AFP
In India, villages are dying of thirst to make Bombay drink
“The people of Bombay drink our water,” accuses Sunita Pandurang Satgirune, whose village is dying of thirst a hundred kilometers from India’s economic capital. With a heavy pot filled with foul-smelling water on her head, the 35-year-old villager says she spends up to six hours a day, at the height of summer, fetching water. all our days and our lives”, laments Ms. Satgir who has to make “four to six round trips daily” due to lack of direct connection to the water network in the village of Navinwadi. “The inhabitants of Bombay drink our water, but no one, including the government, is not interested in us or our demands”, she further criticizes. The megacity in the west of the country is supplied by an immense infrastructure of reservoirs connected by canals and pipes over a hundred kilometers. According to experts, due to a lack of planning, the network is often not connected to the hundreds of villages in the region and neighboring districts, which therefore depend on traditional wells. meager resources. In the world’s most populous country, with more than 1.4 billion people, water tables are falling, with climate change leading to erratic rainfall and more intense and longer droughts. dry out quickly under extreme heat. This year, temperatures exceeded 45°C. When his well runs dry, Navinwadi has to rely on a government tanker, with an irregular supply, two or three times a week. The water delivered is also untreated: it comes from a river where people wash and where animals wander. Deputy village head Rupali Bhaskar Sadgir, 26, says residents often get sick because of the water. “For years we have been asking governments to ensure that the water available in dams also reaches us,” she says, but the situation “is only getting worse.” The region’s huge reservoirs provide around 60 % of water in Bombay, according to local authorities. Government authorities, both at the state level and in New Delhi, say they are determined to tackle the problem and have repeatedly announced programs to address the water crisis. However, for the moment “nothing has changed” for the villagers, Sunita Pandurang still protests. The think tank NITI Aayog, led by the government, predicts a “sudden drop of around 40% in the availability of “fresh water by 2030”, in a report published in July 2023. It also warns of “worsening water shortages, depletion of groundwater and deterioration of the quality of resources”. – “Unsustainable rate” – Groundwater resources “are being depleted at an unsustainable rate”, adds the report, specifying that they represent around 40% of total water reserves. According to Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, an organization campaigning for the right to water, this story is being repeated “all over the country”. “While projects are planned and justified for drought-prone regions and their inhabitants, most of them end up only supplying urban areas and industries that are far away,” he laments. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a program to provide running water to every home in 2019. In Navinwadi, however, residents have resigned themselves to living with a severely rationed supply. When the tanker arrives, dozens of women and children run out with pots, pans and buckets. Santosh Trambakh Dhonner, a 50-year-old worker, joins the stampede because “the more hands, the more water at home.” “We don’t live with big ambitions,” explains Ganesh Waghe, a young resident of Naviwadi. “We just dream of having water the next morning.”bb-pjm/juf-chv/oaa
