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High and dry In Bhopal, India's City of Lakes, , a severe water shortage has turned deadly as residents fight for survival, writes Gethin Chamberlain
July 2009 THE tanker lurches to a halt by the side of the kerb in the Pushpa Nagar slum, water sloshing from the open hatch on the back, and all hell breaks loose. Men scramble up to the hatch, pulling behind them green plastic tubes which they ram inside before passing them down to their wives or mothers waiting on the ground to suck hard on the other end to siphon the water off. At the back of the tanker, women and men jostle for position to shove their plastic containers under the tap; elbows are jammed into faces, the weakest shoved aside, tempers fray. Children dodge between the feet of the adults or crawl beneath the tanker to catch the spillage. The temperature is pushing 37C and it is the first delivery to this slum in the Indian city of Bhopal for two days. The monsoon is late and years of poor rainfall have left the city’s water reserves almost exhausted. Bhopal bills itself as the City of Lakes (it has two large man-made lakes in the heart of the city plus six other smaller lakes) but by the first week of July they have all but dried up; the largest of the two, the 1,000-year-old Upper Lake, has shrunk from 38sq km to a mere 5sq km. The last time it was full was 2005. The government’s meteorological officials try to put on a brave face, claiming it is not yet too late for the rains to come, but the truth is that Bhopal has received little more than a third of the rain it should have by this point and the US agriculture department is warning that the country could face a serious drought unless rain arrives quickly. To make matters worse, there are growing concerns that the monsoon could be further hampered by a developing El Nino weather system. In Pushpa Nagar, the last few drops of water dribble out of the tap. The crowd has filled everything it can lay its hands on; old cooking oil containers are the most popular choice, followed by metal pots, but even old paint tubs are pressed into service. It is all over in less than10 minutes. With the falling water table leaving many of the city’s bore wells dry, at least 100,000 people have become dependent for their water supply on the fleet of tankers which shuttle backwards and forwards across the city carryng 6,000 litres at a time. Fights often break out among those waiting for a delivery and some tankers carry a police escort after desperate residents refused to allow them to continue their rounds until they had disgorged every last drop. In the Durga Dham slum, the tanker stops about 100 metres away from a giant water tower built to provide a supply for a more upmarket area nearby. The door at the foot of the spiral staircase leading to the top of the concrete structure is heavily padlocked to prevent those who live in its shadow getting to the water inside, though the indicator on the side suggests there is precious little left anyway. Chand Miya, the local committee chairman, watches the women as as they work feverishly to drain the tanker. There is simply not enough water to go around, he says. “During the last five or six years it has been raining much less,” he says. “The population has increased, but the water supply is still the same.” Every family needs about 100 litres a days for drinking, cooking and washing, he says, and people have no idea when the tanker will come again. The flooding that inevitably accompanies the arrival of the monsoon may seem to suggest that India’s problem is too much water. Too often, though, the opposite is the case. This year the country experienced its driest June for 83 years Overpopulation and climate change have played their part, with many people abandoning agriculture because of the increasingly erratic rainfall and drifting into the cities to live. That has placed additional pressure on a water supply that was already inadequate. Since last October, the 1.8 million people living in Bhopal were restricted to 30 minutes of water supply every other day in an attempt to eke out the reserves. With the arrival of the monsoon delayed, that became one day in three. Those living in the nearby city of Indore had to manage with half an hour’s supply every seven days. Those with no access to a regular supply grew more and more desperate. As the drought set neighbour against neighbour in a desperate fight for what little water remained, a tragedy became almost inevitable. On May 13, it happened. All the Malviya family wanted, their neighbours say, was a few litres of water to get them through until the next time the supply was turned on. They were to pay for it with their lives. The pipeline running through the slum of Sanjay Nagar had been dry for days. The water in the pipe was not intended for them. Nor was it intended for their killers: the people living there had simply worked out where the pipe ran and dug down until they hit it, determined to get what they regarded as their fair share. a share of what others take for granted. The Malviyas’ neighbours cluster round the hole in the street outside their house. It has been covered with a large red stone. There are other holes outside other houses, into which the residents push rubber pipes when the water starts to flow. It was just after 8pm when the water began to flow, says Sunita Bai, a female relative minding the house. Raju and his parents, Jeevan and Gyarasi, rushed out into the street and started to fill their containers from the hole they had drilled in the pipe where it ran past the blue metal door of their small house. It was not long before the mob arrived. The local tough guy, Dinu, was convinced that they had stuffed a plastic bag into the pipe to stop the water flowing further down the hill, the neighbours say. Dinu had slapped Gyarasi and Raju had tried to stop him. Matters quickly got out of hand. “We were too afraid to do anything,” says one woman, who gives her name as Shanno. “I don’t think they were really trying to block the pipe but Dinu didn’t want them to take any water. He just wanted it for himself.” Harsh words were exchanged, then blows. Someone produced a sword and a few minutes later, the three lay dying in the dirt. Their neighbours waited until the attackers had left, too scared to intervene, then filled their own containers until the water stopped flowing. The Malviyas were a nice family, they said later, but they did not really have much choice: no-one knew when the water would be switched on again. Everyone went back into their houses and locked the doors. A little while later the police arrived and took the bodies away. Everyone stands around, looking down at the hole in the ground. The pipe is dry. “It is a terrible thing, that people should be fighting over water,” Shanno says. The couple had four other children: they have gone to stay with other relatives while the family wrangles over compensation from the authorities. The Malviyas are not the only ones to have lost their lives in India this year for the sake of a few litres of water. In Bhopal alone at least two other people have been killed. At least those whose neighbourhoods are served by tankers know that supplies will come eventually, even if they cannot be sure when. But not everyone in Bhopal gets a tanker delivery. In addition to the city’s 