As per a recent report by NITI Ayog on groundwater level says 21 Indian cities including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad – will run out of groundwater by 2020, and will affect around 100 million people overall.
The report stated that about 40 per cent of India’s population will have no access to drinking water by the year 2030. Three rivers, four water bodies, five wetlands and six forests have completely dried in Chennai recently despite having better water resources and rains than any other metro cities, the report said. The water crisis in Chennai has raised an alarm for the metro cities for the conservation of water.
“The government is depending upon the desalination in Chennai which is very expensive also however they forget that the earth is a limited planet and oceans will dry. What will we leave for our children and grandchildren? We may have a lot of money but we cannot ask our children to drink money instead of water. Using ocean water and desalination is not the solution but water harvesting is” said former director of National Water Academy professor Manohar Khushalani.
“It is a collective responsibility of the government and people of the country to save water and contribute to increasing the groundwater levels,” he added.
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“It is not very difficult and expensive to harvest rainwater. One can easily do it commonly in group housing societies or individually. We will just have to make our heart little bigger and more responsible to be thinking about our next generation,” the professor told ANI.
Measures can be taken by people like making a rainwater harvesting which helps save water.
“I made this water harvesting structure in 2003 when my sixty feet deep tube well dried up. I decided to put all the rainwater collected on my terrace into it. There are two conditions in doing rainwater harvesting. Number one, first rainwater should not go into it, secondly filtered water should go into the ground otherwise it will contaminate the groundwater. The rainwater which is collected on my terrace flows through a pipe which is connected to the bore. After sixty feet, the soil filters the water by itself. The water which falls from the terrace or from height should be harvested but not the water on the roads during rains because it carries lots of dirt with it which may lead to groundwater contamination,” he said.
Khushalani further suggested that the regions which are facing drought should not do farming of sugarcane as it absorbs a lot of groundwater. “By becoming aware today we can avert the danger tomorrow,” he concluded.
(with inputs from ANI)