Far from the gleaming high-rises of India's financial capital Mumbai, impoverished villages in areas supplying the megacity's water are running dry -- a crisis repeated across the country that experts say foreshadows terrifying problems.Government authorities both at the state level and in New Delhi say they are committed to tackling the problem and have announced repeated schemes to address the water crisis.

Far from the gleaming high-rises of India’s financial capital Mumbai, impoverished villages in areas supplying the megacity’s water are running dry – a crisis repeated across the country that experts say foreshadows terrifying problems.

“The people in Mumbai drink our water but no one there, including the government, pays attention to us or our demands,” said Sunita Pandurang Satgir, carrying a heavy metal pot on her head filled with foul-smelling water.

Demand is increasing in the world’s most populous nation of 1.4 billion people, but supplies are shrinking – with climate change driving erratic rainfall and extreme heat.

Large-scale infrastructure for Mumbai includes reservoirs connected by canals and pipelines channelling water from 100 kilometres (60 miles) away.

But experts say a failure of basic planning means that the network is often not connected to hundreds of rural villages in the region and several nearby districts.

Instead, they rely on traditional wells.

But demand far outstrips meagre resources, and critical groundwater levels are falling.

“Our days and our lives just revolve around thinking about collecting water, collecting it once, and collecting it again, and again,” Satgir said.

“We make four to six rounds for water every day… leaving us time for nothing else”.

  • Heatwaves and dry wells -

Climate change is shifting weather patterns, bringing longer-lasting and more intense droughts.

Wells rapidly run dry early in the extreme heat.

In the peak of summer, 35-year-old Satgir said she can spend up to six hours a day fetching water.

Temperatures this year surged above a brutal 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit).

  • LovstuhagenOPMEnglish
    2·
    10 days ago

    India’s government-run NITI Aayog public policy centre forecasts a “steep fall of around 40 percent in freshwater availability by 2030”, in a July 2023 report.

    It also warned of “increasing water shortages, depleting groundwater tables and deteriorating resource quality”.

    Groundwater resources “are being depleted at unsustainable rates”, it added, noting they make up some 40 percent of total water supplies.

    It is a story repeated across India, said Himanshu Thakkar, from the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, a Delhi-based water rights campaign group.

    This is “typical of what keeps happening all over the country”, Thakkar said, adding it represents everything “wrong with the political economy of making dams in India”.

    “While projects are planned and justified in the name of drought-prone regions and its people, most end up serving only the distant urban areas and industries,” he said.

    Truly, India needs to rapidly supply water to these areas, perhaps with massive desalination projects like they do in the Gulf region, where areas like Riyadh have 7 million people dependent on water pumped in from the cost.

    • ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 days ago

      Desalination is horrible for the local marine life though. Less people might be a better option, but impossible to implement short-term.

      • LovstuhagenOPMEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Right, I just looked and saw there are some conflicting ideas about this.

        The brine issues seem quite abd:

        And even the desalination industry agrees concentrated salt is a problem. Because it is heavier than seawater, the brine tends to settle toward the bottom of the coastal areas where it is released—unless it is diluted. The excess salt decreases dissolved oxygen in the water, suffocating animals on the seafloor. Technologies exist to reduce brine waste prior to disposal or to mine pollutants out of the waste for commercial use—but this is generally cost-prohibitive. Instead, plants use other strategies to minimize damage.

        One such alternative involves situating plants in areas where strong currents help disperse the brine. But this is not always possible. For example, the Arabian Gulf is shallow, lacks strong currents and has seen incoming freshwater slow to a trickle due to upstream dams and to people in the region diverting water for drinking and irrigation. The Gulf is also a receptacle for salty “produced water” from the oil and gas industry. As a result of these factors, the Gulf is now about 25 percent saltier than typical seawater, with hotspots double or triple its regular salinity. In addition to harming sea life, extreme salinity also makes desalinating the water more difficult and expensive. The Red and the Mediterranean seas are also growing more saline.

        Some plants make efforts to better mix the brine into the ocean when discharged, either by using multiple waste outlets that spread it over a larger area or by pressurizing the waste flow to disperse it by force. A recent six-year study at the Sydney Desalination Plant in Australia found its pressure diffuser reduced excess salinity in coastal areas where waste brine was released. But the abnormally fast flow prevented species with slow-swimming larvae—such as tube worms, lace corals and sponges—from colonizing the impact zone. At the same time, species that thrive in high-flow conditions—such as barnacles and bivalves—increased in number, says study lead author Graeme Clark, a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. The study showed an attempt to reduce the harm of extreme salinity can change the composition of species living in the outfall area. “It’s a bit of the lesson for the industry,” he says, about considering the impact of hydrodynamic changes. Nevertheless, he adds, the impacts are “less sinister…than the toxic effect of high salinity.”

        Scientific American

        It’s quite a complex issue.