Deteriorating Conditions Of Drinking Water In India Today

By Author: Anuj Singh
Total Articles: 32
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With varied conditions, Indian households today are struggling for drinking water. In Madurai, for instance, the drinking water supply has been reduced to once every four days as of February 2014. The state of water supply is similar in most major cities of India during the summer. Hardly any civic or political body is addressing “the elephant in the room”, though. The bottom line is that we need to learn how to save water. The state of water conservation in India is shocking. Most of us don’t know about it, though. With huge amounts of water wastage, India is reaching an all-time-low on water availability.

But why do we have such a water crisis?
As the National Bureau of Asian Research suggests, there are mainly three reasons for shortage of drinking water in India. The first reason accounts for 99% of all problems in India – Population. The total amount of water available in India is estimated to be around 1,200 billion cubic meters. This is not enough for our estimated population of 1.2 billion (population of India as per 2011 census). If distributed equally, it will amount to 1700 cubic meter water ...
... to every person. This is significantly lower than the USA, which has 8000 cubic meter water per person.

Secondly, our rivers are not well maintained. Most rivers in India do not have water clean enough to drink. Some, in fact, are too polluted to even consider bathing in! Levels of water pollution in India today are rising to new highs. All the governmental resources put together are not enough to tackle the water pollution onslaught being faced by the rivers of India.

Thirdly, the groundwater supply in India is reducing over time. The over-extraction by farmers is mainly due to lack of irrigation in India. India is extracting more groundwater supply than the United States. This is an astonishing fact that affects health of our agriculturally cultivable land significantly. This basically means that the number of people consuming water is growing without any healthy maintenance of existing fresh water resources in India.

What do we do about it?
Today, knowledge and action are the initial weapons of attack. We need to employ easy and effective water conservation techniques in India. We need to save water and spread information about these techniques to improve our response in this situation of distress. Projects such as watershed development and usage of hard water for drinking after water purification process are both easy and efficient ways of water conservation.

Anuj Singh works as a water conservation specialist. Also Anuj, being a nature lover, he knows the importance of water and shares information on water conservation in India. He spreads the awareness of saving water by using water conservation techniques.