The Big Thirst, page 28
The daily wrangle to secure water is corrosive not just to economic development and to health but to the spirit of the Indian people. Water problems become a creeping attack on human dignity, a kind of erosion of the spirit.
The curb where the water tanker pulls up to deliver water before dawn each morning, just outside the slum in the Vasant Kunj neighborhood— that street, and the slum area itself, are tucked amid much better-off neighborhoods, a situation that is quite typical throughout both Delhi and India.
Just a car ride of 120 seconds away—1.5 kilometers, not even a mile— is a hotel called the Grand, an imposing granite edifice hidden behind guarded gates. When you step inside, you are in a dazzling white marble lobby, as big as a ballroom, whisper quiet. The entire back wall of the lobby is a window of floor-to-ceiling glass, and through the glass you can see the hotel’s garden, the central feature of which is a tiered expanse of water stretching back 160 feet, with fountains, waterfalls, and pools. The long pool is lined with palm trees and blazing pink bougainvillea. The pool is purely decorative. Birds have free access to it—flitting along the edges, drinking, bathing, playing in the shallows.7
The contrasts in India are perhaps a little too facile, but this one is hard to ignore. It’s not just that the tourists who stay at the Grand have access to things the people in the Vasant Kunj slums don’t. It is the birds. The birds who live in the garden at the Grand have access to clean water 24/7 in a way that would be a dream for the people of Vasant Kunj, just a two-minute ride away.
THE NAMES OF INDIA’S CITIES today ring with energy and possibility, even for people who’ve never been there: Bangalore and Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai. India is the place where the people are smart, disciplined, hardworking, and ambitious enough to stay up all night (their time) talking to us about our credit card bills, gratefully doing work we ourselves used to do, for pay one-fifth what we wanted to be paid. India is the place our X-rays often get read; it’s the place companies are buying their legal and IT work.
India is China’s partner in the twenty-first century’s great leap forward—India skipped over building the laptop computers and went right to explaining to us how to use them.
In 2008, the Indian economy grew 9 percent. In 2006, 2007, and 2008—three years combined—the U.S. economy grew 8.4 percent. In the midst of the great recession of 2009, the U.S. economy creaked out 1.1 percent growth. The Indian economy slammed along at 7.4 percent.
The transformation from that growth is truly astonishing. Between 1985 and 2005, according to an analysis by McKinsey & Company, India managed to cut the number of truly poor people in the country in half— even as the population grew dramatically. And the remaking of the Indian economy and society has only just begun. McKinsey estimates that between 2005 and 2025, if India sustains its economic growth, more than seventy thousand people a day will move from poverty to middle class, every day for twenty years.8
The evidence is everywhere. In Bangalore, at one point, nine hundred new cars were being sold per day. India has 636 million cell phone subscribers—that’s twice as many cell phone talkers as the United States has people.
And India’s economy isn’t just creating consumers who want cars, cell phones, and good jobs. India is making millionaires and billionaires. On the Forbes 2010 list, two of the five richest people in the world are Indians. And except for the United States, no country has more billionaires in the top fifty than India.9
But India is so large—nearly four times the number of people as in the United States in a country only one-third as big physically—and still so poor that twenty years of soaring development and growth have taken Indians only so far. Forty-four percent of Indian homes have no electricity. Twenty percent of Indian homes use either crop residue or cow dung as their primary cooking fuel. The Census of India measures eight kinds of “fuel used for cooking,” and “cow dung cakes” is the fourth most common.10
And in some ways most stunning of all, 39 percent of Indian adults cannot read or write, with the burden falling most heavily on women. Fifty-two percent of India’s adult women are illiterate—more than 200 million Indian women who can neither read nor write.11
Some of that deprivation is simply a function of the fact that India remains largely rural—three-quarters of Indians live outside urban areas. Economic modernization spreads out to the countryside much more slowly than it energizes the cities.
The contrast between the ambitious, media-savvy, high-tech India and the impoverished India is nowhere more dramatic than in the world of water.
