https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/water-warnings-from-cape-town-and-karnataka/articleshow/62731398.cms
Later this year, Cape Town in South Africa faces an unthinkable situation. Barring a climactic miracle, this prosperous, famously beautiful coastal city with over four million residents will become the first major urban entity in the world to run out of water. Just this week, the city administration warned of less than 90 days supply remaining in the reservoirs. Three years of severe drought, combined with continuing unchecked usage, has produced a stark and unavoidable deadline. On April 22, fearfully called “Day Zero”, municipal water supply will be turned off for everything but the most essential services, such as hospitals. After that the plan is something out of dystopian science fiction – each individual will have to go to a water distribution centre for a daily ration of 25 litres, with the entire process overseen by armed guards. This is uncharted territory for Cape Town, and the effects of this dramatic event cannot be predicted. No one can anticipate what will happen after Day Zero, when 5000 people start lining up every morning to collect water rations. Probably the city will empty out, as other parts of South Africa have sufficient water resources to support larger numbers of people. Other parts of the world have fared very badly as climate change continues to steeply raise temperatures and alter longstanding weather patterns. Just a few days ago, the veteran foreign correspondent Somini Sengupta wrote in the New York Times, “Nigeria. Syria. Somalia. And now Iran. In each country, in different ways, a water crisis has triggered some combination of civil unrest, mass migration, insurgency, or even civil war. In the era of climate change, their experiences hold lessons for a great many other countries.” That list begins with India, which uses (actually wastes) more groundwater each year than China and the United States combined, adding up to a full quarter of the global total. Since the Green Revolution, the country has relied heavily on its groundwater reserves, which feeds over 60% of irrigated agriculture and almost 90% of domestic water use. This has led to a steady decline in levels, sometimes at the rate of a metre per year. NASA ranks the Indus basin aquifer which feeds much of North India the second most stressed in the world. By 2030, at least 60% of the country’s groundwater resources will be in a critical condition, placing agriculture at risk in several states. These are very high stakes, which is precisely why Karnataka shut itself down earlier this week in protest over the Mhadei water dispute with Goa. Unconvinced with pre-elections political chicanery and bluffing about “reasonable and justified” extra-judicial sharing, pro-Kannada groups enforced a state-wide bandh that extended to bus services between the neighboring states. Whether or not that action is justified, the sentiment is perfectly understandable. It is an expression of desperation. Large parts of the state experienced sustained drought for almost a decade, killing off agriculture and forcing large-scale migration. The situation improved in 2017 thanks to unexpected monsoon bounty, but now everyone in Karnataka knows just how important water can be. That essential lesson has somehow not filtered to Goa yet, despite ample red flags and warning signs. Before a late burst of showers, the last monsoon was running an extremely 25% deficit right into September last year. A few months earlier in the height of summer, state officials registered water levels lower than 50% of capacity in four of the five major reservoirs that supply drinking water to most citizens. The situation mercifully resolved itself, as it has been a decent run of adequate rains for several years for India’s smallest state, but no one can expect that record to continue endlessly in this era of climate change and extreme weather events. As with the other severe problems menacing Goa, water resources are abysmally mismanaged in Goa. Instead of harvesting and conservation on a war footing, there is extraordinary profligacy and absurdly unsustainable practices. Much of the dubiously approved new construction in the state – the Kadamba plateau is a particularly egregious example – is built despite the absence of water resources. These allegedly premium property developments are served by tankers, which very often steal water from already depleted community resources. It might seem manageable today, and perhaps for a little while longer while the going is good, and the state’s many rivers still flow fast from the Ghats to the sea. But as we have seen just this week, from Cape Town to Karnataka, all that can change very fast indeed.