H2O Let Free Its Flow

Farm Woe: Net irrigated area in India is 55 mn ha against a net crop area of 142 mn ha.

Fast Dwindling: Forest cover has gone down by 1,409 sq km between 2003 and 2005.

Is it Disjointed? Over 1,03,000 JFM committees manage about 18 mn ha of forest land.

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The state government also continues to have an issue with the Radius-CSIDC agreement. As Vivek Dhand, principal secretary, water resources department, told Outlook: "There is no agreement between Radius and the water resources department. We have forwarded this opinion to the state government." But the state government is yet to take corrective action. Of course, an early termination of the 20-year contract will lead to huge losses to the public exchequer. Says Gautam Bandopadhyaya of the Nadi Ghati Morcha: "Out of 23 rivers, eight have some sort of corporate control. This is dangerous to public good."

While there is growing acceptance that end-users will have to willy-nilly pay more for water, issues have been raised about the cross-subsidisation of privatisation initiatives. In Tamil Nadu's Coimbatore district, the Tiruppur Water Supply and Sewerage project is touted as a model PPP, but the price of water to industry has fluctuated from Rs 23 per kilo litre to Rs 45 per kilo litre since its inauguration in April 2005. Dharmadhikari points out that prices for domestic consumption too have risen sharply: "They've gone up to Rs 150 per month for metered connections and unless the industrial demand goes up, water tariffs for domestic users will continue to rise." Worse, with no documents forthcoming, the community remains in the dark about their rights to a fundamental commodity.

That's ironical as the few success stories in the water space come from partnerships forged between the government and the community. Like in north Bihar's rural hinterland. The villagers of Bettiah, Supaul and Khagaria districts had long forsaken their wells, using them as a dump for unwanted items. Ground water from state-installed pumps or chapakals met all their needs. With large doses of Ph content, coliform, ammonia, chloride and arsenic, the water was unfit for drinking. Steel containers turned red due to iron content. Villagers would complain of stomach disorders routinely, their monthly health bills running into hundreds of rupees.

When four NGOs brought together by Eklavya Prasad, a practitioner of natural and social resources management, asked people here less than a year ago to go back to the wells, they weren't convinced. Till, in a community initiative, they were persuaded to donate money for a clean-up operation—and it worked.

What followed was four months of cleaning up, which meant emptying out the well entirely and digging deeper for cleaner water. The wells were then treated with bleaching powder and the water tested constantly for abnormalities till it was deemed fit to drink.

Now Block Development Officers here are almost converted to well water. And villagers clean the area around the well in the morning and draw water from it almost reverentially. Chapakals are forgotten. That water is not used even for washing utensils.

There is also the case of Beas tributary Kali Bein, a lifeline for communities in central Punjab. Reduced to a cesspool of raw sewage and pollution, it was rescued by the Ek Onkar Charitable Trust, working under Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal, in 2000. The trust mobilised people as volunteers to work on the project. Soon, the hyacinth plants had been removed, the riverbed desilted, a brick road built along its banks and new trees planted. A pipeline was also laid down to carry treated water from Sultanpur Lodhi to agricultural farms for irrigation. "I'm sure efforts like Nangaldasa (Rajendra Singh's initiative to create a water reservoir in Rajasthan) and Hivre Bazar (an irrigation initiative by its panchayat near Ahmednagar) will change the face of India as ideas travel," says Union water resources minister Saifuddin Soz.

Such community efforts can now help improve the performance of irrigation systems. India has spent Rs 99,610 crore between 1992 and 2004 on 210 major and medium irrigation projects. Despite this, the area covered by irrigation shrunk by a little over 3 million hectares. IIT Bombay alumnus Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, an informal network of organisations and people in the water sector, lays down the roadmap. "PPPs must be transparent," he says, "with community participation and a legally empowered mechanism to monitor the project. People must be allowed to play a role, since they'll bear the brunt of the outcome."