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One of the greatest signs of privilege in the modern world is how many things we take
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Looking at myself for example, I take it for granted that I have a roof above my head and
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will have one for the foreseeable future.
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I can eat when I am hungry.
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I will always have access to drinking water.
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In fact a friend of mine recently pointed out that thanks to technology, the next generation
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will never know what it is to be lost.
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Imagine that, GPS Zindabad.
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Well today's episode is about water, which is something that people like me are lucky
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enough to take for granted, while millions in this country are not.
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Now usually things get better, but in this regard matters might actually get worse.
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We think of water as an endless resource, but could India actually be running out of
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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In one sense, India has had a water crisis for decades, millions of Indians don't have
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access to clean drinking water.
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But those who run the country take it for granted.
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I always assumed though that the issue here was distribution.
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I thought well we have the ocean on three sides, we are a land of rivers, it's just
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a question of using technology to make all this water drinkable and then distributing
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Well, I discovered while recording this episode that my notions about water were completely
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wrong and that we might be headed for a water crisis.
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My guest for this episode is Vishwanath S. He is well known on Twitter as Zen Rain Man
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and has been an activist for water conservation for over three decades.
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I'd heard a lot about him and as I didn't know anything about this subject, I invited
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him over for an episode.
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We recorded this in Bangalore a couple of weeks ago.
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Listen in, Vishwanath, thanks so much for coming on the Scene and the Unseen.
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Vishwanath, you've worked in the field of water conservation and in the field of water
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generally for more than three decades now.
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And these days there's been a lot of news about Bangalore's water wars and so on and
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Can you contextualize our current problems for me a little bit?
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Well, that's interesting.
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India is a bit peculiar as compared to other countries when it comes to how it accesses
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One striking example for me, which has driven me to work in this particular sector also
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has been the dependence on groundwater.
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We have close to 33 million wells and bore wells.
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We take out 250 cubic kilometers of water, that's groundwater every year.
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So this is far more than what the next two nations, China and the USA combined to.
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Together China and USA take about 220 cubic kilometers out.
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India takes 250 cubic kilometers of groundwater out.
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So this dependence on groundwater is something stunning for India.
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I'm a complete layman, so excuse me for this very sort of nooby question, but how do the
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other nations then get their water?
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Like if we are different from depending so much on groundwater.
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Like the other nations, China and the USA are to a large extent dependent on surface
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Waters from rivers which is stocked up in reservoirs, dams, and then pump it across
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or canalize it across the country.
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But in our case, we are dependent more on drilling underground and water.
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We have been to, for a long, long time, we have depended on groundwater.
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It dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization, Mahenjodaro, Harappa, Lothal, we have a history
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of open wells which provided water, and this is striking again because it's called the
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Indus Valley Civilization, yet the habitations actually took their water from groundwater.
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I mean, you'd imagine a land with so many rivers would, you know, not have this kind
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Well, it looks like a historical coincidence, but let's look at it from also the other
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lens of what I would call water romance, which I'm pretty much romantic about.
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This discovery that a hole in the ground could yield water was something stunning for civilization.
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Some tectonic shift happened.
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You were no longer tied to the tyranny of rivers and lakes.
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You could go to the countryside, dig a hole in the ground, find water, and survive.
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And it looks like the ancients in India cracked that particular form of knowledge.
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So therefore, you were anywhere and everywhere.
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And remember this country of ours, what is now what we call India, is two-thirds semi-arid.
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It's in the Deccan Plateau.
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So the rivers are ephemeral.
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They're not perennial rivers.
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And then when you have to survive for the whole year, you look for solutions and the
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well was a striking solution.
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So what are the implications of our dependence on groundwater?
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Till we were dependent on open wells, there was a strange sort of communication between
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the ecological resource, that is water, and us as human beings.
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So the wells spoke to us.
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It would tell you summer is coming.
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So you started to alter your behavior depending on the water availability.
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The well was both functional and communicative.
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It rewarded you for good behavior.
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If you recharged around the surrounding areas, if you protected the forest, then the well
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If you dumped waste material, well, the well would get polluted and you wouldn't be able
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So these signals of communication and functionality was something striking about the well.
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From the 60s, and then we slipped into the era of the borewell, the borewell stopped
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They only communicate to us twice.
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Once when they strike water and once when they're dead, actually.
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Because we no longer see what's happening to water levels, how they're changing with
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the seasons, and we can't adjust accordingly.
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So that information has stopped.
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The borewell does not let you know how much water there is, what is the source of that
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groundwater, where is it coming from, what is the quality of that groundwater?
