‘India must devise ways to restore the water-cycle balance’

Netherlands is a water country. We have lived and worked with water for thousands of years, like India has. And the Netherlands is willing to share its knowledge and also learn from other countries. Water envoy represents Netherlands as a water country overseas. The purpose of my visit is to take stock of the strategic water partnership that we have with India… to celebrate the success, see where we are, and what we can do in the future.

The strategic water partnership is an MoU that we signed for government-to-government cooperation. We are working on various projects including coastal protection in Kerala and the Sundarbans in West Bengal. And we also have a cooperation on national mission for clean Ganga. The cooperation is not only on (improving) the water quality of the river — how we can use water management to make the city more resilient, more liveable for its residents. But we also do other things. For instance, we have financed an international NGO to work in UP (Uttar Pradesh) to reduce water use in tanneries and make sure the wastewater is less toxic.

The water crisis in India has many parallels. In many countries, we — humanity — have pushed the water-cycle out of balance in the past few decades. Number one is through overexploitation, often of groundwater for irrigation. Secondly, by changing land use... there is less forest, less coverage. So there is a lot of evaporation. Water doesn’t stay in the ground or in the lakes. And third is because of climate change, as it manifests itself through water.

We talk to individuals on their sufferings from climate change… because their home floods, or the harvest fails, or the rains are late and the kids go hungry. So, if climate change creates water problems, we need to see how we can make water the engine of climate adaptation. I think that is what we want to do in the partnership between India and Netherlands.

The current overuse of groundwater in India, especially northwest India, is not sustainable. In English we have a saying, never waste a good crisis. Because of the water crisis, and now that it is in the newspapers, there is growing awareness. Not just professionals, government or universities who do research, but also common people need to be aware that this is not sustainable.

Water is much more on the agenda now. What you need to do about it is complex. First of all, you need to measure what’s really  happening. Where is the groundwater? How deep is it? What’s the problem? Do solutions work? Today, you can do a lot with satellite imagery. So we understand the problem much better. Now the difficult work starts. The issue of water pricing (needs to be addressed). As long as you don’t pay for it, you can just pump all day even if you don’t use it. 

And it is also about planning. What do you really want? Which crops do you want to plant?  Yesterday, I heard the example of Maharashtra, where they first had millet, then went to more water-intensive crops and now are back to millet. That’s because the district and State governments realised that the water was depleting, so crops that are not that thirsty needed to be grown. So the role of the government is important in creating awareness, letting farmers know the price of water, and working with farmers on what is possible in these areas, because a lot of people depend on this for their livelihood.

There are three components to that. The first is use of best technology and engineering. But we must also realise that technology and engineering are not enough anymore. We also need to protect and restore the water buffers we have in nature.

You often have long discussions about large dams. It is very controversial here. But 99 per cent of water storage is in nature — it is in wetlands, groundwater, in lakes and in rivers. And those systems are deteriorating very rapidly. In the past 30-40 years, we have lost 30 per cent of wetlands. And if we think of climate change as more water coming, intense rains, floods or drought, you need those buffers in nature. You need to make sure these wetlands can take water if it rains a lot, so your cities don’t flood, and you save water in your lakes or aquifers for dry period.

Water storage is the second component. And the most difficult one is the need to start taking water into consideration for our economic planning, for our spatial planning.

Right now, everybody can start a farm or industry wherever they want. But with more water scarcity, the government actually needs to say ‘no, you cannot put your industry there. No, you cannot grow cotton in the desert. You cannot build a new neighbourhood in a flood plain because it will flood’. And then everybody will come and say we want compensation.  That broader approach — built on  technology and engineering, but also restoring your water buffer and how  you work on your spatial planning and economic planning through waterlands — is really what a strategic water partnership is also about.

We do it very much in the State partnerships that we have. For instance, to deal with floods in Kerala, there is need for coastal protection. Yes, you have your engineering solutions and you can restore your coastal protection. But you also need to do planning for the basin level around the river. You need to think who needs the water and who doesn’t, and how it should be allocated. You need to see if the water is being priced and if there is a cap on extraction. There are also  questions about water quality, because if you have polluters upstream, downstream people suffer. So when you do this kind of basin planning, and we give training to officials in Kerala, you actually always think about economic development and about spatial planning. Because just thinking about the molecules of water is not going to solve the problems.