8/20/2019
‘We Can’t Waste a Drop.’ India Is Running Out of Water. - WSJ
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INDIA
‘We Can’t Waste a Drop.’ India Is Running
Out of Water.
Population growth, modernization and climate change spawn a resource crisis; trouble in a remote
Himalayan region
By Bill Spindle | Photographs by Gareth Phillips for the Wall Street Journal
Aug. 19, 2019 10 27 am ET
LEH, India—The Ladakh region of northern India is one of the world’s highest, driest inhabited
places. For centuries, meltwater from winter snows in the Himalayan mountains sustained the
tiny villages dotting this remote land.
Now, like many other places in India, parts of Ladakh are running short of water. A tourism
boom has sent the summer population soaring, and the region’s traditional system of
conserving water is breaking down.
Water crises are unfolding all across India, a product of population growth, modernization,
climate change, mismanagement and the breakdown of traditional systems of distributing
resources. India is running out of water in more places, in more different ways, putting more
people at risk, than perhaps any other country.
Nearly all of India’s biggest cities, including New Delhi, the nation’s capital, are rapidly
depleting their groundwater reserves, and 40% of India’s people could lack drinking water by
the end of the next decade, according to a 2018 report by NITI Aayog, a government-policy
think tank.
In Ladakh, making matters worse, the winter snows were scarce last year. In the fields above
the city of Leh, tensions ran high.
Wheat farmer Tsering Wangchuck, 67, regularly rose at 3 a.m. to send water into his fields
before others living at higher elevation awoke. At times, he had to march back uphill to confront
a neighbor who had arrived later to redirect the water his way.
“You had to check all the time,” he said. “It was frustrating.”
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India is the 13th most water-stressed country in the world, but its population is triple the
combined population of the other 16 countries facing extremely high water stress,
according to the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit group with offices around the world
that tracks water use and other global environmental and resource issues.
Water resources in India have been mismanaged for decades. Critical groundwater resources,
which account for 40% of India’s water supply, are being depleted at unsustainable rates, the
NITI Aayog report said. Droughts are becoming more frequent, creating severe problems for
India’s rain-dependent farmers.
By 2030, water demand in India is projected to be twice the available supply, according to the
report. “If nothing changes, and fast, things will get much worse…with severe water scarcity on
the horizon for hundreds of millions,” the report said.
In the southern city of Chennai, drinking water reserves almost completely dried up this year.
Although a 200-day streak with no rain ended recently, the first month of the annual monsoon
brought one-third less rain than the 50-year average, which makes it the driest June in five
years, according to the India Meteorological Department.
Two of Chennai’s four reservoirs went dry, and the other two nearly did. Millions of residents of
the city, India’s fifth largest, with a population of about 10 million, have to get their drinking
water from trucks—either sporadically from government vehicles or by purchasing it from
private companies.
In the agricultural heartland of India’s northern plains, where almost one-third of the country’s
food is grown, farmers generally pay little or nothing for the groundwater they use or the
energy needed to pump as much as they desire. That has led them to plant water-intensive
crops, creating shortages, especially during lapses in the annual monsoons, that endanger the
country’s food supply.
Various Indian states are locked in legal and political battles with one another over the control
and use of water flowing through the nation’s legendary rivers, such as the Ganges.
Some tourist centers have run short of water. Last year, in the former British hill station of
Simla, dozens of hotels had to cancel bookings and temporarily shut down, and the city’s major
summer festival was canceled. Government schools were closed for 10 days because they lacked
water for the children and teachers.
“Until now, it’s been relatively easy to increase supply without thinking too much about
demand. But parts of India are beginning to hit the natural limits of water supply,” said Mervyn
Piesse, manager of the global food and water crises research program at Future Directions
International, a research institute based in Nedlands, Australia. “Unless there is a reduction in
the rate at which those resources are being used, they are eventually going to run out.”
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Two of the four reservoirs in the southern city of Chennai went dry, and the other two nearly did. PHOTO: ATUL LOKE GETTY
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Beset by the multitude of water problems, Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his second
term recently by appointing a ministry of water, combining previous ministries that oversaw
wetlands and riverways development and drinking water and sanitation.
A warming climate is making water supplies more unpredictable throughout the Himalayan
region, upon whose watershed some two billion people ultimately depend. A recent study by a
nongovernmental organization that focuses on regional developmental issues, called the Hindu
Kush Monitoring and Assessment Program, warned that glaciers feeding rivers in the
Himalayan region could start disappearing after 2050.
Ladakh, which borders China and Pakistan in the nation’s far north, became a formal Indian
state earlier this month when the central government separated it from Jammu and Kashmir. It
has long been isolated, especially in the winter, when many roads snow over and temperatures
drop well below freezing. In the 1970s, the Indian government opened the region to tourism,
drawing a trickle of mostly Western travelers who came to trek and to visit the ancient
Buddhist monasteries along the Indus River.
Then came a 2010 hit Bollywood movie called “Three Idiots.” The final song-and-dance
extravaganza had two Indian megastars reuniting in love along the shores of Lake Pangong,
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then a small-time Ladakhi
tourist attraction. Indian fans
of the movie flocked to Ladakh
to visit the lake.
