Looking For Common Remedies
To A Rabid MalaiseBy Jawed Naqvi
19 June, 2007
Countercurrents.orgA couple of weeks ago an Indian TV channel showed men, women and children somewhere in the country drinking water from an open gutter because they believed it was a foolproof prevention against rabies.
The gut wrenching sight of a father lovingly scooping up brown liquid into a glass, with everything floating in it, and offering it to his young ones revealed a sickening reality for a nation aspiring to become some kind of a superpower.
There could be two or three lessons to draw from this bizarre happening. First, the extremely notional health facilities that exist in most Indian towns and cities have forced people to fend for themselves and, naturally, quacks are having a field day. Second, there is official approval of and systematic apathy towards this absolutely deplorable state of affairs, which includes letting loose rabid dogs on the streets with no one really looking eager to set things right. Third, it was more important for the TV channel to show the disgusting pictures to improve its own TRP ratings rather than to intervene instantly to stop the foul ritual of humans drinking sewage water.
Another grim reality crying out from this apparently popular daily event is that a large number of helpless people are being forced to drink foul water, and they are often unaware of the fatal consequences of doing that. You could safely conclude that people in large parts of India are actually forgetting what clean potable water looks like. In fact, in one of the visits to the site of the Narmada anti-dam demonstrations led by Medha Patkar, a woman protester was carrying a bottle of water to beat the scorching heat. She was surprised when some of the young tribal boys there, evicted from their homes to pave the way for the dam, asked her to explain what she was carrying in the plastic bottle. The boys simply refused to believe that it was water and nothing else. Why would they not believe a friend and sympathiser who had travelled a thousand miles to express her solidarity with them? The explanation was hesitant. One of the tribal boys produced his own version of water, a bottle of brown liquid, and insisted that water was brown and not transparent.
Viewers who missed the India TV report from Lucknow, if I remember right, would be more familiar with the other, some would say uglier, reality of India. They would be more familiar with the images of India's ageing but still charming film star Hema Malini and her daughter Esha exchanging notes in a TV ad on precisely what makes for clean drinking water. The star duo have been promoting a branded device that filters relatively clean water through a process called reverse osmosis or RO. A quick research about the contraption threw up startling facts about the system that is fast becoming a fad among the well-heeled in Indian cities. According to this research, RO units are not only expensive to procure and maintain but they use a lot of water
too.For one they recover only five to 15 per cent of the water entering the system. The remainder is criminally discharged as waste water. Because waste water carries with it the rejected contaminants, methods to recover this water are not considered practical for household systems.
Waste water is typically connected to the house drains and will add to the load on the household septic system apart from squandering away precious quantities of depleting ground water. An RO unit delivering five gallons of treated water per day may discharge 40 to 90 gallons of waste water per day to the septic system. This contraption goes well with the main thrust of India's 15-year old economic reforms, but it doesn't seem to spare a thought for the larger question of conservation. But who cares? Ms. Malini and her product manufacturer are laughing all the way to the bank.
When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh goes to another international summit, say of G8 leaders or some such, to express solidarity with some who claim to be looking for ways to create an agreeable environment from their industrial waste, he should also be able to explain why India has allowed his economic reforms to create monstrous consumers with even more monstrous contraptions, the water-guzzling washing machine being another such. Moreover, it is not uncommon in most of these RO-friendly households to find overhead tanks overflowing relentlessly after callously sucking away water from depleting ground reserves. Here is a selfish, self-obsessed class of Indians who applaud the so-called reforms at CII and FICCI meetings but are least interested in acknowledging the disaster they are collectively and mindlessly leading us to.
India's water woes are not its internal 'domestic' matter alone. Disputes over the scant resource are a feature of its diplomatic engagements with Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and even China. In fact, John Kenneth Galbraith when he was US ambassador to India signalled the fear of a potential water dispute in the resolution of the Kashmir issue as early as 1960s.
In a significant resemblance to the state of play existing today, Galbraith had ruled out a plebiscite in Kashmir and held that "the only hope lies in having a full guarantee of the headwaters of the rivers. Each side should hold on to the mountain territory that it has and there should be some sort of shared responsibility for the valley. I really don't think that a solution on these lines is impossible."
Headwaters disputes are not a peculiarity of India's border states alone. Bang in the heartland of the country, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are all engaged in bitter wrangling over water sharing. The Narmada river that straddles western parts of India across several states has been the focus of mass mobilisation by native people who live or were living along the banks before they were evicted by the mega dam project.
Bold signs of the looming bitter strife are writ large for every one to see. India's burgeoning middle class is "reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed", says Arundhati Roy. "The greed that is being generated and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable."
Fidel Castro, on the other hand, recently calculated that more than three billion people in the world are being condemned to a premature death from hunger and thirst. He quoted Argentina's official Telam news agency as issuing a stark warning: "Within hardly 18 years, nearly two billion people will inhabit countries and regions where water might seem a far away memory. Two thirds of the world population could live in places where the lack of water could bring about social and economic tensions that could lead peoples to go to war over the precious blue gold."
In the course of the last 100 years, water consumption has grown at a pace which is more than twice the population growth rate. According to the World Water Council, the number of persons affected by this serious situation will increase to 3.5 billion by the year 2015. Telam says that many regions on this planet suffer from severe water shortage, where the annual rate of cubic meters per person is less than 500.
"An insufficient amount of the precious fluid necessary to produce foodstuffs, the impaired development of industry, urban areas and tourism, and the emergence of health problems are some of the consequences that derive from water shortage," Castro warned.
He lives a stone's throw away from the United States, where the head of the nation recently announced a mega plan to convert foodstuff into industrial fuel, thus adding the prospects of aggravated misery for an already starving multitude. It is already difficult to say if some of these novel ideas are not more rabid than the street dogs that have sent clusters of clueless Indians looking for desparate remedies.
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