Conserving the last drop:-
This editorials is part of 6 series essay that explores the issues of water scarcity and provide few good case studies.
Disclaimer :- This editorials are given as case studies, although the names of the people are not important from exam point of view, however few datas are important and they are highlighted.Keep 5 things in mind while reading this case study :-
- Where it is happening – the geographical extent
- Why it is happening ?
- What are the impacts ?
- What can be the solution ?
Here are the 6 parts :-
- Drilling for their Lives
- Telengana’s Tanker economy
- Drinking water, sipping Poison
- Interlinking, an idea with flaws
- Scarcity in Mettur’s vicinity
- Conservation – lessons form ancient India
Part -3 – Drinking water, sipping Poison
India’s water quality problem is reaching crisis proportions, and today at least 1.95 crore habitations are affected by poor water quality. Over 3.6 crore people are exposed to health hazards owing to drinking water containing excess arsenic, fluoride, iron, salinity or nitrate.
66 million Indians are at risk due to excess fluoride and more than six million have already been crippled by high fluoride content in drinking water.
In some cases such contamination occurs due to the overexploitation of groundwater. Besides metal poisoning, bacterial contamination affects at least 37.7 million Indians annually, with 1.5 million child fatalities due to diarrhoea. Urgent investments are needed to stave off the crisis of water quality focusing on water treatment solutions such as reverse osmosis, and also on improving water storage infrastructure so that the water table is recharged .
The third of a six-part series is on the effects of poor water quality in drought-prone Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri districts in Tamil Nadu.
The Story
Tears plop down Ammasi’s sunken cheeks that get bruised every time she gets one of her epileptic seizures. Married off at 18 years, Ammasi was abandoned by her husband a month later, after one such seizure. Today this 26-year-old finds her single status debilitating. “Is it the water?” asks her brother Karthik, who too suffers epilepsy.
The lab report of Sivakumar (36) shows his serum creatinine count as 12.56 mg against the normal 1.4 mg, and his urea count is 127 mg against the permissible 45 mg. Both his kidneys failed, requiring him to travel every fortnight to Salem for dialysis. ‘The hospital said it was the water. They suggested a transplant that I can’t afford,” says this father of three children, out of work for the last two years.
Susceptible to Fluorosis
In the same street 58-year-old Govindammal died ten days ago from renal failure. And across the lane, 35-year-old Kanagaraj has been diagnosed with early stage renal dysfunction. His eight-year-old daughter born with mental retardation, died a week ago. “She had fever,” he says.
Here in Oddanur in Nagamarai Panchayat in Pennagaram, renal failure is quoted with the nonchalance reserved for common cold.
Until recently, people of Oddanur drank from a fluoride-contaminated groundwater hand pump. On the Panchayat’s request water quality was tested by the Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board and the hand pump was red-marked as highly contaminated.
The 150 households of Oddanur now depend on the second and only hand pump remaining in the village, although it produces saline water. “Look at our vessels, this is the water we drink, we cook with,” says Paapathi, a ward member, waving the corrosively stained stainless-steel vessels.
This is a young population cut off from the workforce owing to rickets, epilepsy, and renal failure within a radius of few lanes. “We know fluorosis causes renal ailments, but we are not sure about others,” says an official.
Forty kilometres down at Hogenakkal in Pennagaram, the headworks of the multi-billion dollar Hogenakkal Drinking Water and Fluorosis Mitigation project stands tall, with its mammoth booster station, master balance reservoir and state-of-art water treatment facility.
Here water is tapped at source, from the Cauvery gushing into Tamil Nadu, and is carried for around 700 metres to one kilometre to the mainland for habitations in the two districts of Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri. Since it is tapped at source, the water is seen as dependable even under drought conditions.
Distribution lags
The project was commissioned to supply water treated at a cost of Rs.42.21 per kilolitre for habitations like Oddanur, but this state-of-art supply-side infrastructure is bogged down by distribution lags.
Oddanur receives Hogenakkal water once a week. “The 60,000 litre Overhead Tank (OHT) takes two days and half to fill due to low voltage and a pipeline flaw,” says Kandavel, OHT operator. In neighbouring Odayaankadu, a new OHT still awaits connection.
In Paaparapatty town Panchayat, 30 kilometers from Pennagaram, a household gets 25 cans every three days. “We use this for bathing, when it gets closer to the next supply” says a woman.
Technically, this Japan-funded multi-billion dollar Hogenakkal Drinking Water and Fluorosis Mitigation project established at a cost of Rs.1928.80 crore has fulfilled its mandate, “covering” its targeted 7,716 habitations, 17 town Panchayats and three municipalities in the two districts.
But the numbers fail to capture the whole picture. Fed by power from different feeders from different stations, the project design assumes a 12-hour power supply in rural habitations, and hinges on partial pumping and partial gradient flow. In elevated terrains, multiple boosting is required and power supply should be available at all pumping stations for synchronised pumping.
“In many places, there is not enough power even at the substations. A 33 KV substation receives just about 23 KV supply,” says an official source. There is also tampering of pipelines and pilferage at places.
Several habitations have now threatened a poll boycott on the Hogenakkal water issue. On the campaign turf, the opposition has contested the AIADMK’s claims to the project’s success. The project component itself appears to recognise only dental fluorosis leaving in the lurch people like Sivakumar, and Ammasi, who need diagnostic intervention.
Part 4 will be published tomorrow.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.