The number of visitors to
Ladakh, which has a yearround population of only
133,000, has soared fivefold
since the movie came out,
reaching 327,000 last year.
Most stay in Leh. Local
A family farmer using traditional irrigation methods in the village of Saboo, in Ladakh.
tourism officials and hoteliers
say many of the new tourists,
unlike the adventure travelers who preceded them, tend to stay in hotels where they
shower twice daily and use flush toilets instead of the waterless dry-pit latrines traditional to
Ladakhi villages. They also favor vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers over the region’s
traditional potatoes and barley, which require far less water to grow.
The new tourists consume about 25% more water per person than longtime residents during
the summer and double what the average resident uses in the winter, when cold weather
curtails running water, according to Iftiqar Ahmed, an engineer in the Leh government’s office
of Public Health and Engineering, which oversees water use.
A hotel building boom in Leh has increased the number of rooms since 2010 to 16,000, from
fewer than 2,000.
Tourists lock to shores of Lake Pangong to recreate scenes from the hit Bollywood ilm ‘Three Idiots,' which triggered Ladakh’s
surge in tourism.
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In need of a constant water supply, the new hotels drilled their own wells. By the time
authorities started monitoring wells last year, they estimated hotels were pulling up more than
a million liters of water a day during the June through August tourist peak, from ground water
reserves fed by melting snow and glaciers, said Mr. Ahmed. They now account for 20% of the
water used in the city, he said.
Outside Leh, where farming still underpins village life, water has long been treated as a
precious commodity. To preserve it and assure equal distribution, the villagers appoint water
managers, known as churpons, to oversee the collection of snowmelt into catchment ponds and
dole it out through an ancient network of canals and sluices that run downhill past family farm
plots. They ensure that families with plots at higher elevations who get the water first leave a
fair share for families with plots at lower down.
In Saboo village, where some 300 families live a few miles outside Leh, Jigmat Stanzin, 47, has
held that job, which rotates annually among village families. “We can’t waste a drop,” he says.
Jigmat Stanzin was chosen by villagers in Saboo to serve as a churpon, managing the distribution of snowmelt through canals
and sluices to family farms.
April to July 2018 were anxious months in Saboo. Villagers decided the home gardens that
provide food to most households should get water first, then water would go to apricot and
apple trees, which would take a decade to replace if they died. Then, wheat and barley fields,
and, finally, the poplar trees used as building material.
Mr. Stanzin and a team of five other churpons worked around the clock. Some fields weren’t
planted and some crops were stunted. But the village made it through.
Leh, however, stopped using churpons in 2015 as farming gave way to tourism and other
development. Mr. Wangchuck, who tends the family’s farm with his wife, couldn’t plant half his
fields, forcing him to buy feed for his cows. His family cut back on what they ate and had less to
sell in local markets.
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The city itself came to the brink of catastrophe. Some hotel wells went dry as the paltry
snowmelt failed to recharge underground springs fast enough.
As many as 100,000 seasonal migrant workers reside in and around Leh during the summer.
Nearly all of them live in areas where water must be delivered by tanker truck, once every three
days.
Longer term, Leh has an $11 million project to pump drinking water from the nearby Indus
River. The project was planned in 2006, to be built through the year 2042, for a summer
population projected to be 84,000 by then. But the summer population already is at least
90,000, Mr. Ahmed says. The project timeline has been accelerated for completion two years
from now.
Until it is completed, water needs will be met with a patchwork of delivery systems. Some
4,500 households now have drinking water piped to their homes a few hours each day as
part of the plan to deliver drinking water to all homes. During the winter, though, the pipes can
freeze if they aren’t drained at night.
Tanker-truck deliveries will continue to thousands of other households. Residents store the
water in plastic vats that they have taken to padlocking to prevent theft.
Stanzin Namgyal, 52, grew up in Leh and is trying to revive the churpon system to supply
meltwater to remaining farmers and the many residents with home gardens. Yet for the 23room hotel he is building in the city center, he intends to bore wells. “I’ll need one well, maybe
even two,” he said.
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Last year, Leh began requiring residents
and businesses to register their wells, but
only a fraction of them did so. This year,
the municipality is conducting inspections
door-to-door to try to get an accurate
count.
The eventual goal is to charge a fee for
wells, and ultimately to begin metering
and charging for water usage, although
officials concede such measures may be years off.
Sonam Parvez, who also grew up in Leh, opened a 20-bed hotel and heads an association of
some 300 hoteliers. When his parents operated a small guesthouse in Leh decades ago, he said,
their water was allocated under the churpon system.
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“The churpon system is people coming together and trusting each other,” he said. “With the
coming of the present day, that trust is gone because everyone is tapping into the bore well
system. Everybody thinks there’s free water down there. Last year, for the first time, Ladakhis
discovered there’s no free water.”
—Krishna Pokharel contributed
to this article.
Write to Bill Spindle at
bill.spindle@wsj.com
Ishey Angmo, a 90-year-old farmer in Saboo.
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