From January 15 this year, seven tubewells have been put into operation to pump water into the famed Sukhna lake in Chandigarh. Nearly one crore litres of groundwater, good enough to meet the daily requirement of 14,000 households or 70,000 people, will be drawn out every day. Sukhna lake will pull out groundwater, which is normally required to meet the supply of people living in Chandigarh’s Sectors 19, 20, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30.

Where the Chandigarh administration has gone woefully wrong is to do what it normally expects from the people. It failed miserably in protecting, conserving and managing the catchment regions of the lake which fall in the Shivalik hills.

There can be nothing more maddening. The decision to use tubewells to fill the lake, which has an ornamental value, smacks of a complete disregard to the unfolding crisis in groundwater depletion. More so at a time when the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) points to a four-metre decline in ground water levels in cities like Ludhiana, Delhi, Faridabad, Jaipur and Greater Mumbai. Other cities are hardly any better. The sharp decline has happened in a period of 10 years, between 2002 and 2011.

In most cities and towns, the ruthless exploitation of underground water has already reached critical levels. Take the case of the industrial city of Ludhiana in Punjab. The water table is plummeting at the rate of 1.08 metres every year. A World Bank report had already warned of New Delhi turning into a dust bowl. Gurgaon’s SEZs have been directed to procure water from its own resources. The situation is no different in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and the list is growing. Meeting the ever multiplying needs of water for domestic, industrial and infrastructure consumption requires extracting underground water from deep aquifers or encroaching and siphoning off the water needs of other regions.

With 50 per cent of the country’s population, which means more than 60 crore people, expected to be swarming into urban centres by 2030, the monumental task of providing water to every household besides meeting the daily needs of business and industry has been largely given a miss. The task assumes gigantic proportions, knowing that much of the water resources have been heavily contaminated, and the rivers and rivulets have virtually turned into nallahs. A recent observation of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) acknowledging that not even a drop of Ganga water has been cleaned and that too despite a massive investment speaks volumes of the threat ahead.

Although the prognosis is far from optimistic, I do not think the answer lies in increasing the number of trains carrying water to the deficit areas. An Atlas compiled by the CGWB – called Aquifer Systems of India – provides a countrywide overview and depicts the ground water scenario for each of the 42 major aquifers in the country. While it is known that the demand for ground water for irrigating crops has increased rapidly, often surpassing the sustainable levels of supply, not much emphasis has been laid on designing the cropping pattern to correspond with the availability of water.

The search for water has forced farmers to dig deeper and deeper into aquifers. During the past few decades, most farmers in Punjab, the food bowl, have shifted from centrifugal pumps to deep submersible pumps. With the groundwater levels declining sharply, satellite images from NASA have shown the withdrawals will turn negative in another 5 -7 years. And still, no urgency is demonstrated by agricultural scientists and policy makers to force farmers to opt for less water-consuming crops. Western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and now Madhya Pradesh too are faced with alarming levels of decline.

Irrespective of cities or villages, what the country needs today is a nationwide Paani Bachao campaign. Otherwise, water conflicts will sooner than later turn into a major law and order problem between cities and within cities.

The author is an agricultural policy expert.