A person can survive without food for a week or longer but hardly a few days without water. This simple and incontrovertible fact was ignored by our planners in Delhi. Their emphasis was on irrigation water and not on drinking water. Our parliamentarians realised the importance of drinking water four decades after independence and it was the Water Resources Act of 1987 that gave drinking water priority over irrigation water for the first time since 1947.

The Central Water Commission (CWC), formerly Central Water and Power Commission, was established in 1945 for the development of India’s water resources but for some inexplicable reason it focused mainly on irrigation water development and not on drinking water supply. I think the reasons why CWC ignored the drinking water supply are: 1) perhaps it thought that drinking water is a state responsibility, and 2) the professional culture prevalent in India since the British days that allows engineers working on prestigious dam and irrigation schemes to consider themselves superior to those working on water supply, sewerage and other similar schemes.

As a water resources engineer for 44 years in India and abroad I often feel guilty for not having contributed enough to the solution of this nationwide problem, although I started my professional career in CWC in Delhi some 60 years ago. Whether I lived and worked in Delhi or in Hyderabad or even abroad, the problem preoccupied my mind. The pictures of villagers, mostly women and children, carrying water vessels on their heads to their distant villages, the pictures of hundreds of empty water containers of all shapes and volumes lined up outside a well or near a tap and the pictures of men, women and children thronging around a water lorry as it arrives to deliver water are etched permanently in my mind.

The two States which are adversely affected now are Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu , especially the latter. In Tamil Nadu, the surface water resources are fully developed but to exploit them further for drinking water supply may be feasible. Recently I read a newspaper report that drinking water was transported by lorries to Chennai from Vellore. The groundwater resources in TN are mostly polluted by the inward flow of seawater due to the drilling of wells in Chennai and other cities. Rajasthan is predominantly a “semi-arid to arid” State but sources for the supply of drinking water to towns and villages could still be found.

The Rajasthan Canal may be a source of drinking water to several towns and villages. The relatively low importance that we attach to drinking water is confirmed by the fact that our planners and engineers did not incorporate drinking water supply in the major dam-reservoir schemes they built in the last 72 years, during which time as many as 15,000 dams were built.

For example, the Nagarjunasagar Dam that was built in Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s and 1960s irrigates over a million hectares in AP and Telangana. But it did not have any provision for drinking water supply to its capital Hyderabad, which is 130 km away and which suffers from a scarcity of drinking water every summer. Only after much introspection and criticism, a scheme to supply drinking water to the city was added much later. The sources of drinking water are usually rivers, lakes, tanks, wells and micro catchments. But the other source in arid and semi-arid parts of the country can be harvested rainwater.

Most parts of India receive 500 mm/50 cm of annual rainfall or more mainly in the monsoon season (June-September) and this is more than adequate to harvest 10-12 cubic metres of rainfall in a suitable storage tank built below or above ground level. The use of rainwater harvesting and the construction of storage tanks is an integral part of several new housing projects in Hebei, Inner Mongolia and Qingai provinces of China. As a water resources/infrastructure consultant on a World Food Programme (WFP) mission to Hebei province, I was involved in a project incorporating underground storage tanks below new houses to store rainwater harvested from roofs which is used during the dry season.

The water quality is monitored by government inspectors. In addition, communal drinking water cisterns with a capacity of up to 1,000 cubic metres are built in villages by diverting water from a permanent or ephemeral stream or a spring. The designs of the rural water supply and sewerage schemes are standardised in China and the villagers themselves execute the projects. Selected villagers from each village or a group of villages are intensively trained in the operation and maintenance of irrigation, water supply and sewerage schemes and most of the rural schemes are operated and maintained by villagers themselves. This is something we should also adopt to reduce our huge O&M budgets.

The WFP is also assisting several projects in India and I was involved as a WFP consultant in a major dam project in Karnataka in the late 1980s in which thousands of labourers building the dam were provided with drinking water and sewerage facilities. Addressing a gathering of young computer whizzes in Hyderabad in March 2000, President Clinton exhorted: “Getting people connected to fresh water is as important as getting connected to Internet….the information technology that is creating 25-year multi-millionaires should not be governed by higher profits but higher purpose.”

President Clinton seems to have encapsulated the dilemma of modern India in his few words. Today India is the 7th richest economy in the world, indeed richer than Netherlands and South Korea. It is likely to become the fifth richest economy in the world in the next five years and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has vowed to make it a $ 5 trillion economy by 2024. But as soon as the precarious drinking water situation in Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Maharashtra hits the headlines, the world is reminded that India is still a Third World country.

India ranked 130 among 189 countries in the UN’s latest (2018) Human Development Index (HDI). Its position in the development league is below Sri Lanka (HDI 76). Unless India embarks on a massive plan for the supply of drinking water to all its villages, towns and cities and executes it in the next two to three decades it will remain a Third World country for the rest of the world. If India can increase its irrigated area ten-fold from one crore hectares in 1947 to ten crore hectares in 2000, it can also create nationwide water supply schemes in a much shorter period because these schemes are not as complex as the irrigation schemes.

In order to achieve the desired goals new Ministries of Drinking Water Supply should be created at both Central and State levels and they should be given a clear mandate. New institutions to design, implement and administer the schemes should be created and existing institutions reinforced. Not many bright engineers are attracted to water supply and sewerage departments. Peers make fun of those who join these departments. Incentives should be provided to attract the right technical and administrative staff.

The late Padma Shri Anil Agarwal, who established the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi and whom I call ‘The Father of India’s Environment’, was a leading exponent of community- based water supply and management systems. To remember him, we should adopt the community-based approach which might be more effective in harnessing drinking water supplies from local sources with the total involvement of the village community.

(The writer, an NRI living in London, is a retired UN/World Bank consultant)