The disappearing water of Delhi. More serious than you think

New Delhi: In a country where a woman's 'suhaag', her husband, is seen as central to her existence, imagine a song where a woman, driven to desperation, says it's easier to lose him than her precious pitcher of water. This was a song we filmed in Banda, Bundelkhand, 16 years ago, when we travelled to Uttar Pradesh. The water shortage appeared apocalyptic then, even for this under-developed part of India. But since then, Banda's thirst has become starker.

In 1997, the Centre for Science and Environment, published 'Dying Wisdom: The Rise, Fall and Potential of Traditional Water Harvesting Systems'. It beautifully mapped the acumen with which communities across the country once conserved their water resources. At the book's launch, when we interviewed the CSE director at the time, the late Anil Agarwal, he emphasized how urgent the need was for us to revert to our older water-harvesting techniques as well as develop newer ones. The book was widely-read and for a while, it seemed that policy-makers would take note. Yet, 15 years passed before some laws were put into place to make rainwater harvesting mandatory. The Delhi government, for instance, constantly reiterates its commitment to do rainwater harvesting but when we set out to do a water profiling of the city, we found a disturbing mismatch between intention and reality.

Dhiraj Ahuja runs a company called Delhi Tubewells Limited. In 1994 when his company dug a tubewell for a house they had to go down approximately 60 feet to get water. By 2011, for the same home, they had to go as deep as 250 feet to hit water. "In some places we only had to dig 30 feet and we would hit water, today when we are called to bore wells, even after going down 300 feet we don't get any water." It's a candid confession from a man who has profited greatly from a dangerous water policy which allowed unchecked tubewell-boring for decades.

From the mid-sixties, both the government and home owners have bored their own water supplies, deep into the earth, sucking out Delhi's ground water in massive quantities. "See those are tubewell pipes pulled out of the ground as the wells have dried up,' Dhiraj Ahuja points to piles of dug up borewell pipes, now lying unused and rusting.

Frantic laws are now being formulated to try and reverse the damage. In neighbouring Gurgaon, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has barred the Haryana government and its agencies from allowing any construction till real estate developers commit that they will use water tankers for building their projects. Ground water will be off-limits. The construction lobby has been badly hit by this. According to the Central Groundwater Authority (CGA), Gurgaon was illegally extracting as much as 50 million gallons of water per day - taking out from the ground three times the amount of water it replenished. The CGWA warned that by if this was not stopped Gurgaon would have no groundwater left by 2017. More