380 registered slums, there are numerous other shanties where people have to fend for themselves. Some, like the Malviyas, tap into the main supply. Others cluster around the ventilation valves for the main pipelines that stick up out of the ground from place to place, trying to catch the small amounts of water leaking out. In the Balveer Nagar slum, a ramshackle collection of buildings rising up a hill above a wide drain, 250 families have no supply at all. The women get up in the middle of the night to walk the 2km to the nearest pumping station, where someone has removed a couple of bricks from the base to allow a steady flow of water to pour out. Below the giant pipe running from the pump house out across a small valley, women wash clothes on the rocks and men in shorts lather themselves before jostling their way forward until they are standing below the cooling stream of water to rinse themselves off. Sumitra Prajati, 29, and 10-year-old Reena Dhani push their way through the crowd to fill up their containers, balance them on their heads and set off back towards the slum. They must make the trip several times every day just to have enough for their most basic of needs. Sometimes the men stop them getting to the water, Reena says, because they want to bathe. Back on the hillside, Reeta Adivaasi, 25, is preparing to set off again to fill up her containers, carrying her four month old daughter Khushi with her. She shuttles backwards and forwards, from 8am to 6pm, trying to keep her family supplied. Each trip takes an hour, she says, and she must make three or four trips every day to get enough water. Reeta: “If someone mends it, we won’t have anywhere else to get our water,” she says. “This is the government’s fault. We go to the corporation’s offices to ask for help, but no-one listens to us. They are not interested.” A few communities have received help from non-governmental organisations. In the Arjun Nagar slum, Water Aid and its local partners have drilled a 115 metre deep bore well, which provides water for 100 families, each paying 40 rupees a month. Until the well was drilled, Shaheen Anjum, a mother of four children, would get up at 2.30am every day to fetch water, wheeling a bicycle with five or six containers strapped to it to the nearest public pipe in the hope of beating the queues. “Often we would get there and the water would not be running. It was so tiring and in the afternoon we would sleep. The children were suffering and getting ill because they had to come too,” she says. “The tankers used to come but there were so many fights that the driver used to run away. The police used to have to come because there was so much fighting. We are lucky that there is water at this depth because in other places they have drilled and there is no water there.” Even with the well, there is not enough water for everything. They still use a nearby pond to wash their clothes, but at least now the women can bathe at home. “Before this we used to have to plan our lives around water,” says Sarabjeet Kaur, one of the younger women standing around the pump. “We could only wash twice in a week and there were often arguments among the family because someone had used all the water. Now the water is here we can decide for ourselves when we wash.” Water Aid is working in 17 of the city’s 380 registered slums, providing water and sanitation. “It’s not just Bhopal. This has been a drought year for many districts.” says Suresh Chandra Jaiswal, the technical officer. “Now it has reached a critical stage. We just don’t know any more how long the water will last.” Fifty year’s ago Bhopal had a population of just 100,000; today it is 1.8 million and rising. In a good year the city might get 1100 mm rain a year between July and September, but last year it was just 700mm. According to the government’s meteorological department, this year’s monsoon was expected to deliver only 93 per cent of the normal rainfall. It is not just the water supply that is affected: one quarter of India’s electricity generation comes from hydro plants and there have been widespread power cuts, with outages of up to 10 hours a day in the capital, Delhi. The government has ambitious plan to divert water to Bhopal from the Narmada river, 70km away, but even then, many are still likely go without. The UN has been warning for several years that water shortages will become one of the most pressing problems on the planet over the coming decades, with as many as 4 billion people estimated to be affected by 2050, according to one UN report. Competition for dwindling water supplies has already raised tensions between a number of countries. India and Pakistan are at odds over water supplies from the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, while there is also friction between China and India over Beijing’s plans to divert the Brahmaputra river. ln 1998 Turkish plans to dam the Euphrates brought it to the brink of war with Syria. With temperatures at the start of July soaring to as high as 49C in some parts of India and dozens of people reported dead from the effects of the heat, Indian scientists have been experimenting with “cloud-seeding” - using chemicals to trigger precipitation - in the hope of finding a way to outwit nature. But the real problem is that India has too many people in places where there is simply not enough water. On the shore of the lake, the true scale of the disaster that has befallen Bhopal is clear. A steady stream of people heads out towards what was once an island, crossing a large expanse of sun-baked black silt that once formed the lake bed. The boat club is struggling - it has dragged the boats down to what is now the shore, but trade is slow. At the pumping station, the inlet pipe sits high and dry about 100 metres from the water’s edge. No water has been pumped since January. The last time the lake was full was 2005, and it has been shrinking ever since. In January, people started to volunteer to help de-silt the lake to increase its storage capacity, but the problem of too little water remains A few men are working to dig a deeper channel so that when the monsoon comes, they might have a chance of diverting some of the water into the plant. Anwar Khan watches them digging half-heartedly. He has worked there since 1972: it has never been this bad before, he says. He gestures to the railings on top of the wall that rises six metres above the dried up lake bed. “The water used to come up to here,” he says. “Until February it still reached the bottom of the wall. Look at it now.” The water treatment plant at the end of the lake used to supply 100 per cent of the city’s needs: now it can manage barely 20 per cent. Naramada Prasad, the supervisor, says demand has risen threefold since he started working there in 1983. “There is just not enough water, even if the lake is full,” he says. “Only rain can help. There is no other way out.” Back at the pumping station, Anwar Khan mops his brow as the sun beats down. He looks out towards the lake. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” he says hopelessly. “If there is no rain, there will be no lake. And if there is no lake, then where will we get the water from?”
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Copyright ©2011 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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