Wash your clothes, or flush the toilet? Until last month, Ranjana Sharma had never considered the question. Then she arrived home one night to find her sister filling buckets.

The hot season has occasionally caused brief water shortages in Shimla, the former summer capital of the British Raj. But for an unprecedented 15 days in May and June, most taps in the Indian Himalayan town ran completely dry.

Public toilets were padlocked; families used disposable cutlery and threw it away; water trucks rolled in offering to fill tanks – at a steep mark-up; and people queued for hours to receive two buckets from a government supply.

Most schools were shut, but not the one where Sharma works as a child psychologist. It stayed open but advised students not to flush the toilets. “I tried to avoid the bathrooms as much as possible,” she says.

She chose to keep flushing her own. “I haven’t washed my clothes in weeks.”

India is undergoing the worst water crisis in its history, a government thinktank announced last week. About 600 million Indians face “high to extreme water stress” and about 200,000 die each year because they can’t get a clean supply.

People queue to collect drinking water in buckets from a truck in Shimla. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

And the situation is getting worse. By 2030, water availability will be half what India needs. The thinktank quoted predictions that up to 6% of GDP could be lost to extreme water scarcity. Put another way, millions of Indians could be too thirsty, or sickened by contaminated water, to study, work or live.

Signs of crisis are already apparent. While wealthier residents of major cities such as Delhi still drink from reliable supplies cleansed by home filters, in a northern Delhi slum in March, a father and son were killed in a brawl over a water tanker – the first reported deaths in the capital from a water dispute.

An estimated 21 major cities could exhaust their groundwater supplies within two years, government advisors believe. Several smaller cities have said they also are teetering on the edge. In the past month, Shimla, in the hills of Himachal Pradesh, has emerged as the frontline of the emergency.

Officials in the city have blamed an 82% shortfall in winter rain and snow. “There is climate change all over India and the world,” says Jai Ram Thakur, the Himachal Pradesh chief minister.

Others say Shimla is an example of how negligence can create a water crisis, one they warn will be repeated in cities and villages across India.

‘The problem is not a lack of water. It is a lack of vision’

Hours after he was sworn in as the mayor of Shimla in 2012, Sanjay Chauhan asked to visit the Giri river, one of six major sources of the city’s water supply. The Giri was supposed to be supplying the city with 20m litres of water each day. Shimla was receiving just 12m.



“It looked like no council officers had visited the place in years,” he says.

An Indian woman fills buckets in Shimla Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

Heavy vegetation had formed around the pipes, which were gushing water into the surrounding soil. “In a one kilometre stretch, almost 60% was being leaked out,” says Chauhan, who lost office last year. “Not like a fountain, like a waterfall.”

On paper, Shimla should receive about 55m litres of water each day. In practice, 22m litres – enough to fill nearly 10 Olympic swimming pools – seeps out of the system each day.

The loss rate across India is even worse: researchers estimate 50% of the country’s usable water leaks from pipes or is wasted, especially by farmers, nearly all of whom irrigate their fields in the most inefficient way possible, simply flooding crops with vast quantities of water.

The British established Shimla on seven cedar-studded hills in 1851. They foresaw a maximum population of 16,000 people. Last year, more than 18 million tourists visited the city.

Successive governments have done little to stem the flow of new residents and visitors, and looked the other way as hundreds of hotels illegally sprung up to house them. “It was a boom,” says Shimla-based environmental lawyer Deven Khanna.

“Whoever had land, built a hotel. Even some who didn’t have land just cut down trees and without sanction made a building.”

Officials estimated there are 25,000 illegal buildings in Himachal Pradesh, many of them in Shimla. The surge has overwhelmed the city’s stocks of rain and snowfall, and wiped out nearly 70% of its groundwater.





“Himachal has enough water,” says Khanna. “We have rivers, glaciers. The problem is not a lack of water. It is a lack of vision and will from the government.”

This approach is not unique to Shimla. “All over India, we have an anarchic situation in water management,” says Himanshu Thakkar, the coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, a network of advocacy groups.

He compares Shimla to Cape Town, the South African city that narrowly avoided running out of water this year after officials raised warnings and citizens restricted their use. “Once they predicted that water would run out, action followed,” Thakkar says. “In India, you would never even get a prediction. The water would just go.”

Officials in Shimla maintain the crisis was exaggerated. “Within four or five days, the situation was back to normal,” says Thakur, the chief minister.



Yet every resident the Guardian met on the city’s main promenade disagreed. A salesman, Ritaram Sham, said the community tap he and his neighbours rely on ran dry one morning in May. “It has been off for the last month,” he says.



Ritaram Sham, a salesman in Shimla, India, who in says the community tap he and his neighbours rely on has been dry since May Photograph: Michael Safi/The Guardian

Naresh Kumar left Shimla for his village after the tap stopped working for nine days. “Washing clothes, taking baths, they became privileges,” he says.

Chauhan, the former mayor, is not surprised by the discrepancy between the views of officials and ordinary citizens. In India, he says, water is power. “No minister was standing in the line for the water tankers,” he says. “It was only the poor, the working class, the small shopkeepers.”

Without effective plans to manage dwindling supplies, future water crises will likely play out the same way.

“That’s what the powerful people want,” says Thakkar, the water rights advocate. “They are in a position to pull the strings they need to. The weaker people have no strings to pull.”

Additional reporting by Madan Lal