In September 2009, in a discovery that changed forever the way humans will look at the Moon, NASA announced that its scientists had discovered water on the Moon’s surface—a thousand pounds of dusty Moon rock would yield two eight-ounce glasses of water.
In March 2010, NASA announced an even bigger discovery of water on the Moon: Instruments scanning forty craters at the Moon’s north pole had found ice, lots of it. Each crater contains iceberg-size quantities of ice—660 million tons in just the craters examined.12
It was, in fact, India’s space program that made possible the discovery of huge quantities of water on the Moon. The NASA instruments that found the water rode to the Moon on Chandrayaan-1, India’s first Moon-bound spacecraft, designed, built, and launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). Although India’s instruments didn’t discover the water, the Indian press overflowed with pride:
The Times of India: “One Big Step for India, Giant Leap for Mankind.”
The Hindustan Times: “Water on Moon Is India’s Discovery, Says ISRO Chief.”13
Nothing quite captures the dichotomy of modern Indian society like India’s twenty-first-century spacecraft finding water on the Moon. The Indian scientists and engineers who created Chandrayaan, at ISRO headquarters in Bangalore, don’t themselves have running water at home. Officially, municipal water service is provided in Bangalore just 4.5 hours a day.
None of India’s global brand-name cities—Mumbai or Hyderabad or Delhi—does any better. Quite the contrary, the water service in India’s great cities is nothing short of primitive, and getting worse.
In Delhi, most homes receive water just an hour or ninety minutes a day.
In Mumbai, that’s the goal—an hour or ninety minutes a day. Many people receive water only every other day.
In Hyderabad, some areas have water four hours a day, some two hours, and some people get just ninety minutes every other day.14
Thames Water, the water utility for metropolitan London, is one of the companies that have outsourced many critical IT functions to India. Thames Water uses Wipro, the renowned Indian technology provider based in Bangalore, with 100,000 employees. So the biggest water utility in Britain, where uninterrupted water service is the unquestioned basic, gets its IT from people in India who don’t themselves have water service most of the day.15
Indians have adapted to human-created water scarcity, but that doesn’t mean they’ve lost sight of either the frustrations or the ironies. No less a body than the Indian Supreme Court, in an April 2009 order, demanded that the Indian central government immediately tackle the nation’s water problem “on a war footing.”
The justices, despairing of what they described as “serpentine queues of exhausted housewives waiting for hours to fill their buckets of water,” ordered the immediate establishment of a scientific panel to, within months, come up with solutions to a whole range of Indian water problems that took half a century to develop.
The Supreme Court’s order was more an expression of official vexation than it was a practical effort to provide water. “It is indeed sad,” the Court wrote, “that a country like India, which scientifically solved the problem of town planning … during the Indus Valley Civilization and which discovered the decimal system in mathematics and plastic surgery in medicine in ancient times, and is largely managing the Silicon Valley in the USA, has been unable to solve the problem of water shortage till now.”16
Ashok Jaitly, of TERI, is on the panel advising the Supreme Court’s water reform effort. “We were ordered by the Court to find a way of providing everyone in India with safe drinking water in three months.
“Three months! Could anything be more ludicrous?
“I’d be satisfied if we could do it in three hundred years. Well, okay. If we could do it in thirty years.”
