[Kabar-indonesia] NYT: Often Parched, India Struggles to Tap the Monsoon

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

[Note: The first two parts of this series were sent by Joyo Indonesia News
Service Friday and Saturday, September 29 and 30th, respectively.]

also: NYT: The Debate: Water Management, Water Fees and Conservation 
             
The New York Times
October 1, 2006

Thirsty Giant

Often Parched, India Struggles to Tap the Monsoon 

Last of Three Articles

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

photo: Flooding is a perennial problem in India. A flood in Surat killed at 
least 120 people in August and caused damage estimated at $60 million. 
Amit Dave/Reuters

SURAT, India -- Early on a Monday morning during the August monsoon, after 
several days of torrential rains, the engineers in charge of a massive dam about 
50 miles upstream from this diamond-polishing hub faced a harrowing crisis. 

With water brimming well past the permitted levels at the 350-foot Ukai Dam, 
according to official records, and the skies showing no sign of relief, the 
engineers apparently threw open the reservoir’s 21 sluice gates. Water then did 
what water does. It surged downriver, swallowing this city of three million 
people like a hungry beast. The diamond lanes of India became a warren of muck 
and ruin. 

In less than three days, at least 120 people died. More than 4,000 animal 
carcasses were later hauled out of the mud. Two weeks after the floods, Surat’s 
diamond-polishing factories were practically empty of workers, who had fled 
fearing disease. An industry group estimated the losses at $60 million. 

Exactly what happened in Surat is still under investigation. But the deluge 
has drawn new attention to a puzzle that is crucial to securing India’s future: 
how to harness and hold on to its rich but capricious rains. 

The problem is a matter of bitter and enduring debate in this country — and 
the answer may hold a key to India’s prosperity. Every year, India is crippled 
by floods in some areas, even as it is parched in blighted corners elsewhere.

India’s average annual rainfall rate hovers at an abundant 46 inches, as much 
as Ireland’s. Yet growing water scarcity threatens both farms and cities. 
With the population hitting 1.1 billion, the amount of water available to each 
Indian is roughly the same as the amount available to the average Sudanese, 
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. 

India’s rains tend to come in short, furious bursts, meaning that much of 
that water escapes as untapped potential, washing into the sea and wreaking havoc 
on the fragile villages and flourishing cities that stand in its way. 

India is likely to become even more vulnerable, environmentalists warn. 
Global climate change threatens to make weather patterns even more erratic. 
Steadily shrinking Himalayan glaciers will inexorably melt and rush down the flood 
plains. 

Floods in India are already a perennial and costly affair, especially in 
human terms. The southwest monsoon killed 2,545 people in less than four months 
this year, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs. 

Part of the problem lies in India’s rapid and unruly development. As water 
demand has soared, the natural sponges of Indian cities — lakes, ponds, marshes, 
mangroves — have been lost to construction. Only a handful of city and state 
governments have lately begun to mandate rainwater harvesting to slowly 
replenish groundwater. 

Moreover, the country faces a water storage crunch. Traditional small-scale 
Indian storage systems, from temple tanks to elaborate step-wells, have fallen 
into disrepair. China, a country with similar development issues, manages to 
store five times the water that India does per person, the World Bank 
estimates. But the Chinese government, with scant public debate, has moved thousands of 
people to make way for colossal water projects. 

India, too, has tried. But here, in the world’s largest democracy, the 
big-money water solution — the big dam — has been the subject of rancorous 
disputes. Some projects have met resistance for decades. 

Proponents say India must build many more reservoirs to meet its growing 
water and energy needs. India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, under 
whose watch the Ukai Dam was built, called them “modern temples” of his newly 
sovereign nation. India has roughly 4,300 large dams, like the one east of 
Surat, and an additional 475 under construction.

Critics say that big dams have already proved too costly and too destructive, 
submerging villages and displacing people without adequate compensation. 