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What can you do to protect it?
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How much of it are you using up?
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All these signals are completely lost with the borewell.
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So what are sort of the seen and unseen effects of borewell drilling?
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What were the advantages which led to that being adopted as a technology in the first
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place and what eventually happened?
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So there's a strange coincidence to the entry of the hard rock drilling rig into India documented
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by UNICEF, amongst others.
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In the 60s, the mid 60s, there was a continuous drought for three years and there was actually
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There was food shortage and great water shortage.
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And UNICEF brought in these drilling rigs from the UK, Denmark, and the USA, hard rock
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drilling rigs, about 18 of them, and started drilling for water.
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These went off into the villages of Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh, and they brought life
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So they were a big boon at that particular point of time because the wells had dried
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The bore wells had to be dug to about 100, 200 feet, which the wells would not have reached.
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And then the hand pump was attached to it and life saving water came.
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But in a peculiar Indian tradition, we took the drilling rig, jugardified it, and started
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to make the rig itself.
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The small town of Tiruchengod in Tamil Nadu is now one of the leading exporters of borewell
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drilling rigs in the world.
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These rigs then started to get used for irrigation and agriculture.
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Farmers started to drill it.
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They were uncontrolled.
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Nobody controlled the number of wells that were being dug.
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And actually, the political establishment started to give free electricity for the pump
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sets to mine water from these.
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And so they spread rapidly, became politically uncontrollable, and started to exploit a lot
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The benefits, of course, of the Green Revolution came from groundwater, a lot of people argue,
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not from the dams of India.
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The second consequence on health, for a short time, diseases like the guinea worm were eliminated.
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Waterborne diseases became less because groundwater was pure water.
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But slowly, poisons such as fluoride and arsenic started to emerge.
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Now we have a situation, because of our dependency on these deep bore wells, that about 66 million
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Indians are consuming fluoride contaminated water and about 18 million Indians are consuming
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arsenic contaminated water.
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Wow, that's quite a revelation.
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So the first seen effect of bore wells was effectively that it played a part in enabling
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the Green Revolution, which of course saved millions from possible starvation and was
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And the second effect was that diseases like guinea worm, for example, completely vanished.
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And before I asked you to elaborate on the unseen effects, you spoke about how the spread
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of bore wells was, you hinted that it was perhaps more than it should have been.
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And partly because of government incentives like free power, which allowed people to pump
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up as much water as they wanted, and we started, we jogarified and we started making them ourselves.
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And can you elaborate on that a bit, like how, like was the spreading of bore wells,
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at what point does it sort of become a con rather than a pro?
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Yes, that's an interesting question.
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I think in the initial days when the Geological Society of India, which was one of the strong
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proponents of the hard rock drilling rig and the bore well went about its business, farmers
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did not believe that a four inch hole in the ground could actually yield water.
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So they had to be persuaded by scientists to actually drug these bore wells and drew
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And I think even in the minds of the geologists, it was not clear that we were going to run
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out of groundwater because we had not formed a good idea of how much water was actually
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there, what was the volume that was being recharged annually and what were the areas
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from which these deep bore wells were being recharged.
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I think that hydrogeological science is only now developing in India.
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We are doing something called sub aquifer mapping, trying to understand these hard rock
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aquifers in a more thorough manner, which we did not know in the 60s and 70s.
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So we went about assuming infinite resource.
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And I think that was the handicap.
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So one does not blame on a deliberate attempt to create a scarcity, but this is the very
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nature of technology and science.
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It seems that we create problems and then overcome them with solutions, which are actually
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And so then the cycle continues, except that, you know, with most everyday technology, like
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if there's a bug on the latest Android version, it's fixed really fast and the information
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is flowing really fast.
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And here, because it's geology and you don't really know what's under the earth and it's
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something that can take decades to play out and affect millions of people.
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And how many hydrogeologists are produced in India?
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It's a good question to ask, and where do they go?
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Most of them went to the oil industry.
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So we had a lack of human resource power.
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We still have a lack of human resource power, given the complexity of the science.
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Who has to do the investments in managing groundwater?
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Is groundwater a government resource?
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Is it a common pool resource?
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Is it a private resource?
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It's now managed as a private resource.
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When do we flip from turning it into a common pool resource from a private resource?
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And then who does those investments are big question marks even now.
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One of the unseen effects that you pointed out, of course, with the new diseases that
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came about like chloride poisoning and so on and so forth, but going even beyond that
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as our knowledge grew of how scarce groundwater might be, how it gets depleted, where it comes
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from and so on and so forth.
