https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2021/07/16/op-ed-who-ll-stop-the-rain

It has rained non-stop all this week in my home town of Panjim, the
pocket-sized capital city of India’s smallest state.

Right outside where I live beside the estuary where the Mandovi river meets
the Arabian Sea at Aguada Bay, the landscape is drenched and utterly
dreamy: sky and sea blurring into each other with sublime effect.

This, of course, is the magnificent South West monsoon, the dramatic
weather event that plays out in spectacular style from June to September
each year. It is the basis of our civilization, the backbone of our food
security, and the wellspring of our culture.

Here, we are blessed with an average of just over three metres of annual
rainfall, and almost all of it will come down from the heavens in this
season.

But even as every patch of exposed earth explodes green, and innumerable
rivulets become charged with rainwater to feed the state’s eleven rivers,
there’s the troubling realization that none of it is going to be enough.

This is because by the end of the year many parts of Goa will be right back
into water shortage.

Our situation is already pretty bad, but it’s far more dangerous right
across the border in Maharashtra and Karnataka, where many districts have
suffered drought conditions for several years. These are all facets of the
increasingly grave, interlinked water crisis that threatens the lives and
livelihoods of hundreds of millions of South Asians.

The immediate problem is not the monsoon itself. As multiple scientists
from three countries (led by Steven Clemens of Brown University) describe
in *Remote and local drivers of Pleistocene South Asian summer monsoon
precipitation: A test for future predictions*, their research article
published in *Science* last month, “South Asian precipitation amount and
extreme variability are predicted to increase due to thermodynamic effects
of increased 21st century greenhouse gases.”

Put more simply, the fact of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
will actually result in more and heavier rainfall from the South West
monsoon for the time being, with the caveat that all this increased
precipitation will arrive in more intense bursts of extreme weather.

We can see that this is already happening: each rainy season of the past
five years has been accompanied by devastating storms that have wrought
immense damage in multiple locations (including Goa just weeks ago).

But if it isn’t due to diminished rainfall, how is it that India – and more
broadly, South Asia – still has such an entrenched water crisis?

Like so many other problems in our part of the world, it’s due almost
entirely to incompetence and epic mismanagement by an entire generation of
elites that has wilfully destroyed the age-old water-harvesting systems
that sustained their forbears, while installing unsustainably short-sighted
and rapacious practices that have brought us – perhaps irredeemably – to
the brink of disaster.

This is the story of Mumbai and Bangalore, but also Karachi and Dhaka, and
my once-idyllic Panjim as well: polluted wells, concretized wetlands,
paved-over lakes, encroached rivers and streams, and absurdly inadequate
drainage. When it rains it floods, but the water table still doesn’t get
replenished. All the while borewells go deeper, buildings rise higher, and
urbanization proceeds unstoppably.

It’s a regional issue, but it also has to be acknowledged that no country
in the world has depleted its groundwater more carelessly than India. The
scale of dependence is staggering: each year the country uses more
groundwater than China and the USA combined.

The results from this overuse are wholly predictable. According to the New
Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), nearly 30% of India’s
land mass is currently undergoing desertification (defined as “a type of
land degradation in which a relatively dry land region becomes increasingly
arid, typically losing its bodies of water as well as vegetation and
wildlife”).

Taken as a whole, the CSE’s predictions are absolutely horrifying: 26 of 29
states are experiencing enough desertification to be worried, and 8 of them
already have an emergency because between 40% and 70% of their land mass is
threatened. These are Rajasthan, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra,
Jharkhand, Nagaland, Tripura, and Goa.

Yes, it’s the sorry truth. My famously lush and riparian Goa, with its
three metres of rainfall each and every year, still shows up on this list
of states that are turning to desert. It’s maddening: we waste more than we
use, and both are more than what we receive from the skies.

It’s what Credence Clearwater Revival sang about in 1970, “Long as I
remember the rain been coming down / Clouds of mystery pouring confusion on
the ground / Good men through the ages trying to find the sun / And I
wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?”

John Fogerty didn’t suggest an answer to his question, but we know who the
culprit is.

Reply via email to