They also argue that dams and irrigation canals, like so much Indian 
infrastructure, are so poorly maintained and managed that already they cannot hold all 
they are supposed to. According to government estimates, silt deposits make 
up 10 percent of total capacity. Because of declining rains, India today fills 
up its reservoirs two out of every three years.

When the Tapi River burst upon Surat on Aug. 7, its swollen waters broke 
through an already fragile concrete embankment near Abdul Bhai Patel’s apartment.

Eventually, the rising waters reduced Mr. Patel’s building to a pile of 
rubble and brick. His wife, Zulekha, was among nearly 40 people who were killed 
when the building collapsed.

“I screamed,” Mr. Patel recalled several days later, as he picked solemnly 
through the rubble in search of his passport. “No one heard me. There was water 
all around.” The river took away his only source of income, too — the 
auto-rickshaw that he plied on the streets of Surat. 

Downstream, at the industrial park called Hazira, one of the country’s 
largest natural gas plants was forced to shut down. Several petrochemical plants 
shut down as well. The floodwaters reached as high as 18 feet at Hazira. 

Government engineers who manage dams, including the Ukai, have the unenviable 
task of balancing the competing Indian curses of drought and deluge. 

In dry years, they must take measures to store as much water as possible in 
the reservoir. In wet years, they must guard against drowning those who live 
downstream.

Whether state officials at Ukai could have taken any steps to forestall the 
flooding remains uncertain. The officials plead silence, citing a judicial 
inquiry under way. 

Their critics are not silent. They argue that it was reckless to wait so long 
to discharge so much water, knowing it could submerge the city in a matter of 
hours, and they have pounced on the drowning of Surat as a model of all that 
is wrong with the way India uses its reservoirs. 

“I call it a management failure,” said M. D. Desai, a retired state engineer 
who once worked at Ukai. 

The reservoir was already well over 20 percent full by the time the rains 
began in July, critics note. Meteorological data forecasted heavy rains in early 
August. And dam officials should have known that a full moon, on Aug. 9, would 
bring high tides and further pinch the river’s ability to drain into the sea. 
The Hazira industrial complex, built on the estuary, also compromises the 
river’s ability to drain out. 

Often, the wasted water is a double hit to development: Not only does it go 
unused, it destroys everything in its path, setting back both industry and 
infrastructure. In Surat, the outpouring of the Ukai Dam snapped electricity and 
phone lines, and suspended train service and commerce. 

The Business Standard, an English-language daily, fumed in an editorial, 
under the headline “Man-Made Floods,” a few days after the deluge. 

“Releasing the water in a rush at the monsoon time means that the stored 
water has gone completely waste, as runoff,” it read. “This is criminal 
profligacy with a scarce and precious resource.” 

Modern India, urban and rural, continues to live at the whim of the monsoon. 

For two-thirds of India’s farmers, who have no access to irrigation, a good 
monsoon is the difference between survival and penury. For fast-growing cities 
like this one, the monsoon lays bare the frailties of urban infrastructure.

This year, in the perennially drought-stricken agricultural region of 
Vidarbha, in central India, the monsoon was first tardy and then, unexpectedly 
furious. Those who had low-lying lands lost their crops entirely. In the western 
state of Rajasthan, a fluke downpour turned desert to lake. 

In the cities, troubles like those in Surat are spread all around, at 
accumulating costs. Last year, one day’s unusually heavy rains brought Mumbai, 
formerly Bombay and the country’s financial capital, to a standstill. 

Trains stopped in their tracks. Cars were submerged, sometimes with people 
inside. Shanties were washed away. All told, 400 people died in the flooding, 
and then, 60 more, as cholera and dengue fever festered in its waterlogged 
streets. 

Civic scrutiny fell on years of neglect and bad planning: the narrow storm 
drains bursting with the city’s waste; the slums sitting on the city’s 
floodplains; and the sprawling complex of financial services buildings that has eaten 
up mangroves. 

In Surat, prosperity and population growth brought a surge of new development 
on the river’s edge. A city official acknowledged that expanding construction 
along the riverbank had made it impossible to put up flood walls in some 
places. 