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Looking at those learnings, what can you say?
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And also the point you made about the information that a person living on the land has about
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the water content of the land disappearing because this was now unseen, the water that
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the borewell was striking as opposed to the seen water in a well, which you're in touch
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How did all of this play out?
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What are the long term unintended consequences?
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So one unintended consequence is the drying up of the peninsular rivers.
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A lot of people don't get the fact that it's not merely depletion of catchments and cutting
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down of forests and trees, but it's actually the sinking of the groundwater table through
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millions of borewells, which causes our rivers to dry up.
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And so if we want to revive our rivers, which is now quite the thing with society, then
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we have to get our groundwater tables high.
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It's a relationship not understood pretty well.
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The second point is what it did was it caused farmers to take loans to drill borewells.
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Enough evidence has come that farmers would take loan after loan, see borewell after borewell
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in this desperate chase for water because that was his only source of water for whatever
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So he would have to drink multiple borewells because he'd drink, dig one, and then that
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would get over and he'd have to dig another one.
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The thing with hard rock terrain is that if you drill a borewell, it's not a guarantee
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that you will strike water.
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You may drill one four meters away and it may strike water because this waters occur
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in cracks and crevices, which are limited.
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It's not a sponge-like aquifer, which the well would have tapped into.
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So this uncertainty of being able to strike water was a clear factor in hard rock borewells
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and this caused tremendous agricultural distress.
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So what followed from this, like take me on a narrative like through the decades, like
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in the sixties, you have problems of food and water and then you have these borewells
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They enable the green revolution and it seems like a technological miracle and by and large
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the green revolution was something which had millions of people enormously.
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But then through the decades, a story then starts playing out where people gain more
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and more knowledge about what it's actually doing to the groundwater and we start facing
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So sort of tell me that story through the decades.
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India is getting independent in 47, our population is about 330 million.
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We are a nation growing just about enough food for ourselves.
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Slowly the population starts to increase in the fifties, we are faced with a set of droughts
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and in the sixties it becomes striking because we get a three year drought, continuous drought.
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And then we have a hand to mouth living as is described with grains coming from the USA,
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At the time there's a war with Pakistan, 65 coincidentally or otherwise.
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And now our dependence on food becomes a security risk for us.
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So we start to think what we should do.
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See Subrahmanyam steps out, puts a Swaminathan and meet Norman Borlaug in the high yielding
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dwarf variety, the Mexican dwarf variety of wheat comes to India.
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This dwarf variety needs actually more water and it needs lots of groundwater for its productivity
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It needs fertilizers, it needs pesticides.
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The International Rice Research Institute is established in Odisha.
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To begin with, later on shifted to the Philippines, they developed IR 64, a wonderful hybrid variety
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which comes to the Thanjavur belt, which is in the Cauvery area.
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These wheat and rice strains are now demanding water, they're producing food security.
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And informally, subversively farmers are drilling bore wells to feed this water.
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But we are fixated on the food output, we are not looking at what's happening to the
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And slowly, the spread of both these varieties is all across India.
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In the meantime, the hard rock drilling rigs have come, technologically speaking.
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They've started to replace the traditional diesel pump or the animal driven lifting devices.
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They now start to dig deeper and deeper and start to move everywhere.
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Free power is started to be given to the farmers because the farmer lobby is a strong lobby,
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agriculture is a strong lobby.
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And so therefore, this depletes groundwater even further because it's indiscriminate use
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of the groundwater, it's flood irrigation, it's not drip or sprinkler irrigation.
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And slowly, eventually, we're into 33 million bore wells and 250 cubic kilometers of water
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Now, we realize the gravity of the situation, we start to figure out areas where groundwater
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is depleting and we try to bring control through law, doesn't work.
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None of the places in India, groundwater rules and legislations are working because the number,
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sheer number of bore wells to manage and regulate has become too huge.
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Now we are in an era where we want to recharge the aquifers and try to make it up, but we
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still have not found an idea for demand management until we find a balance between demand management
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and what goes in into the groundwater as rainwater, strike a balance, we'll be in for tough times.
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And this seems like an almost insurmountable problem because at the policy level, the government
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will of course say that we need to not destroy the depleted resource, we need to figure out
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a way to make it better.
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But at the individual level, the incentive for the individual farmer always will be to
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make sure that his next crop has the water it needs and therefore he doesn't give a damn
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and farmers are an important constituency and politicians therefore have to kind of listen
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to them, can't go against them.
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But however, there are grains of experiments which are now happening where we are turning
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the resource into a common pool resource.
