| |JULY 20209wastage is reduced. For many farmers, the most high-tech option they have is still building bunds! But as you can see - this is now in the realm of policy-mak-ers and bureaucracy. In other words, it will take time to implement across the country. In developing countries like India, urban population growth is more than twice the rate of overall population growth. Reports say up to 200,000 people migrate from rural India to cit-ies and towns areas every day ­ which means less water/head every single day. So we need to move fast. Below are a few (obvious) things we need to address.PRICING & LEAKAGE I don't have a report on this for India - but the USA wastes 20 billion litres of water every day just from leaks. So for India, it is not unfair to assume that things are as bad or worse - we have water pipelines that thousands of li-tres of water every day that remain unfixed for weeks on end. Many of our pipelines are decades old so there is no point blaming anyone - but we need to prioritize fixing water pipes. It is not just the leakage - when a pipe is bro-ken, it means external contaminants can enter the water supply line - imag-ine a broken pipeline along-side a bro-ken sewage line. Remember, a drop a second is 130 litres a year - so you can imagine the scale. For tankers running across the cit-ies - we already pay a slightly higher price. But city supply does not usually include the total cost of infrastruc-ture, treatment and disposal - that is perhaps why most cities do not have sufficient budgets to maintain and upgrade the supply lines and even set up treatment plants. I might rake up a mini storm here - but we need to charge more for the government to make water supply fair and sustain-able. A lot of countries charge for the water disposal as well - so there is me-tering for both incoming and outgoing water from a house! Installing water meters at the individual home level, across apartment complexes will be a good first step. DECENTRALIZED TREATMENT SYSTEMSAccording to estimates, major Indi-an cities have less than 30% sewage treatment capacity currently. Though most large cities have centralized wastewater treatment systems - they were mostly set up a long time ago and most of them can't process current wastewater volumes. How do we re-duce the load? We can't, till we reduce consumption - but since the urban growth rate is so high, this is not an avenue we can explore. Sewage lines were also set up several years ago and in some cases decades ago, sewage line connections to these centralized recycling plants don't exist - so large sections of society remain uncovered by these treatment plants. Though capital intensive, we need to set up more centralized treatment plants for sure - maybe at ward level. But to reduce the load and improve the efficiency of treatment and filtration - we need to make decentralized recycling systems (at building level) mandatory - they are in some cities like Bangalore, where it is implemented to a large extent. But this needs to be the norm and implementation must be made mandatory for existing buildings as well, even for small towns. So we can reduce consumption, reclaim and reuse whatever we can, and discharge pre-treated water to centralized treatment facilities, so they run more efficiently.RAIN & SURFACE-RUNOFF HARVESTINGWe need to be future-focused - think a century ahead. We need a more sustainable plan. That will not be possible without harvesting rain and surface run-off water and using it to recharge our depleted wells, lakes and aquifers. Simple calculations can be made for projected demand for, say, 2050 and build trenches and tanks to harvest rain-water at building level and community/ward level. If done well, over a few seasons - we will be able to see a dramatic improvement in water table levels. That is the only sustainable way for us to go forward. Yes, we may be generating water out of thin air - but we can't place bets on that just as yet. To summarize, policy-level chang-es to make agricultural irrigation more efficient, invest in distribution infrastructure, decentralized treat-ment systems at building complex levels and rain/surface run-off har-vesting systems along with increased water tariffs to ensure maintenance and technology upgrades for water treatment & distribution are taken into account - will make things better for our future generations. Let our future generation not ask us - humne kahaathanaa? According to World Bank reports, agriculture accounts for 70% of all water withdrawals globally. In India, this is upwards of 80% and a lot of that water is not managed properly, resulting in wastage ­ as high as 60% for some crops
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