives in the field of water boils down, as for many other spheres of our activity, to the three primary pillars of human endeavour:

n    The people-nature issues — management of water resources
n    The people-machine issues — technologies for water
n    The people-people interactions — institutions for water

The difference between how much rain and snow falls on the land surface of the subcontinent and how much water is available for productive use is largely a matter of how well our "natural" ecosystems are functioning. Before the massive destruction of forests, and precipitate fall of groundwater tables, these ecosystems produced more than sufficient fresh water to meet the needs of the people of India. Now, as a result of gross human interference, these ecosystems are no longer able to provide the natural reservoirs and buffers needed to maintain steady year round supplies of water. The result: a growing cycle of droughts and floods, each year increasing in intensity and human cost.

The solutions lie in bringing back the trees and regenerating the aquifers. And, these in turn need the same three pillars of human endeavour: good management practices to encourage the natural resource conservation, good science to design such practices, and good institutions of governance to help internalise these practices into community decision making processes.

Development Alternatives has more than fifteen years of successes in regenerating local water cycles by constructing water harvesting structures such as check dams, gully plugs and reservoirs. With some 100 check dams constructed in the rugged and dry area of Bundelkhand, we have been able to help local communities bring back to life several rivers and streams that had, over the past few decades, virtually died. Gradually, because of progressive deforestation and over-utilisation of water, their flows had deteriorated to the point that, for two to three months of the Monsoon, they were in flood and for the rest of the year they were quite dry.

The solutions lie in a combination of traditional and modern technology: land and water management techniques used for centuries by, for example, the Chandelas and Moghuls, together with satellite imagery for site selection. Afforestation, cropping and other land management practices reinforce the infiltration of water into the ground water aquifers, leading to year round flow of water in the streams. Several rivers have thus been rejuvenated through community action supported by various funding sources including government agencies at the national, state and local levels, private sector sponsors and foundations.

Industry, agriculture and other water intensive activities must now be designed in the light of their impact on the hydrological cycle as much as on their economic and development implications. For this purpose, it becomes necessary to develop indicators of sustainable water use, for which some initial work has been done by Development Alternatives in the form of draft guidelines for panchayats and municipalities.

The Swajal project being conducted by Development Alternatives in Jhansi District has shown us both how important it is to mobilise community participation in solving basic resource problems such as water, and how difficult it is to achieve this. The sense of dependency created over the past five decades by our systems of governance, has destroyed almost completely the desire and capacity of our fellow citizens to take responsibility for their resources, even when the outcome of doing so would mean a radical improvement in their living conditions. In this project, several dozen villages have been working for several years, with varying degrees of success, to build simple water and sanitation systems for their villages.

Water scarcity is not only a problem of quantity, but often also of quality. With more than a decade of work in this area, the Development Alternatives Group has tested several technologies for water purification. Among these, two have showed considerable potential for rural applications – solar stills and the "Portapak" water treatment device. Further tests are needed, however, before these technologies can be put on the market. Industrial water systems are equally important, and we have worked on projects for recycling, effluent treatment and for designing integrated clean technology systems with a wide range of industrial units.

The CLEAN programme works with school children to monitor the quality of water sources in cities. Well trained monitors, equipped with the portable Jal-TARA water testing kit take responsibility for assessing water quality in selected parts of their city. They collect samples from piped water, ground water and surface water bodies and analyse the quality for 14 parameters. Now operating in some one dozen cities in different parts of India, CLEAN has mobilised child power not only to collect data, but also to analyse it and to campaign for technologies and policies that will result in better municipal water.

The campaigns of CLEAN are also responsible for generating awareness to reduce the wasteful use of water. The CLEAN brigade in each city or town designs communication material and exhibits to show how water resources can be better managed and works to convince the wider public of the need for responsibility on every one’s part to conserve them.

As for other resources, the possibility of solving the water scarcity problem ultimately is one of management. And, this relates to the whole issue of governance. The work of Development Alternatives reinforces the growing understanding among development practitioners that only when there is a sense of ownership among the local community over a resource, can it be managed for the benefit of all and on a sustainable basis.

Unfortunately, most policies relating to water have been somewhat short-sighted and narrowly conceived. Probably, the most stark examples of such short-sighted policies and actions lie in the area of subsidies and pricing. In the management of water, as for many other resources, subsidies often lead to perverse results – more or less the opposite of what they were intended to achieve. Introduction of subsidies is generally justified in terms of promoting equity, environmental improvement or use of better technology. But, it is the rich who appropriate the benefits and it is the environment which suffers from excessive use of resources. Water for industrial, urban and agricultural use is grossly underpriced (often by a factor of 100 below either the cost of supplying it or the value addition it leads to).

Neither privatisation of such resources nor their delivery by government can maximise the direct benefits to the members of the community or minimise the indirect costs to the marginalised or to nature. A study of successful common property resource management systems quickly shows that properly designed community decision making systems are capable of distributing a resource such as water not only equitably but also efficiently. The work of Development Alternatives and People First points to solutions in which the government or the private sector should be responsible for "wholesale" (large scale, long distance) delivery, and the community (or "water cooperative") in the village and the neighbourhood in the town should be responsible for retail distribution.

In any case, it has become clear that water can no longer be considered a free resource, both in that it costs money to deliver it and in that value is added by its use. When it is underpriced, it gets overused and if it is overpriced, it limits the value adding potential of other resources. Either way, it is sub-optimally used. Setting a price on water is, however, not a simple matter of neo-classical supply-demand economics: the marginal value of water and the capacity to buy it varies radically, not only from person to person but from time to time. Under these circumstances, neither the goals of efficiency nor of equity are served by the market. Nor are they served by mindless, knee-jerk, simplistic socialist ideas.

Water must be priced, but needs to be priced differentially. The price of water has to be graded to ensure that this resource is available to all sections of society, not only on the basis of how much it costs and how much financial value it creates but also for the human and social impact it generates. Those, such as villagers or slum dwellers vulnerable to pathogens and illness, who need to use more of it should be encouraged to have greater access than their purchasing power now allows. On the other hand, the price of water for industries and rich farmers must be much higher than it is today to discourage the awful and wasteful use they currently make of this precious resource.

Recognising the importance of such issues and the need for greater clarity and consensus on them, Development Alternatives has been involved in a number of initiatives to put these issues onto the international and national agenda. It has been an active member, from their inception, of the Global Water Partnership and the India Water Partnership, about which further information is available elsewhere in this issue.

 by Ashok Khosla