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And there's a particular program called the Participatory Groundwater Management, which
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the group which I'm working with, it's a funding agency, it's also funding and we're trying
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to bring together pools of farmers who pool their groundwater, bore wells.
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So let's imagine about 40 or 50 farmers come together, link up their bore wells, use drip
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irrigation and sprinkler irrigation so that they are effective, put up a rain gauge in
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the place and understand how much it rained.
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Based on the rainfall, take a call on how much water has recharged these bore wells
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and therefore use and grow crops which require less water than what had rained.
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So if this year it rained less, you grow millet, if it rained more, you grow paddy, that kind
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You link up the groundwater and build that groundwater knowledge, link the bore wells.
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The pooling also brings in market feasibilities.
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You can buy seeds cheaper, you can sell to the market as a cooperative, as a unit, as
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These experiments seem to show a glimmer of hope for the common pool resource that groundwater
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Are they just sporadic efforts made by organizations like yours?
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Because imagine that it's actually in the farmer's long-term interest to pool together
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and do this for various reasons, not just the water but also the collective power they
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get when it comes to the marketplace and therefore this is something that should be happening
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anyway regardless of any impetus coming.
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Is that the case or have you found that impetus is required?
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So here's the thing, the institutional architecture of groundwater governance in India is varied
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from state to state because groundwater and water is a state subject.
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One of the better performing institutions is the Groundwater Survey and Development
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Agency, which is in Maharashtra.
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And Maharashtra has taken up very formally this way of pooling groundwater and trying
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to work on it as a modality.
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And we're eagerly waiting for the kind of results that will come there because that
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will set an exemplar for other states to follow.
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There's no other choice.
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We have to make it work, but we have to get these institutions to be full of specialties
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which can deal with societies, not just groundwater alone.
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So far we have thrown hydrogeologists, now we need community mobilizers, we need people
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who can organize farmers groups.
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This is a different skill set altogether.
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So the governance architecture of groundwater will have to be reimagined and it will have
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So give me a sense of, to understand the situation we are in and the crisis that there is, give
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me a sense of the worst case scenario.
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Supposing Vishwanath, you don't exist and this governance architecture doesn't take
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place and there's no one really doing anything about this and it's just individuals going
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by without that larger knowledge that you have gained.
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What's the worst case scenario?
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It's playing itself out in many parts of the country.
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Playing itself out in North Gujarat, it played itself out in Chennai.
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That groundwater ran out completely, that societies had to migrate out.
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There was great agricultural distress, economic distress.
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People struggled for drinking water, drinking water had to be shipped in trains and trucks
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and tankers in Gujarat, in Gujarat, in Maharashtra, in Karnataka, in many places, in many habitations,
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the groundwater has simply run out.
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There is no life without groundwater, so you'll see great patches of India which will simply
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be not occupied because there's no groundwater.
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And mind you, when groundwater tables fall, forests will start to die because the roots
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of the trees cannot get into the aquifers to drink water.
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So you can imagine terrific catastrophes.
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The limited forest cover that we have which feed our rivers will die and so therefore
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our rivers will be in distress.
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They're already in distress.
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So therefore it's both an ecological disaster as well as a humanitarian disaster because
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you'll have people migrating away from areas where there's no groundwater and quite apart
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from the devastation that's already been wreaked on them by having to migrate, they'll put
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pressure on the areas they migrate to who will in turn in a cascading effect face these
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Is there any, like you said, a lot of nations don't quite depend on groundwater.
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Are there other options, like if we take it as a given that eventually over time the groundwater
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is not going to sustain us, are there other options in terms of, you know, again I'm asking
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completely as a layman that can fill that need.
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Well, different areas and different rainfall patterns and different hydrogeologies will
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have to show a different response.
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Kerala in India has the largest density of open wells for any place in the world.
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What Kerala is now doing with its rainfall is it's picking up rooftop rainwater, many
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households in Kerala and feeding their wells so that the wells are full all the time, that
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the quality of well water improves and it can quickly become a mass movement.
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And this is again an innovation that's happened as you pointed out because they get information
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about what's happening to the level of water in the well and therefore they can prepare
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and advance and they understand what's happening while with borewell drilling and so on you
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You assume it's there till it's not there.
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So this business of modernity which started to bring piped water to homes with all good
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intentions to remove the duress that women had to go to bring the water and make things
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easier, piped water inside the house, caused this disconnect because you don't know where
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the piped water is coming from, how much there is water in the rivers and all that.
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So some examples are striking.
