Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[global oneness project]
[The Roots of India's Water Crisis]
Unfortunately, in the last 40 years
the water of India has been so badly abused,
[Vandana Shiva - Dehradun - Environmentalist and Author]
largely with the introduction of non-sustainable technologies
and non-sustainable cultures.
The first assault on India's water came with the Green Revolution,
which led firstly to the damming of the rivers,
which meant death of the rivers downstream after the dam has been put,
and secondly, the excessive mining of groundwater.
And mining of groundwater is now so severe that NASA has shown
that in about 10 years' time we would have groundwater deserts
in the areas of the Green Revolution like Punjab and Haryana,
the northwestern part of India.
More recently with the beginning of globalization,
a lot of resource-intensive, water-intensive, pollution-intensive industry
has been relocated to India.
So if you see India's development part of the last 15 years,
our petrochemical industry is booming,
our steel and aluminum industry is booming,
but that's because it's dying in other parts of the world because of the pollution levels.
Every river today that is serving any of these industries is a dead river.
Groundwater is dying because the percolation of these pollutants and toxins
is absolutely killing the ground.
If you look around Delhi, the River Yamuna, which till 20 years ago flew like a river,
for the 22 kilometers through Delhi it is carrying 70% of the pollution load
of the entire river basin.
And that's because the city's sewage and the industrial waste is being dumped into it.
If you look at what's draining into the Yamuna around the Yamuna,
all you see is either effervescent chemicals--
You don't see water; you just see toxic waste leaking in.
The combination of taking out too much beyond the cycle of the hydrological renewal
and putting in too much pollution has meant that we have lost our water capital.
And India has to be one of the countries with the worst crisis in water,
which ends up being a burden on women
because the majority of women still spend a large part of their time carrying water.
When water gets polluted, they walk further.
When a stream disappears, they walk further.
Up in these mountains we've just completed a survey.
This is where my life began on ecological activism.
The Chipko movement in which women came out to hug the trees,
it was to stop deforestation.
But women were fighting to protect the forests because the forests were the source of water.
At that time, women were fighting because they were walking 1 mile or 2 miles for water.
Today they are walking 10 miles, they are walking 20 miles.
They are waiting for 2 hours to fill 1 little pot of water with the trickle
from the streams having been reduced so dramatically.
That's a combination of intensified drought with climate change and deforestation.
70% of the water sources of these mountains have dried up in the last 10 years
on the basis of our service,
and then you add to it the crisis of climate as it translates into the melting of snows
and the glaciers that feed our perennial rivers.
If you look down 30 to 40 years, I do not think
as many people have ever been affected by a water crisis historically
as will be affected with the water crisis with its multiple causes that India is facing today.
[www.globalonenessproject.org]