Why isn’t water the central issue this election?

India is in the throes of the biggest electoral exercise in the world in a scorching summer, political parties are bending over backwards to woo voters, and yet the issue that is paramount for the wellbeing of every Indian has found little mention in the heat and dust of it all – water.  

The average Indian is starved for water and this shortage is only increasing. Niti Aayog’s 2018 report had bluntly stated that over 600 million people in India are facing extreme water stress. A joint WHO and UNICEF report for 2019 warned that nearly 100 million people in India are without basic water supply.

The severity of this water deprivation has only got worse during the last six years as we find several of our state capitals running out of it. Chennai became one of the world’s first major cities to run out of water in 2019, with tankers being requisitioned to supply 10 million litres of water to meet its population’s needs. This year, Bengaluru is facing its worst water crisis in decades, with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah having to admit that the city is facing a shortage of 500 million litres of water every day. But water scarcity is not limited to just Bengaluru. Mumbai, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Shimla and Dehra Dun are other capital cities facing acute water stress. The less said about our smaller cities the better. 

 A growing population and the ill-planned expansion of our cities has only intensified our water demand so much that a city like Jaipur, which relied on the Ramgarh Dam as its primary source of water, is now dependent on groundwater. The situation is the same in Lucknow, where it has been estimated that groundwater extraction is equivalent to one-third of the Bhakra Nangal dam’s capacity annually.  Dehra Dun, a watershed city whose many rivers including the Rispanna, the Song and the Bindal fed into the Yamuna and Ganga, is now facing acute water stress with all its once-perennial rivers having dried up. 

India constitutes over 16% of the world’s population but has only 4%  of the world’s freshwater resources. With most of our rivers running dry during the summer months, we have emerged as the largest extractor of groundwater in the world – we extract more than the US and China combined. A study published by Science warned that by 2025, large swathes of north-western and southern India will be left with critically low groundwater availability. 

This Armageddon picture seems to be coming true because already, in Hyderabad, the residents of plush, high-rise gated communities have been informed that with borewells having dried up and water tankers being requisitioned, they will have to pay an additional Rs 4,000 maintenance per flat.

The situation in rural India is even worse. Villagers living in water-stressed Marathwada and Vidarbha in Maharashtra receive tanker water once in eight days and have to pay up to Rs 600 for a drum of water at a time when the prevailing water scarcity has wreaked havoc on their crops. Under pressure and with little government support, over 3,000 farmers from these two districts alone ended their lives in 2023. 

The India Meteorological Department has reported that over 500 of India’s 718 districts are facing drought, ranging from mildly dry to extremely dry conditions. Their findings are based on Standardised Precipitation Index data and this, they warn, will further hamper agricultural production.

Water should be at the centre of all political debates because it is getting scarcer and will affect us all, as do floods, forest fires, air pollution and the increasing levels of pollution in our water bodies.

Lip service has been made to the issue of environment since it is included in the manifestos of all our national parties, but politicians have failed to connect disasters or environmental pollution with livelihood and governance issues.

Environmental crusader Sonam Wangchuk has been demanding constitutional safeguards to protect the fragile environment of Ladakh, having strongly opposed mining leases being given to a few favoured corporate houses as this would jeopardise the water resources for the whole of North India. But we need more mainstream politicians to talk about air and water pollution and how the fragile ecology of our country is being destroyed by the dismantling of the regulatory framework by the Narendra Modi government to pave way for that elusive growth in manufacturing and job-creation.

The World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2024 counts extreme weather events and critical changes to our earth systems as the greatest concern facing the world in the coming decade. An assessment of extreme weather events undertaken by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment for the first nine months of 2023 showed that India experienced extreme weather events almost every single day up
to the end of September. These extreme weather events resulted in the death of 2,923 people and destroyed two million hectares of crops, 80,000 homes, and resulted in the killing of 92,000 animals.

Climate change has made the monsoons more erratic and volatile, leading to frequent landslides and flash floods in the Himalayas. A major avalanche was caused this April 22 on the vital Munsyari-Milam Road linking border villages along the Indo-China border when a part of the Chirkani glacier broke off, thanks to the rising temperatures in the Himalayan region.

Our political leaders think that environmental concerns will gain currency only after we address the fundamental human needs of food and water. But, can they address those issues when erratic and uneven monsoon rains cause lower yields and crop damages, reducing farmers’ incomes and causing food prices to rise? This impending water crisis can cripple India’s agriculture sector, and yet we are holding an election where water is scarcely mentioned. 

Water scarcity is such a pressing matter that stakeholders across all parties should get together and chalk out a meaningful strategy for forest and water conservation. For that, they need to rein in the real estate corporates and the mining mafia. If we deplete our groundwater resources, how will these be regenerated. It took nature millions of years to create these aquifers, but the current regime seems hellbent on squandering them.

The farmers and their families in Vidarbha and Marathwada have taken matters in their own hands. They have warned politicians who go there seeking their vote that if they do not give them water, they will boycott the elections. Maybe people in more regions should also raise their voice on this issue. 

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist)