But also, I actually like this form of communication. By the nature of the medium (one thought per tweet), you are forced to discard all superfluous details. Instead each tweet/thought must be a strong point. This is compared to a blog, where the only thing holding you back from adding fluff is your own intellectual discipline.
Can you explain why you find this impossible/discipline to follow?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/19/m...
Granted, redrawing the map based on watershed doesn't solve India's problem. But, it sounds like that in the future their drinking water is going to come from careful management of groundwater, which will require a lot of state level agreements. Right now, I'm not optimistic those agreements will happen smoothly.
Thats a recipe for political disaster. Identity based politics is the only paradigm of politics in India. Currently southern states in India are organised on linguistic identity and every now and then there are statements from main-stream politicians calling for secession and establishing a separate country to counter the influx for North Indians who are painted as separate racial and ethnic group by these politicians. Breaking up existing units of governance organised on the linguistic identity will add fuel to the fire of separatism and powers like China and Pakistan will be more than happy to assist the separatists movement that starts because of this stupidity. BTW this is the wet dream of Pakistan and China as to India's future. Be noted the human cost a separatist movement will cause. India's bulk of fighting forces is made up by youths from north India. Do this and we have a Syria or Bangladesh with a scale of 1 billion plus people.
And calling us racists? Who coined the name madarasi for South Indians? It's the north of Vindhya.
I don't follow your reasoning about this at all.
Bangalore has been having intermittent rains throughout the summers and even though few people use them now, but if situation gets dire almost everyone should be able to setup a rain water harvesting system and get by.
India is also installing solar at a rapid pace and the cost of electricity is going down. The next level solution could be just to use sea water that India is surrounded by, and use some of that solar power to filter this water.
Somehow I dont get all this alarmist news. Maybe im missing something.
As the population of Bengaluru increases, the demand for water will increase. It's not just a distribution issue, it's a civic planning and ecological issue. Encroachment of lakes[0] and the booming real estate market aren't helping the situation at all.
Also, desalination is not as easy as one thinks [1].
Better solutions to this problem are effective civic planning, ensuring that the groundwater table is recharged, (as you rightly mentioned) rainwater harvesting, and preserving the lakes Bengaluru has.
[0] http://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/bangalore-water-bodies-nd...
[1] https://www.hydrofinity.com/blog/why-desalination-is-not-the...
It is a problem because the situation currently is looking pretty bad. As far as I can tell people are not denying that a solution is possible. When is it not?
>"Dear BBC, Bengaluru isn’t running out of water soon. Here’s why!" http://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/bangalore-water-scarcity-...
So, I am confused about whether we really have a problem or there is some other agenda. I know lot of people in Bengaluru don't get govt water supply (Cauvery water). Was speaking to a friend just yesterday who was complaining about the quality of the tanker water they get in their apartment, that some people are getting skin diseases because of it and that they use filtered water for washing their baby and their hair.
Desalination seems to be expensive:
>"Rs 1.36 crore a day for just 200 million litres of water; can Chennai really afford desalination plants?"
http://chennai.citizenmatters.in/chennai-cost-of-desalinatio...
The above article concludes that
>Our water problems are essentially due to mismanagement of water bodies, and Chennai is not a rain-starved city. “Chennai’s average annual rainfall of 139 cm is sufficient to recharge its aquifers. We don’t have perennial rivers, but we have abundant surface water resources. The city of London, with just 60 cm of annual average rainfall, relies on surface water resources. It is shameful that we have opted for the extravagant choice of desalination plants instead,” said Sai Praneeth, Director, Hydro-Meteorological Innovative and Explorative Solutions (HYMIES).
Also just came across this Twitter account. They seem to be posting a lot of info about India's water situation. https://twitter.com/zenrainman
Some societies created intricate cultures like subak in Bali.
The practical question is if India can reform its water policy within years left before certain cities will start to die. Because they will otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subak_(irrigation)
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/12/lost-cities-m...
