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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Oct 03, 2010, 10:30 PM IST
India’s 16-week monsoon period ended last week and the meteorological department has confirmed that we got 102% of normal rainfall. Of course, that overall figure contains both good news and bad: while floods ravaged several states, overflowing lakes that feed cities carry good portents for the future dry months.
However, it would be wise to remember just how bad last year was — the worst drought since 1972 — so that we are not complacent about our relationship with our rain gods.
Much as the monsoon is an integral part of our lives, we need to seriously develop some fail-safe methods to evade its capricious nature. To augment the occasional benevolence, we need our best scientific minds and environmentalists to provide practical and sustainable ways to make best use of the monsoon waters.
There are things we already know — like rooftop rainwater harvesting, preserving green spaces, creating more lakes and ponds, using run-off water and so on. But many of these still lie in the fantasy zone since a good monsoon makes us sanguine and a bad monsoon upends our hopes. We have not managed to do much more than that.
The ambitious plan to link all the rivers of India seems to have run its course. But even if that was untenable in practice, no matter how attractive in theory, it seems that some out-of-the-box thinking is required. In our calculations about weather patterns we have not yet factored in the effects of global warming. Can India, which is almost wholly dependent on a particular weather phenomenon for most of its water needs, afford to do nothing? Must we not look ahead so that we are not desperately found wanting when changes take place?
Two possible areas to look at are appropriate pricing and augmentation of supply — especially in cities. We need to price water higher for those who can afford it, and we need to augment supplies from new sources, including desalination. For city slickers who pay through their noses for tanker supplies, desalination is clearly becoming more economic.
