“Delhi does not have enough clean water.”

-D.K. Chadha, chairperson of the Central Ground Water Authority in Delhi

• The Crisis

Delhi faces a water crisis. The city’s water table is falling and the river is flowing as untreated wastewater. The crisis is fuelled by increased consumption related to increasing urbanization and population growth.  The city needs a lot more water than is supplied to it by government-built infrastructure. Additionally, Delhi needs ecologically oriented philosophies of consumption and more equitably acquired and distributed water.

• Globalization

As we human beings become increasingly connected in a globalized world, we face an impending crisis. New York Times columnist and world-renowned author Thomas Friedman uses the “new” India as evidence of a “flattened” world. As many other proponents of economic globalization agree, India’s future for development depends on multinational corporations, air-conditioned shopping malls, and technological campuses.

A flat world?

It is true that economic globalization is happening in India. As Friedman describes, you know you’re in Bangalore, in the Silicon Valley of India, when you go to play golf and the caddy on the first tee says you can either aim at the Microsoft building or the IBM building. Although attractive to many, this conception of “new” India– based on ever-increasing levels of consumption and growth– is not sustainable.

The water crisis exemplifies this. Supporters of large-scale development projects, like malls and dams, often justify high costs and displacement of the people living near the project site by promising jobs, and, in the case of dams, greater water access for the poor. These promises have not been fulfilled; few jobs have been created and water has been redirected to large agricultural farms or cities. Instead, local people are losing their livelihoods and their access to water.

As the water crisis intensifies, people are protesting these large scale development projects.  These protesting voices want more creative solutions. India has one billion people and a growing population. The government is too small to control all of India’s water.  The scale of the problem calls for multiple solutions from communities across the country.

• Government Solutions Aren’t Working

Humans, plants and animals need water for survival, but this resource is controlled and distributed through government and institutional channels. For a city with more than 14 million people, expected to grow by 40% in 2021 (mapsofindia.com), water finds itself in the hands of those who can pay their water bill, find a way to extract groundwater from Delhi’s fast depleting water table, or buy a tanker of water.

Work in progress

The government of India has engaged in large-scale development projects such as dams (Tehri dam, Gadhwal, Uttaranchal). It has also attempted to privatize Delhi’s water to address this challenge. The citizens of Delhi (The Citizens Front for Water Democracy, CFWD) do not agree with these solutions. Dams displace thousands of people who then add to the population of Delhi and privatization of water makes it so that only those who can pay can access water.

The CFWD would prefer a public-public partnership with the Water Authority (The Delhi Jal Board), decentralized systems such as water harvesting and a municipal supply of water that does not privilege any one group over another.

water tanker

• Delhi’s History of Sustainable Water Use

Sustainable water use in Delhi’s past was possible not only because of clean and abundant rivers and lakes, but because rulers specifically included water use in the city’s plans. Delhi’s past rulers such as the Rajputs (of the 14th-15th centuries) “realized the importance of water security and made an elaborate system of bunds across the gullies and ditches that criss-cross the Aravallis to provide water in this otherwise rocky landscape,”  amongst the other things they did, such as building ‘baolis’ (wells) to store water in.

One cannot help but wonder about the increasing polarities between rich and poor or “modern” and “ancient” India. “Developing” can be an adequate description of change if dissociated from its Bretton Woods, neo-liberal definition. It seems facetious to announce some countries as “developed,” as if to ignore that they are changing. People have lived in India for about 5,000 years and they have been exploring ideas over these generations. Change is inevitable, and as circumstances have continued to change, people in India (and the world) have adapted and are continuing to adapt themselves to these changing circumstances.

Water tub street vendors

• The Current Situation

What we have to adapt to today is shaped by our decisions in the past. Water use in the recent past has changed dramatically. We have gone from sustainable to unsustainable systems. In the latter, we have large and small residential areas in Delhi suffering from water shortages and relying on water sold by private tankers-for people that can afford these. On another side there are malls that guzzle water, being built on Delhi’s water catchment area (such as the ridge forest) all in the name of  “developing” India’s capital city.

• Unanswered Questions

1. “Sustainability” is seen as the solution to the challenges created by the human lifestyle, but what does “sustainability” look like in a city like New Delhi?
2. Can we understand these challenges better before we embark on our solutions?
3. If the nature of solutions proposed to environmental challenges must become more sustainable, can we perhaps spend some time asking questions about the sustainability of the various methods already being used?
4. Can one solution apply to everyone?
5. How should we find better solutions?
6. Who is going to find the better solutions?