The lack of clean water in India is a huge problem. Polluted water kills people daily, and makes many others sick. Agriculture suffers. And even manufacturing processes are disadvantaged because of the lack of clean water for consumption and use. The water quality problems in India are windows to the future of much of the world. Steps are being taken to change the situation, but more needs to be done to protect not only India's future, but most of the world's too.
Diarrhea claims 450,000 lives in India annually. An estimated 186 million Indians do not have access to clean water for drinking and cooking. A staggering 700 million lack clean or private latrines. What is being done to fulfill this basic need for clean water?
India is a potpourri of clean water delivery systems. Traditional government water works struggle to maintain decades-old pipe systems in urban areas and extend connections to ever-shifting settlements. Ambitious high-tech water purification systems are in large-scale testing. Clean water is sold door to door by jar-toting entrepreneurs. Wells, lakes, rivers, and even rainwater are harvested to obtain clean water. But the lack of clean water in India remains persistent, and the country has peculiar water delivery challenges.
Imagine being bitten by a cobra while carrying water home. It happened to Elisha, a farmer in the village of Bhilalpur, as his wife and he carried pots of water back from an ancient bore well three-tenths of a mile from the village. Neighbors managed to get Elisha to a hospital six miles away, where he was treated and survived.
The people of Bhilalpur appealed to Operation Blessing, a nonprofit organization that drills new wells in safe locations, at a cost of about $1,000 per well. But across India, millions of people still make such dangerous daily treks to obtain clean water far from home.
Floods, famine, and civil unrest have caused mass migrations to "unauthorized colonies" that have no clean water sources. The Indian government struggles to extend clean water connections to over 1,500 unauthorized colonies at the painful rate of 30 per year.
Traditional centralized clean water and sewer systems cannot keep up with India's ever growing and ever shifting population, argues Sunita Narain, director of the Council on Science and the Environment (CSE), a nongovernmental organization based in New Delhi, India. Large-scale water infrastructure -- dams, reservoirs, treatment plants, pipe networks -- tend to concentrate around urban areas where consumers are densely packed and relatively stable. The well-watered in the cities get richer while thirsty rural residents get poorer.
It simply isn't possible to build a dam in every rural area, nor could India train enough engineers to keep such a massive, sophisticated infrastructure working. Smaller clean water systems designed to be maintained by unsophisticated rural users are the only real solution.
Water purification systems powered by the sun are being built in rural parts of India by General Electric Corp. and Dynoil, LLC, a privately held petroleum and biofuels company based in Newport Beach, California. Each system can produce 2,000 U.S. gallons of clean water per day, enough for 500 persons. Dynoil is providing installation and maintenance training to local residents to ensure their independence and the longevity of the installations.
Bicycles power machines that mix ingredients for a bio-fuel that does not emit greenhouse gases when burned in the Indian state of Orissa. Forty-five minutes of peddling per day produces enough locally-grown bio-fuel to pump water out of the ground for an entire village such as Kinchiling, which used to get its water from a dirty river. Christian Aid partner Gram Vikas (Village Development) is providing these renewable energy and clean water resources to villages throughout India.
Narain advocates rainwater harvesting as the simplest, most reliable clean water source available in India. Even the most uneducated villagers can capture rainwater in tanks, ponds, and on rooftops to replenish groundwater reserves. Rainwater harvesting is decentralized, putting control of this vital resource in local hands.
The World Bank has predicted that by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will run short of clean drinkable water. If those billions of people are not to become dependent upon multinational corporations and their technologies, then human-scaled renewable water resources must be developed and distributed widely. Maybe then the lack of clean water in India will be but a memory.