FOR WESTERNERS, India combines the familiar and the exotic in a way that camouflages, for a while, how differently Indians think about some things. The newest urban landscapes, for instance, seem on the surface no different from what you’d find in fast-growing parts of the United States. Many of the main highways around Delhi are new and have four or five lanes in each direction, vast flyovers are under construction everywhere, and one of Delhi’s booming suburbs, Gurgaon, is home to large, glassy office buildings with logos from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Convergys, Ericsson, and GE. IBM, Google, and Microsoft all have offices in Gurgaon, which looks like Tysons Corner, Virginia (Gurgaon has the shopping too—it is considered India’s “mall capital”). The zippy pace of urban life has a distinctly hectic vibe. One of India’s cell phone companies uses this tagline in its ads: “Impatience is the new life.” Indians are friendly, many people speak English, and with the infusion of Indian immigrants into U.S. society, India seems closer than ever.17
But Indians think differently about matters both minor and profound. The idea of driving between painted lines in a somewhat predictable fashion is as new as the highways themselves, and there are regular road signs exhorting, “Lane driving is safe driving.” India’s roads are a cacophonous experience that verges on insanity. Drivers talk to each other in a ceaseless conversation, conducted exclusively with the car horn, and every truck in the country has a colorfully painted sign on the back reading in bold letters “HORN PLEASE!” Indians will often shake their heads side to side—the gesture Americans learn from infancy means no—to mean just the opposite. Yes! I agree with you! That’s why I’m shaking my head back and forth!18
America seems to have lost its sense of smell, compared with India. Indians still live amid the aromas of daily life. You can often smell meals cooking, in both cities and villages, and walking around urban areas, you often catch a whiff of what the Indians call “drains”—the open sewers where almost all waste ends up. The animals that Indians live with, in the villages and in the cities, smell like the livestock they are. And in the villages, neat round cakes of cow dung—the size and shape of Frisbees—are everywhere drying in the sun and perfuming the country air. Many places, including taxis, have plug-in air fresheners to muffle the ambient odor. The big luxury hotels actually perfume the air in their lobbies (and burn incense in their public restrooms).
Water is as complicated a cultural element in India as any, and it’s easy to leap to what seem like logical conclusions about Indians and their water, which turn out to be utterly wrongheaded. Several of India’s major rivers are considered holy—they are, in fact, considered to be goddesses, and their water is thought to have great powers of cleansing and redemption. The Ganges (or Ganga), which flows through what many regard as the most sacred city in Hinduism, Varanasi, and the Yamuna, which flows through Delhi, are regarded as the holiest of India’s rivers. They are also among the most polluted rivers in the world. The water in the Ganges and the Yamuna is so fouled with routine city pollution and industrial waste that it is too dirty to be run through American sewage treatment plants— it would have to be cleaned up before the sewage treatment plants could take it. In many places, the rivers are chocolate brown or charcoal black.19
And yet both rivers attract millions of pilgrims who believe that the goddess rivers can, with a simple dip, wash away a lifetime’s sins. Funerals by the thousands are conducted on the banks of the Ganges and the Yamuna, with the remains of the deceased burned and committed to the water.20
How is it possible to worship a river that you also treat as an open sewer? For Westerners, that contradiction is so vivid, it seems unresolvable. A fundamental hypocrisy.
For Indians, the condition of the rivers is terrible, but it isn’t a contradiction.
Praveen Aggrawal is a general manager at Coca-Cola for public affairs and sustainability in India and South Asia. Criticism of Coke’s use of local water supplies in India helped trigger what has become a sustained water consciousness and conservation effort for Coke worldwide. Aggrawal, based in Coke offices in Gurgaon, works every day with water issues. Coke, of course, needs water to make its drinks, and Aggrawal is also part of a group of companies trying to change how Indian businesses approach water issues.
“For us,” Aggrawal says, “water is a bounty given by the gods. You can’t commoditize it. This is a deeply religious and spiritual subject for our population.
“For most people, water is sacred. In most rural homes, in the area where you store the water, you go barefoot—that kind of respect.”
Why wouldn’t that lead to the cleanest rivers in the world, instead of the most toxic?
“Most Indians, the inside of their houses are really clean,” Aggrawal says. “They leave the muck just outside. We have an expression, ‘Shit in public, eat in private.’ Which means, basically, My house is clean—the outside is someone else’s responsibility.”
And so for Indians water that isn’t in their immediate control also doesn’t feel like their responsibility. “How can a factory manager who regards the Yamuna [River] as sacred pipe toxic waste into it? Well, the water leaving the factory with acids and toxins is going to the gods. They’ll be responsible for it. There is no emotional connection there.”
