Is the water scarcity manmade or natural?
By Ashish Moharle
In this piece of writing, I largely emphasize the drinking water scarcity in Maharastra’s Marathwada and Vidharbha region which is the worst hit by the drought in the state. Even after the implementation of several schemes and execution of projects by the government as well as private organizations the problem is unresolved. Therefore, I will try to explain briefly considering aspects such as why the problem still exists and how it can be addressed.
The “Jayakwadi Dam” which is one of the biggest dams in the state and considered as a lifeline to the Marathwada region faces lower water storage problem with less than 45% every year during the months of February and March. As state water resources department said this happened because the entire region received an average of 28.81% of monsoon rainfall which is again the lowest in the state. The same kind of problem is faced by the dams in the Vidarbha region also, the Amravati and Nagpur, both the administrative division of the region had just above 50% water storage in the same time period. At the same time, they said that the use of water from the same dam towards industries has been increasing rapidly with approximately 10% every year, as well as the use of the water for irrigation has also increased. All these issues aggravated the water crises in the region and to mitigate this problem the government has provided 6290 tankers to supply the drinking water for over 4920 villages and nearly 10506 hamlets. These numbers have been increasing over the years for example in the year 2016, only 5923 tankers were used to supply the water to 4768 villages and 7622 hamlets, and these trends go up every year. As a result of all these 151 tehsils faced the severe drought out of 358 in the year 2018 and it was continued more or less the same in the year 2019 as well. Off the record, the government officials said that the ministry of water resources and irrigation somehow manages to provide this much of tankers every year but they couldn’t find the long-term solution. The reason behind that is the economic capacity of the tanker business.
From the government record, every tanker can supply 10000-liter of water per trip and the government paid them Rs. 0.40 paise per liter for transportation. This seems to be very low but as per the total calculation of transportation of water per day, it is very high because the entire tanker mafia has transported 6.29 crore liter water/day and that becomes a high-profit business. The most interesting thing is, many of the tanker owners are associated with party politics and that’s why they haven’t come up with the long-run solution for the problem.
But there are some rays of hope by the “Pani Foundation” and other NGO’s as they tried to make these villages self-reliant considering their needs of water such as water reservoirs, check dams, rainwater harvesting, and other ways. This initiative creates a huge impact on people’s lives who are initially affected by the problem of water scarcity in the same region but, such kinds of solutions supposed to provide by the state where they have failed intentionally or unintentionally. This issue of water scarcity not only affected humans but also to the wildlife, farmers and their livestock. This again forced the government to build a green fodder shelter for the animal and that became an unnecessary burden to the state. This entire water scarcity issue can be resolved if the state leads the initiative for the long-run as NGOs are trying to do and most of the suffering of the whole population can be reduced.
References:
1] Wadke, R. (2019). Maharashtra’s water scarcity hits a crisis level. Business line (pp. 1–1). The Hindu. https://doi.org/May 31, 2019.
2] PTI (2018). 17 Maharashtra districts under threat of water scarcity. The Economic Times http:/doi.org/Sep 19,2018.
