India’s worsening water crisis threatens to curtail food production while taking an increasingly heavy toll on the country’s economics.
Keeping this in mind, a worried minister of rural development Jairam Ramesh is planning to take stringent measures to regulate the over extraction of ground water for purposes of agriculture and industry especially since groundwater sources are “expected to dry up due to unregulated extraction”.
Mr Ramesh, who has been given additional charge of drinking water and sanitation after Gurudas Kamat, refused to take charge and warned that this was a serious issue as 80 per cent of rural India is depended on groundwater for drinking water.
While the goal of the National Drinking Water Mission is to provide safe drinking water for every rural Indian, this is becoming increasingly untenable with drinking water supplies being contaminated by chemical contaminants like arsenic and fluoride and also with large amounts of untreated industrial effluents and sewage.
A recently released report of the Asian Development Bank has warned that both India and China need to become conscious of the scarcity value of accessible freshwater and how to manage this efficiently.
The report also faulted weak enforcement of laws for the degradation of Asian water quality warning that this despoliation of its freshwater resources will have disastrous consequences for ecological balance and environmental sustainability.
Water shortage will have the greatest impact on food production and investment in the energy sector. Nasa scientists had used satellite data collected between 2002 and 2008 to warn that ground water levels in the north western states of India were dropping by four centimetres a year because of massive extraction for irrigation purposes.