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What we are trying to do is to merge both the piped network as well as groundwater.
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Belgaum is a striking example.
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When they ran out of water for the piped network, an engineer there called RS Nayak thought
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about the old open wells there and with the help of the community mobilized and cleaned
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up those old open wells.
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The community promised not to chuck Ganesh Idols into it, garbage into it.
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In return with some small funding, they were able to put up water networks for the local
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community, 500 people, a thousand people, sometimes even 10,000 people, a local network
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linked to the local well, piped water to your homes.
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So here's an incentive for the community to keep their wells clean, to recharge water
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and then in turn they get water.
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As opposed to the piped water supply which cost them about 12 rupees a kilo liter, the
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water from the well was only 75 paisa kilo liter and I'm talking 75 paisa for a thousand
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So there's an economic benefit and an ecological benefit and an environmental benefit plus
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sustainability and this water supply scheme is giving water to 200,000 people in Belgaum
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of a population of 500,000 people.
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Kundapur which is close by, started to get 24 bar 7 piped water supply.
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Well, when the residents were asked to connect and pay a connection fee, they said we already
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have our 24 bar 7 supply from our wells, they're giving us 24 bar 7 and we're in charge of
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So why do we need your piped water connection?
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So somewhere these two will have to meet, the piped water network aspirations of the
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people and the well as a sustainable water resource and the community understanding what
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the well is and so that challenge will have to be played itself out differently in states
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like Kerala, in small towns and cities and in the vast rural areas of India.
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I mean it seems a really great challenge because like in a village, okay you can have communities
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and they have wells and so on but in a large city like Mumbai or Bangalore, you don't have
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those open wells and that sort of connect, you are dependent on the piped water supply
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and then on the water supply basically.
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So let me give you one more example from Bangalore because you raised this important point of
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urbanization and the complexity of cities and how you manage it and this example is
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a rainbow drive on Sarjapur road just opposite Wipro, 36 acres of campus, 360 plots not connected
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to the city utility network.
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What would they have done?
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Each one of them would have drilled a bore well as they build their homes.
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So you would have 360 straws emptying out the cup of water each competing with the other.
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Pretty soon it would be finished.
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When we work with the community and the community had some reasonably enlightened leadership,
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what they did was they banned private bore wells.
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They said we'll sink three community bore wells and we'll share the groundwater but
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360 will now compulsorily recharge the aquifers.
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So each one of them will make a recharge well which is about three feet in diameter and
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about 20 feet to 30 feet deep, pick up all the rooftop water.
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The water which flows on the roads and make sure that it's filtered and send it into the
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So recharge well is something that collects all this water and unlike a well which gives
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you water, a recharge well picks up rainwater, clean rainwater and puts it into the aquifer.
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So you got 360 recharge wells but only three wells which were drawing.
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Still this was not enough.
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When we did a water balance for them, we figured that they were consuming 265 liters per person
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With all the rainwater harvesting they do, they were still over drawing on the aquifer.
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So they had to get it down to 130.
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They put up meter in every connection.
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So if it's more than 20,000 liters per month consumption for a household, they pay 120
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Promptly consumption came down to something like 120 liters per capita per day.
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With the monies that the institution collected, they were able to invest in a wastewater treatment
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They pick up treated wastewater and send it to the households for non-potable use.
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So again, the net freshwater demand has dropped to something like 80 liters per capita per
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So they are now contributing to the city of Bangalore, they're contributing water.
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They're self-sufficient, they're sustainable, and they have perhaps the cheapest water in
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So these kind of examples, this is 36 acres, it's now being replicated in a 70 acre layout.
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It's gone to a 200 acre layout where they've discovered that the basements were flooding
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into well-said water and they were buying water at the same time.
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So this sort of mental map in which we've forgotten what shallow aquifers and wells
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So this is obviously a remarkable and inspiring story, but as you pointed out, it's a community
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which is relatively small and also had enlightened leaders and therefore is sort of one island
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of enlightenment overall.
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So my question to you there is that let's say that as a society it's a problem we need
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What is the role that A, the government can play in it, with all the incentives because
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they are usually focused on the short term and they have different kinds of special interest
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groups, and what is the role that we cannot look to government to play, that we have to
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say that society has to make these moves and these ideas and these values have to spread
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What are your thoughts?
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So that's the important point.
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I think the institutional architecture for water governance in India is 20th century.
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We're faced with 21st century problems and unless we redefine our institutions and get
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them to be able, capacitated enough to be able to address our problems, we're going
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to be stuck with some challenges.
