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PROP TALK

Dedicated: Chandrashekar Hariharan

Consumed with aspects that bring harnessing of nature into day-to-day living, and rejecting characteristics that encourage the repeated use of energy-intensive methods in building and living styles, Bangalore’s ‘Green Man’ is all set to offer another set of apartments that speak of sensitive and insightful ecological living in his ‘BCIL-Collective’ in Yelahanka.

He initiated a spectrum of technologies with practical application in energy-efficient irrigation systems for large, afforested areas.

BCIL’s projects are known to be totally self-sufficient in water needs, thanks to recycling technology. “We do not take municipal water supply into account for our needs,” Hariharan proudly says. “However, water connections will be through in every project as nothing can be prophesied with regard to sustainability and changing needs,” he reiterates.

“We can’t change the world overnight,” he accepts “but some realistic, down-to-earth solutions within the confines of their work-and-build could sensitise people to the world reality.” Earlier, Hariharan had cherished his association with watersheds in Uttaranchal, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Nagaland. Yet another noticeable effort was his treatment of sewage/sullage water in the city with chemical-free, baffles-based tanks that considerably reduced the Total Dissolved Salts in the wastewater before reaching the streams and rivers.

Healthy, continuous water supply is part of a global campaign today. The U.N. set an ambitious target, at the turn of century, of reaching such a goal by 2015. What is the basic challenge today in the districts of India or in urban India for providing safe and accessible water supply and sanitation?

A very stark crisis that is looming large ahead of us is water for cultivation. I will not delve into the statistics which can be mind-boggling; it is before you every time a farmers’ agitation hits the headlines on a river and riparian rights that deny farmers in one State of river water that is flowing from another. Karnataka’s Cauvery water and the agitations of farmers in Tamil Nadu is only one of the many examples.

Dams choke people’s lives and the remote ecosystems get fragile. This puts a new twist to the 100-year-old practice of providing large-scale irrigation with water stored in such projects across India. Eco-activists have also been vigilant to more such dams coming up. While dams of the large kind are not the solution for providing irrigation water to our farmers, the challenge of providing water for the second crop to the farmers has only grown.

How do I secure enough water for the second crop with the first rainfed crop barely enough to meet the family’s needs? All waiters and dishwashers in small hotels swarming the cities are boys who have left their villages because there is not enough land to support the entire family. How do we create more opportunities in such hinterland by giving them the chance to grow the second crop, which will either feed them through the year, or leave an income surplus?

Our monsoon means that we get all our rains in either June-August or November-January depending on which part of India you are located in. So how do you find ways of storing water at the village, or block or tehsil level in a way that you are able to provide irrigation water to fields? Organisations such as the N.M. Sadguru Foundation in Dahod district of Gujarat are examples of such work that has put a smile on farmers’ faces. This needs replication and scaling up, across districts. We have today less than 15 per cent of India’s entire cultivable land under irrigation. Over 80 per cent of our 140 million farmer families still look up to the sky and pray for rain.

There is then the more serious concern of drinking water itself. There have been many wonderful government programmes and initiatives to see how water can be provided to farmers in their villages. Again, the question is one of good administration, local initiative from people as well as funds for setting up basic storage infrastructure for such water.

The NORAD initiative, for example, in four districts of Karnataka was a good example of how people could be helped and enabled. I said ‘was’ because some warp of government policy saw the programme folding up 3-4 years ago. This programme had covered 1,000 villages across Koppal, Chitradurga, Raichur and Bellary.

Now those same workers and engineers have found placement in the district directorates of watersheds or with other agencies working on watershed practices but not with half the impact that NORAD was making. This view may attract controversy, but we need to go beyond views and ideologies. The bottomline is the dynamic management of such challenges with informed support from professionals.

There is a third dimension to water in India. The new challenge of urbanisation has meant that we have nearly 50 per cent of our population in less than five per cent of the country’s landmass.

The density of population in such concentrated settlements means that one cannot look beyond the availability of groundwater for meeting water needs. So borewells become a solution that all people take recourse to. Depletion of groundwater levels has been alarming in just the last 20 years.

* The solution at the urban level is clearly not having new sources of water, but rationalising the use of water, as communities, as cities and as governments.

* The most practical way to achieve efficient urban water supply is to see that you treat and re-use water in a way that your non-potable needs are met with such treated water.

* The good news is that nearly 70 per cent of water needs in any urban housing area or in office blocks is clearly for non-potable use, which is easily met with treated water.

* The technology available for quality water treatment has grown sharply in recent years. There are companies that have cropped up with many different treatment options at reasonable costs for such treatment and re-use. The government, through the Central Pollution Control Board, has made it mandatory for builders to create tertiary sewage treatment plant for re-use of water. All this augurs well for sensible use of water in the years ahead, with drop in demand for fresh water.

* Regulation today in the building industry does not yet cover the installation of dual plumbing lines in large residential projects. The facility will enable use of treated waste-water for flush tanks and gardens with separate plumbing systems, quite distinct from the lines for fresh water. This should be in place soon, in order that the demand for fresh water is met better.

Nearly every city in India gets only about 25 per cent of its water from river water sources; the rest is from borewells that gouge groundwater up, and deplete the lifeline of large tracts of land in cities and their peripheries.

* You can see that the solutions are not complex, but the implementation of solutions are difficult because of the various pull-and-push factors that come out of lack of homogeneity and oneness of objective among all stakeholders.

* The Government, the Water Supply Board (Jal Sansthaans), Water Development Corporations (Jal Nigams), Building Societies and Apartment Associations, Village Development Boards and Panchayats, are all urban and rural local bodies which can take to many of these solutions for efficient water management — if only they were on the same wavelength on how to get the solution in place.

Well, there have been improvements in the way Water Supply Boards have responded in the face of growing needs in both the urban and the rural sectors. The solutions still somehow remain confined to the domain of finding new sources of water. Such governments and local bodies must surely turn to demand-side engineering of water, in a way that they are able to reduce dramatically the need for fresh water.

The solution is obvious: treat all waste water and use it for non-potable purposes. Singapore’s Nuwater programme launched about 18-20 months ago is now looking at treating wastewater to a point where the island-state’s citizens can drink it! The Prime Minister was on TV taking a sip of the ‘Nuwater’ which was fresh water emerging from grey and black water flowing off the city’s drainage!

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