1. Musi river water/Manjeera 2. the Large lakes like Hussain/Osmania Sagar etc. 3. ground water/borewells
My apartment society in Gachibowli area, just ran of water for a few days back in June. The borewell just couldnt get the water. There is no lake around us.
Getting the river water connection would be around Rs.15_00_0000. To add to the issues, the gov is not giving out new river water connections without a longdrawn process and the river water itself is too low to sustain all the existing connection.
Right now several apartment societies with 3000+ apartments in them are coming up in my immediate neighbourhood. So next year, we can expect the borewell water to be over way before june (early may?). We will certainly don't have river water connection by then. So, we will be dependent on water takers for a few months. this year the tankers are charging 8k (from 2k last year) for each refill. next year, the price would be over 20k for each refill.
Rain water harvesting doesnt works greatly in areas like ours which only get a few months of rain. Where will you keep the harvested water for the next 8-9 months? How do you maintain the quality of this stagnant water? So, most likely people would end up using it and the hope would be that an equivalent amount of ground water will be spared. It really doesnt works out in practice. People don't ration the water usage and will not until it gets dire. Also rain harvesting infra will take years to set up. Desalinating water is not much help as transporting the water is a logistical issue. So yes, while there are possible solutions, they will take a lot of political will to execute and will certainly take more than a few years to bear fruit. The situation, till then will be bad.
The water in all lakes is incredibly low. The lakes are also extremely dirty (http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2018/oct/07...) The water is already contaminated by industrial waste.
2020 is going to be bad for us in Hyderabad. Not Chennai level bad. but we will get there in the next few years. And what i do know of Bangalore form my other friends who live there, its pretty bad there already. A lot of large societies are dependent on tanker waters despite Bangalore having much more rainfall than Hyderabad.
All in all, I think this level of alarm is not just necessary, it should have come a decade ago, when it would have been easier to circumvent. Hyderabad's population will cross 12MM by 2030. Now, whatever approach we end up taking, its gonna be costly, hard to execute and will take a lot of time. And will probably will not be enough.
EDIT: I am wildly off on the Hyderabad population growth. The existing census data is from 2011. Apparently we crossed 12MM in 2019. https://indiapopulation2019.com/population-of-hyderabad-2019... If correct, this is over the population of major mega cities like NY, LA etc.
Do you mean that a permit had been given to developement project without providing adequate water supply first? And it will depend on borewells?
> Rain water harvesting doesnt works greatly in areas like ours which only get a few months of rain. Where will you keep the harvested water for the next 8-9 months?
Some desert cities in Palestine had a rain once in a three years. Still tanks provided adequate amounts of water.
Seems like India ain't lacking in water resources but in governance.
Population growth + increased quality of life = more resource use
1. Water theft from utilities
2. Gigantic and wasteful usage of water in agriculture
3. Leaky pipes and contamination from sewage
4. Utilities are just starting to recover from decades of extreme mismanagement
5. Tanker mafia of course doing its worst to keep all of above going
Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive):
How does that compare with a kg of lettuce, or tomatoes, or beef?
Bottled water has its problems, water use isnt really one of them.
Interesting question, I found this article[1] which says:
- for North American companies, it takes 1.39 liters to make one liter of water
- That's less than the global averages of a liter of soda, which requires 2.02 liters of water
- A liter of beer, meanwhile, needs 4 liters of water, wine demands 4.74 liters. Hard alcohol, it turns out, is the greediest, guzzling 34.55 liters of water for every liter
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/28/241419373/ho...
This problem is not confined to India, it’s a problem with humanity. Nature is working on a correction.
You could also say that resources of India had been depleted by greed, overexploatation and the lack of proper governanace. You can't run a multimilion city on borewells and groundwater - the government should had built proper infrastructure - pipelines, reservoirs, water meters, sewage treatment plans etc.
In a way India is a minature to the entire world.