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From a policy perspective, the city of Bangalore, Chennai for example, drives a rainwater harvesting
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policy which makes it mandatory for every household to do rainwater harvesting.
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It's not being implemented at the efficiency and effectiveness which it should be, but
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a beginning has been made.
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And why it's not being implemented is something that we need to crack because we do not have
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a good communication outreach to pursue its citizens to understand the benefits of doing
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But if we do that, then we have a substantial amount of recharge of our aquifers, so therefore
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our bore wells and groundwater, open wells can come back to life.
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If lakes are rejuvenated and if they're fed with treated wastewater, so in the rainy season,
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you feed the lakes with rainwater.
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In the non-rainy season, you feed them with treated wastewater which comes in through
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And there's an example in Jakur, there's an example in a lake called Rajanalli and Bhutanalli.
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Many examples are there.
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And these lakes recharge that shallow aquifer and a huge amount of groundwater becomes available
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for the city to reuse, right?
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So a wastewater policy which talks about ecological use of treated wastewater to recharge aquifers.
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A groundwater policy which says, okay, in a particular area, you're not allowed to sink
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individual bore wells, but community bore wells will supply you water.
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A rainwater harvesting policy, wastewater policy, groundwater policy, all talking to
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each other and reinforcing sustainability is the way for government to think and work
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At a policy level, that's already happening.
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We need more better implementation.
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What would you say are the bottlenecks here?
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Like, is it the government sort of seeing the light or is it a matter of state capacity
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or is it a matter of communication?
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It's again that cities need what is called integrated urban water management institutions,
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an institution which looks at water holistically.
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Classic example is Jakur Lake.
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Now, if you go to the lake, the lake is with the BDA, the Bangalore Development Authority,
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which it's handed over to the Bangalore Mahanagar Palike.
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The fishes in the lake belong to the fisheries department.
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The recharge that the lake water does is monitored by the Mines and Geology Department in the
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So these are like separate silos which...
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The wastewater which comes in is managed by the Bangalore Water Supply and Storage Board.
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The rainwater which comes in is with the Mahanagar Palike.
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You take any one of this institution to the lake and they're like the six blind men of
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Hindustan, they just see their point of view and then they come back.
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Now unless we get these institutions to sit together on one plan of action and management,
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Now residence associations are doing the convergence.
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They sit, they identify a problem.
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Okay, solid waste is coming in, I go to the BBMP and fix it.
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Medical waste is coming in, I go to the State Pollution Control Board and make sure that
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But that citizen action cannot be long-term and sustainable.
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Our institutions have to, like I said, reimagine themselves and come together on this common
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It's possible, it's a long road, it's a harder road.
#
It's not a technical solution, it's an institutional and governance solutions.
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We need that kind of capacities to come together, to reformulate our institutions and governance
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policies to make it happen.
#
So when you spoke about sort of the institutional architecture being of the 20th century instead
#
of the 21st century, what you're referring to is that the same thing, that they all work
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And now we need to recognize the problem and bring it under one authority, which can then,
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you know, take these decisions and get it done.
#
That's one part of the problem.
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The 20th century architecture of institutions was one of supply management.
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The resource was available in plenty.
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You needed engineering skill sets to pump water from a large distance.
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The Bangalore Water Supply Surge Board, set up in 1964, was the first water utility set
#
And its biggest achievement was that it brought water from the Kaveri River in 1972, which
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is 100 kilometers away and 300 meters below the city.
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Huge engineering challenge.
#
Now the resource itself is running out.
#
But what this institution is geared for is to pump water to the city.
#
So its next imagination is to bring water from the Sharavati River, which is 340 kilometers
#
Whereas what it perhaps needs to do is to look at the ecological resource available within
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the city, like rainwater, wastewater, groundwater, and manage it.
#
But there is not a single hydrogeologist in the institution.
#
There's not a single hydrologist.
#
There's not a single ecologist.
#
How can that hockey team play football, which is what is being asked of them?
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That's a brilliant articulation.
#
And like you just pointed out, citizen activism has its limits, and you also don't have enlightened
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So what really you need here is, in a sense, political will and governmental will, which
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are slightly separate things.
#
But those are what you need.
#
What are the obstacles to those?
#
Well, actually, the government too is listening.
#
It's not that all politicians are bad.
#
There are quite a few ministers who-
#
Well, the incentives are sort of different.
#
They're geared towards the short-term winning the next elections, more towards handouts
#
and deep fundamental change.
#
The democratic cycle and the ecological cycle of sustainabilities, this one is a five-year
#
cycle, this one is a minimum 20-year cycle, they don't overlap.