Any lessons will come too late for Tulsi Mistry, 14, and her family. Before 
dawn, on that fateful Monday in early August, when news of flooding first 
reached the Rivera Row Houses, they scrambled to higher ground. 

>From her perch on the roof, Tulsi watched as the river rose and devoured her 
city. A refrigerator and washing machine coursed down her street. A body 
floated in the park up the road. 

Tulsi and her family ended up virtually stranded on their rooftop terrace for 
a week. They ate whatever was left in the pantry and shared with neighbors. 
They drank what was stored in the rooftop tank, forgoing a bath for seven days. 

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The New York Times
October 1, 2006

The Debate: Water Management, Water Fees and Conservation 
             
India’s water crisis defies a single easy solution. While there is fierce 
debate, there is also broad agreement that demand must be contained, particularly 
in agriculture, and supply increased. Here are some of the opinions of the 
experts shaping the discussion.

Rajendra Singh

Founder, Tarun Bharat Sangh, Alwar District, Rajasthan, India

“In India, we need water conservation, management and disciplined use with 
commitment,” said Mr. Singh, best known for revitalizing traditional ponds 
across an arid patch of western Rajasthan State. Everyone who uses water should pay 
for it. Water management should be decentralized and local communities 
encouraged to manage their own water resources, rather than leaving it all to 
government. Industry should be required to recycle its wastewater. Those who pollute 
and overexploit the water should be strictly punished. “Without strong laws 
the water exploiters are converting our rivers to drains,” he said. 

Peter H. Gleick

President, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and 
Security, Oakland, Calif.

In addition to turning to more water-efficient crops and treating and reusing 
wastewater, India’s flood plains should be preserved and not used for 
development. “Flood plains are valuable ecosystems, for farming, and for groundwater 
recharge. Building in them, something we do egregiously in the United States, 
leads to more people and property at risk, encourages inappropriate 
development and comes back to haunt us.”

M. S. Swaminathan

Chairman, National Commission on Farmers, India

Farmers should to be encouraged to grow nutritious, water-efficient food 
grains, like sorghum and millet, and the government should pay fixed prices for 
them, as it does now only for rice and wheat, which require more water. Indian 
farmers should carefully choose what crops they sow based on what their land — 
and their water — can sustain. Dr. Swaminathan’s group will submit 
recommendations Monday on enlisting farmers in research to increase output by reducing 
water use. “It is now possible to increase yield and income per drop of water 
through generating synergy among water, variety, agronomic practices,” he 
argued. Farmers should also be encouraged to return to “traditional systems of 
water conservation.” 

Kirit S. Parikh

Member, Planning Commission of India

“Storage is really dams, you can’t avoid that,” he argued, adding that India 
would need to balance the cost of displacing villagers with the cost of not 
expanding storage. “The cost of not doing anything, the cost of building large 
dams or building small dams — you have to factor that in.” Farmers must be 
discouraged from pumping groundwater. Free electricity to farmers should be 
abolished, and farmers should be billed for how much water they use, though the 
government may well need to continue some level of subsidies, to help Indian 
farmers survive. State officials should be pressed to finish long-overdue 
irrigation projects. In the countryside, groups should be authorized to collect water 
fees and manage and maintain the tanks and canals used by their members.

Rajendra K. Pachauri

Director, Energy and Resources Institute, India

“We have to put in place a set of incentives and disincentives for efficient 
use of water in agriculture,” he said. The government should offer incentives 
for farmers to install far more efficient drip irrigation, for instance, and 
do away with subsidized electricity to discourage the overpumping of 
groundwater. The private sector should be enlisted to improve water management in 
cities, making certain kinds of water — like drinking water — more expensive than 
recycled water, which can be used for gardening and outdoor use. Water 
privatization is controversial, he well knows. “You’ll have to change people’s 
mind-sets,” he argued. “Everyone in this country thinks access to water is a 
God-given right. It’s a scarce resource which has to be treated as such and, like 
everything else, come with a price attached.” 

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