I went down worldpopulationreview.com's list; I'll post my list annotated with country size as a reply to this comment.
Findings:
India, the country, is #28. It has essentially equal population density to the Netherlands (#29, in Europe!), while being a modest 87 times larger. Belgium (#33) has only slightly less density, and India is merely 102 times bigger.
The next European country down is England at #50. It's much closer to the size of India -- 8% as large -- and has two-thirds the density.
Pakistan is #55; it's about four times the size of England with comparable density.
#59 is Germany; it's less than half the size of Pakistan with comparable density. Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, who you might have thought would have super-high density, are equal to Germany. (Monaco and Vatican City really do have super-high density.)
The only other country-sized European countries in the top 70 are Switzerland and Italy, #68 and #69. They have half the density of India. Italy is a tenth of India's size. Switzerland is slightly larger than the Netherlands.
Bangladesh, by the way, is #12, with more than double the density of India (in about 1/20 of the space).
So I can't agree that India's population density is comparable to "many Western European countries". It's comparable to a couple of diminutive European countries. Equal density over 100 times the area is not what you would expect; it's something very unusual about India.
In fact, we can just compare the regions directly. Europe has 743 million people in 10 million square kilometers of land for an average density of 74.3 people per square km. India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) has 1740 million people in 4 million square km, for an average density of over 400 people per square km (roughly equal to the density of India the country, which makes sense), about 6 times the figure for Europe.
This makes them able to efficiently provide for their population with the land they have available. India has some way to go in that respect.
This is not accounting for differences in geography or resources - like water - that are directly limited unless you want to build infrastructure for artificial water purification too.
Many places in Scandinavia go below -20c and people live there because they've means to heat up the spaces where they live.
People are surviving in dessert where there is no natural water because they've built sea water planets.
East side, is full of greenery, rainforest, and a peaceful living with hardly any population compared to west.
But at least for this year, the climate also seems to have played a very big part in the issue:
https://weather.com/en-IN/india/monsoon/news/2019-06-03-indi...
The Drought Early Warning System (DEWS) revealed that more than 42% of the country’s area is abnormally dry, which is 6% more than that of the previous year.
... as many as 26 out of 36 meteorological subdivisions in India have recorded deficit rainfall. This is the second driest pre-monsoon that the country has witnessed ever since 1954.
China managed in a similar situation. I think it may be harder to fight people for resources, or just reducing their resource use, than making sure they are never born.
When people were building these concert jungles, they didn't keep in mind where the water comes from and how exactly it's refilled and what we can do to replenish the capacity lost due to our development projects.
What if they start requiring a domestic visa process to let in the people from other states?
Everyone wants a life of high standards of living which cities provide along with employment.
If we do not limit the number of people who can get in, it will naturally result in whole population of India moving into these cities.
This will result in people making wherever they live better instead of just moving to a better city.
Mobility rights is seen as a fundamental human right and is protected by constitution in most countries.
What needs to happen is to provide economic incentives for people to spread out, not through laws that limit ones right to movement.
.
However, people are willing to endure a lot if living standards are generally low.
The population of France does not all live in Paris, nor that of the USA in New York. Even in as small a country as Luxembourg not everyone lives in Luxembourg City.
Maybe in the long term. In the immediate future, it would lead to massive economic recession due to labour shortages in high-employment areas and economic genocide in low-employment areas. The only way to redistribute employment might be gradual with economic incentives and disincentives. It also requires long-term thinking and implementation and it is difficult to imagine this in the Indian context.
Coca-Cola operates 58 water-intensive bottling plants in India. In the southern Indian village of Plachimada in Kerala state, for example, persistent droughts have dried up groundwater and local wells, forcing many residents to rely on water supplies trucked in daily by the government.
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion-in...
[2] https://waronwant.org/media/coca-cola-drinking-world-dry
The plants may be blamed for transferring water scarcity from places where the drinks are bought and drunk to the places where the bottling plants are operated, but not for creating water scarcity.