#
And the short-termism and suboptimal nature of democracies start to impact it.
#
However, I think we can find a midway by which we commit ourselves to a long-term plan, which
#
is cutting across political frontiers, but then use the democratic cycle for equity and
#
distribution, which is as critical as resource management.
#
The big challenge for our cities is not how much water is coming in, as much as who is
#
Here, the political system can play a major role in making sure that there is equity.
#
So I see a lot of merit, but what we need from civic society groups and activist groups
#
is to be able to understand the weaknesses of the system and address those in a solution
#
mode rather than to keep on harping on problems and highlighting problems.
#
You can keep on saying that Belandur Lake is getting sewage, that it's foaming and
#
frothing, but what is the architecture by which you want to manage it is something that
#
civic and academic institutions, civil society groups have to come together and brainstorm
#
What I've often heard from civil society activists in other fields is that when it comes to dealing
#
with government, you can sort of push for short-term measures and jogars and little
#
fixes here and there, but changing fundamental architecture is much more difficult because
#
of sort of the incentives involved.
#
So I sort of now want to talk about your personal journey.
#
You've been in this for 32 years.
#
You've been sort of an evangelist for reform and all of these.
#
What has that journey been like?
#
What's your struggle been to convince fellow citizens around you of what the problems are
#
and from there, what's your struggle been to actually make fundamental change happen?
#
Well, it's not been struggle, struggle as in where you see it as a sort of despondent
#
I've had great joy and happiness in being able to understand the complexity of the problem
#
and trying to see how individually and as teams, different kinds of teams, we're able
#
to push the solution and develop a bit more.
#
Luckily, 14 years of my initial life in the job sector, I spent with the Housing and Urban
#
Development Corporation, which is the government of India undertaking.
#
So I know how the government thinks.
#
I was lucky enough to do that and that job gave me exposure to many geographies of South
#
India, especially I must have visited every alternate village and almost every town and
#
city as part of that job.
#
So it was a huge learning experience and one learned the strengths of government and the
#
limitations of government.
#
Then once you stepped out, the challenge was how do you work with communities, academic
#
institutions and even the government from a policy influence part of you.
#
So it's important to build a brand around yourself and a thought process that you do.
#
So that has been very important.
#
I think you must be seen as somebody who does not have an agenda, which is political or
#
whatever personality driven, but which seeks to bring positive change to communities, individuals.
#
The response has been fabulous.
#
The choice are from working with well diggers, traditional well diggers, the community who
#
have been digging wells in India for 1200 years now and who have run out of a livelihood
#
because nobody's digging wells, but everybody's digging bore wells.
#
So how do you make sure that they get a job?
#
So in the policy we said in the Rainwater Harvesting Policy, which I was fortunate enough
#
to write with the government was to say, hey, everybody will make a recharge well.
#
So suddenly the livelihood opportunities for these well diggers came up and the well diggers
#
learned a new skill and a new trade.
#
You pick up rainwater and you send it into wells, they didn't know a damn about it.
#
Now many of these wells have water.
#
So there's at least 10,000 open wells in Bangalore with water in it.
#
So people call them again to clean it up every year, which was what they used to do before
#
and deepen it a bit more and make sure that the water quality is improved.
#
So you see that solving a water problem is also engaging with history, livelihoods, its
#
economic benefits, its social benefits, and all these add up to ecological benefits.
#
And when you see that canvas, it motivates you almost on a daily basis because there's
#
something exciting happening.
#
And do you feel you're taking small steps all the time and then that's a sort of getting
#
to somewhere really meaningful or do you sometimes feel there's an impasse and, I mean,
#
Oh, there's old monk for that.
#
But the thing is that the beauty of at least the work that I got on myself was that I was
#
able to engage with one small rainwater harvesting unit, which collects 2,000 liters of rainwater
#
to be able to sit on writing the wastewater policy for Karnataka, rainwater harvesting
#
policy for Karnataka, sitting with the planning commission as one of the subgroup members
#
to be able to address some of those issues.
#
So scale ways of thinking, institutional governance to actually doing that sort of engagement,
#
which really gives you a huge kick.
#
Right, and supposing some of my listeners are listening to this and thinking that, hey,
#
you know, as a concerned citizen, I'd like to do something about this.
#
Now two questions for you on that account.
#
One, can you explain the scale of the problem?
#
What are things like right now?
#
And two, what is it that concerned citizens can do at a practical level immediately?
#
So the scale of the problem is an agglomeration of a million problems.
