Sunderrajan Krishnan

Nobody on the frontline

There is a war going on. The generals are plotting. The armoury is ready. Lands are to be won. The people are all charged up. But there is one problem. Maybe it's a big one. There is nobody on the frontline.

Climate change triggered heat waves threaten water availability

Ninjallama rues as she remembers, " It was a terrible summer. The heat wave was killing. Three people died in my village. People with skeletal fluorosis suffered .. "

The Government of India has passed a draft notification to bar membrane based systems such as Reverse Osmosis (RO) to be used as domestic purifiers in cities where the tap water is safe according to the Burea

Fluorosis is a cowardly disease; it selectively preys upon the most vulnerable and renders them even more fragile.

Fluorosis is a bone disease that is caused by a high consumption of fluoride. Most think that it is a direct result of drinking water with high fluoride content alone but it isn’t so. Nutrition plays an  important role in the onset of this disease.

India is the world's largest consumer of groundwater where it is extensively used for irrigation. However, there is a considerable waste of this valuable resource. While a part of this waste can be attributed to a lack of incentive for conservation, unmetered electricity supply contributes greatly to this problem. This has led to the formation of what is being termed an energy-irrigation nexus.

Several sessions at the IWMI-Tata Annual Partners' Meet in 2012 discussed this phenomenon, its causes, impact and possible management strategies. 

It warns that groundwater quantity as well as quality are the two major problems that the country has been facing.

The rate of withdrawal of groundwater has reached “unsafe” levels in 31% of the districts, covering 33% of the land area and 35% of the population. The situation has dramatically worsened within a short span of nine years, between the assessments done in 1995 and 2004.

Taking the quantitative and qualitative aspects together, data indicates that a total of 347 districts (59% of all districts in India) are vulnerable in terms of safe drinking water in India. This is a matter of serious concern, requiring a new approach.

India’s Groundwater Challenge and the Way Forward
P S Vijay Shankar , Himanshu Kulkarni , Sunderrajan Krishnan

The groundwater crisis is acquiring alarming proportions in many parts of the country. Strategies to respond to groundwater overuse and deteriorating water quality must be based on a new approach involving typologising the resource problems and redefining the institutional structure governing groundwater. This approach is based on the notion of groundwater as common property.

This report by CAREWATER has been prepared as part of a component on Groundwater Governance in Asia: Theory and Practice under the CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food. The purpose of this collection is to guide a beginner to groundwater hydrology through the basic concepts in this subject. The problems begin with fundamentals of the subject and are followed by those which test the comprehensiveness of understanding. Most problems are illustrated and a real-world situation is related with the problem.