It is a leap that’s hard for Westerners—but for Indians, the very fact that the rivers are goddesses means you can’t hurt them by polluting them. The power of the Yamuna and the Ganges transcends anything a factory’s wastewater pipe can do.
Ashok Jaitly of TERI says that you can’t tackle the problems of water in India without taking account of water’s cultural significance.
“It goes very deep in India, our attitudes about water,” Jaitly says. “It’s so complex. It’s so fascinating. Water and religion, water and music, water and literature, water and spirituality—water is integral to all of those. It has all those connotations, and you have to deal with that as part of the politics of water in India.
“This is a society where people believe if they take one dip in Mother Ganga, they are going straight to heaven. That’s irrational, of course. But people are irrational. Thank goodness.”
The irrationality is layered through how Indians use water, as well as how they treat it.
Farmers in India use 80 percent of the water consumed in the country, but because both water and the electricity necessary to pump the water into farm fields are basically free, farmers have no incentive to be careful about how they use water. Irrigation efficiency—the amount of irrigation water that actually helps grow crops—is between 25 and 35 percent in India. Which means that roughly 70 percent of the water Indian farmers use is wasted. And since farmers account for 80 percent of water use, 56 percent of the water available to the country is wasted.21
India’s big cities—the focus of so much of the country’s entrepreneurial energy and growth—don’t supply water to the people they’ve got now, and millions of new residents each year are pouring into those urban areas. Indians talk more seriously about Delhi running out of water than they do about Delhi getting water service twenty-four hours a day.
Millions of Indians in villages of a thousand or two thousand people— where 70 percent of the country’s people live—rely on water-gathering systems that would have been regarded as primitive in the developed world a hundred years ago. Yet getting water to the villages is harder than it seems, because even small-scale solutions, like compact, solar-powered water purification systems, require the kind of continuous support from someone with technical skill that has proved hard to sustain.
Finally, there is the complexity of Indians’ sometimes conflicted attitudes about water service itself.
One of the interesting things about water is that it is one of those rare areas where the gold standard of service and the basic level of service are the same thing: Water should be provided twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in pipes that keep it clean and safe. In many parts of the world, 24/7 water is the fundamental municipal service.
And many places with more modest resources, and equal challenges, have decided that continuous water service is simply part of being a twenty-first-century city, and have done the work to put 24/7 water in place. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, both have water service 24/7. Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and Kampala, the capital of Uganda, also both have continuous water service.22
In India, which takes such pride in its economic and technological achievements, there is virtually no political support for the idea of 24/7 water. “In fact, when someone says water 24X7,” wrote a senior official of the Delhi Jal Board in 2006, “we laugh it off as an absurdity.”23
Puzzling as it may seem, there is resistance to the very idea of 24/7 water. Wealthy and middle-class people have created a world of artificial 24/7 water that meets their needs; however inconvenient, they are all too familiar with the Indian bureaucracy, and skeptical of what 24/7 water might require. Poor people already spend a huge portion of their time and limited income to get water. For them, promises of 24/7 water simply ring hollow; why spend more for something that seems unlikely to materialize?
The slow deterioration of India’s municipal water systems owes something to an attitude that is a parallel to the attitude about the sacred rivers. The water infrastructure was a given. It was installed under the British Raj, it was the job of the government to provide water, the water itself needed to remain cheap, and the pipes, pumps, and treatment plants would sustain themselves—just as the sacred Ganges and Yamuna absorb their pollution.
As a result, Indian water utilities charge so little for water, and let so much water leak away unbilled (as much as half in Delhi), that they don’t come close to covering the cost of their basic operations—payroll and energy—with revenue from water bills. Customer payments cover only 60 percent of the Delhi Jal Board’s operating costs. With huge operating deficits (covered by their local governments), it’s not surprising that expensive maintenance, upgrading of the systems, and expansion aren’t high priorities for Indian water utilities. India’s cities have grown far faster than their ability to keep up. Streets, highways, and traffic are a nightmarish tangle, and that’s something that everyone suffers through every day. The water infrastructure gets far less attention than the roads under which it is buried.24