#
If you take a city like Bangalore and there are 1.8 million households, the city of Bangalore's
#
problems of water is 1.8 million problems, which then agglomerate.
#
So therefore, you can become part of that 1.8 million solutions because you occupy one
#
of those households and one of those homes.
#
The thing to do is to start to understand what water is in your household level itself.
#
And it's not rocket science.
#
If you want to, you can cut down consumption 30%, 40% if intent is there.
#
You need space between the years, you don't need space anywhere else.
#
Second is to look at the rainfall in your apartment, in your building and see what's
#
happening to it and whether it can be put to better use.
#
And one of the better uses is to make sure that it goes and infiltrates into the ground.
#
These are immediate actions.
#
The second set of actions is to reach out at a community or a watershed level.
#
There is a lake within two kilometers of every apartment or house in Bangalore.
#
Step in into the lake on a Sunday, which we try and get what we call friends of lakes
#
Pick up 10 plastic bags from that lake.
#
The next time somebody chucks a plastic bag in that lake and you realize you're going
#
to pick it up, it really makes you mad.
#
So your ownership of the lake is generated by simple small actions and then work with
#
groups to figure out what needs to be done to save the lake.
#
It's not going to be easy, but you'll understand the political ramifications, the challenges
#
which a city has to go through in managing water.
#
And it gives you pretty much a can do kind of a positive moment.
#
And I think we need to work at a lot of these can do's at various scales and engage with
#
your corporator, engage with your MLA, engage with your water utility provider and see how
#
the challenges they think that exist and what can be done by you as a participant.
#
You'll find many solutions.
#
So I'm going to end with, I mean, this has been extremely illuminating and I'm going
#
to end with two questions.
#
One, what makes you despair about the journey that you're on and what can happen to what
#
India's water problems and two, what makes you hopeful?
#
The despair comes from a sort of a binary view that we seem to think that economic development
#
means certain sacrifices and therefore the ecological environment has to degrade.
#
This set of thinking articulated in that river water reaching a sea is a waste.
#
It makes you despair saying how much more literate should we become ecologically and
#
And your point is they can go hand in hand.
#
They absolutely go hand in hand.
#
There is no binary there.
#
They have to coexist together and we have to find, you cannot label people environmentalists
#
or you cannot label people pro market and leave it at that.
#
Both have to talk to each other and reinforce each other and understand each other's problems.
#
But that conversation is not deep enough or not smooth enough in the sense we don't seem
#
to be able to sit and dialogue our way out.
#
That's a cause for despair.
#
The cause for hope is to see the millions of actions, fishermen, well diggers, poor
#
well diggers, everybody who's in some way or the other contributing to make sure that
#
what we have as a society, as a nation stays somewhere reasonably good.
#
So that engagement fascinates me.
#
That's an inspiring note to end on and you know, if you're listening to the show, you
#
don't just have to listen to our journey and say, Hey, that's nice, but you can also be
#
Vishwanath, thanks so much for coming on the show.
#
And the Twitter handle is at Zen Rain Man.
#
I always tweet that at the end of the show, but at Zen Rain Man and he tweets regularly
#
about all of these issues.
#
So please go and check that out.
#
And you know, I really hope you write a book about this someday because all of this has
#
been such a learning for me just, you know, talking to you today and you know, there's
#
such a great narrative of how our woes with water have sort of developed.
#
Thanks for that suggestion.
#
I'm basically too lazy a person to be able to sit together and print words.
#
The communication has to be immediate and absolutely these kinds of conversations that
#
It's a pleasure to talk because then thoughts flow and we can answer questions.
#
And I'd love to have you on the show again sometime.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do follow Vishwanath on Twitter at Zen Rain
#
You can follow me at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
Past episodes of The Scene and The Unseen are available at sceneunseen.in.
#
And hey, two final pieces of advice before I go.
#
Number one, please stay hydrated.
#
Number two, don't waste water.
#
While you figure it out, goodbye till next week.
#
If you enjoyed listening to The Scene and The Unseen, check out another show by IVM
#
podcast, Simplified, which is hosted by my good friends, Naren, Chuck and Sriketh.
#
You can download it on any podcasting network.
#
As you can see, we have a podcast listener in his natural habitat.
#
Millions of years of evolution have led him to this point.
#
He's on his way to work and listening to podcasts makes his miserable day better.
#
He will now head to work and use all his knowledge to communicate with other colleagues and possibly
#
You can find more of his species on ivmpodcasts.com, your one stop destination where you can check
#
out all the coolest Indian podcasts.
