Reading Comprehension Test 17

With shortages mounting across the board for water as they are for energy, it was only inevitable that the Central government would be stirred into starting a Bureau of Water Efficiency (BWE), much like the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) that was launched some years ago. Early reports suggest that the draft norms for various sectors consuming water will be created by the BWE soon. The alarm bells have been ringing for some years now. Water availability per capita in India has fallen from about 5 million liters in the 1950s to 1.3 million liters in 2010- that’s a staggering 75 per cent drop in 50 years. Nearly 60 per cent of India’s aquifers have slumped to critical levels in just the last 15 years. The rate at which bore wells are being plunged in every city with no law to ban such extraction, groundwater tables have depleted alarmingly.

The BEE’s efforts in the last seven years have only been cosmetic. The bureau has looked at efficiency rating systems for white goods in the domestic sector and has not paid attention to the massive consumption of energy in metals manufacture, paper, and textiles. These sectors are very intense in both energy and water consumption. But very little attention has been paid to the water and energy used per ton of steel or cement or aluminum that we buy, and without significant changes in these areas, the overall situation is unlikely to change. Use of water is inextricably interlinked with energy. One does not exist without the other. The BWE should steer clear of the early mistakes of BEE – of focusing on the ‘softer targets’ in the domestic sector. Nearly 80 percent of freshwater is used by agriculture, with industry coming a close second. The domestic sector’s consumption of freshwater is in single digit. So, the BWE’s priority should be to look at measures that will get farmers and industrialists to follow good practices in water use. Water resources have to be made, by law, an indivisible national asset. The protection and withdrawal of this resource, as well as its sustainable development are of general importance and therefore in the public interest. This will mean that individuals and organizations may own land but not water or the other resources that lie below the first 20 meters of the surface of those lands.

Drilling of bore wells into such ‘national assets’ will have to be banned, or at the very least they must be regulated. What would be more sensible for the new water bureau to do would be to look at some of the low-hanging fruits that can be plucked, and pretty quickly, with laws that can emanate from the Centre, without the risk of either dilution or inaction from state administrations. The other tactical approach that the BWE can adopt is to devise a policy that addresses the serious water challenge in industry segments across a swathe of companies: this will be easier than taking on the more disparate domestic sector which hurts the water crisis less than industry.

Implementing a law is more feasible when the concentration is dense and identifiable. As for agriculture, though the country’s water requirement is as high as 80 per cent, the growing of water within the loop in agriculture de-risks the challenge of any perceived deficit. Rice, wheat, sugarcane are crops that need water-logging, which ensures groundwater restoration. Surface water evaporation doesn’t amount to any more than 7-8 per cent and only strengthens precipitation and rainfall. Agriculture and water needs are not quite as much a threat as industry and domestic sectors that account for the rest of the 20 per cent.

The primary challenge in industry and the building sector is that no conscious legal measures have been enacted that stipulate ‘growing your own water’ with measures that will ‘put all water in a loop’ in any residential or commercial building. This involves treating all used water to a grade that it can be ‘up cycled’ for use in flush tanks and for gardens across all our cities with the polluter owning the responsibility for treating and for reuse. The drop in fresh water demand can be dramatic with reuse, and recycling of treated water. Water by itself in industry and the domestic sector, is not as much a challenge as pollution of water. Not enough measures exist yet to ensure that such polluters shift the water back for reuse. If legislation can ensure that water is treated and reused for specific purposes within industry as well as in the domestic sector, this will make all the difference to the crisis on fresh water.

A listing of such correlations of water used by every product that we use in our daily lives will make much better sense than any elaborate rating system from the newly formed BWE. Such sensitization with concerted awareness campaigns that the new Bureau drives will impact the urban consumer more than all the research findings that experts can present. What is important for us is to understand the life cycle impact in a way that we see the connection between a product that we use and the resources it utilizes up to the point where we bring the visible connection to destruction of natural resources of our ecosystems.