A system in crisis

India's water shortage has developed quite quickly.

Dr Vandana Shiva, a physicist and environmental activist, says the problem is not a lack of water, but how it is managed.

'India has been a land of abundant water, and where the water did not come in abundance, it's been a land which created adequacy,' she says.

But Dr Shiva says this system has been destroyed in the past 20 years, due to rapid industrialisation, without any controls or thought for conservation.

'Every river is today carrying pollution, whether of urban areas or of industry,' she says.

'Major rivers have been dammed, which means they're not flowing downstream, leaving wells that are not getting recharged, leaving regions without irrigation, and the combination of diversion of water and pollution of water has created an extremely serious water scarcity.'

Dr Shiva says 'ecologically devastating' activities have also robbed Indians of their water, including privatisation and the recent mining of groundwater by corporations like Coca Cola.

'It is leaving the rural poor disenfranchised, it is leaving the urban poor disenfranchised, it is not a system that can deliver,' she says.


Problems in Delhi slums

The problems caused by this water shortage are affecting all sections of society in both rural and urban India.

For most of India's well-heeled urban middle class, which is about 300 million people, water only comes two hours per day.

But those worst hit by the shortages are the poor. Life in many Indian slums revolves around the water pump, but water supply is erratic.

Women from a slum in Delhi's diplomatic enclave of Chanaykapuri say they cope by sometimes sending their children off on bikes with empty water cans, in search of a functioning tap.

'We're facing a lot of difficulty here,' one woman says.

'Most days the pump that is meant to pump up drinking water doesn't work,' she says.

'We do get water tankers here that supply water, but we have no idea when they'll show up, if they will show up, and when they do turn up they either don't bring the right water, which is not potable water, or they don't supply to everybody - they come with half a tankload full and it's just not predictable enough.'

A spokeswoman from NGO Oxfam, Bharti Patel, says although slum populations are entitled to free water from the government, they often have to resort to these illegal means to get it.

'What kind of country are we living in, where water is supposed to be a public property, it is a right for everyone, and yet people are saying that they have to be criminals, act as criminals, to access what should be a basic human right?' she asks.

Is privatisation inevitable?

The big question is, are India's state governments capable of managing their water resources, or is privatisation inevitable?

Critics accuse government utilities of mismanagement, waste, leakage, corruption, overstaffing and no accountability. The various water departments themselves agree that there is a desperate need for reform.

The World Bank is spearheading the push for privatisation, and the world's big water companies think they can make profits out of running India's water systems.

But water privatisation around the world does not have a good track record, and most Indian people don't want it to go ahead.

Delhi residents took to the streets in protest in late 2005 when they discovered a World Bank proposal to privatise water in parts of the city of 13 million residents.

The World Bank proposal for Delhi said water could be supplied all day, every day, but at a higher cost than present.

The level of public opposition has made the government put the privatisation plans on hold, at least for the time being.

The World Bank loan has been rejected by the city's water board, Delhi Jal Board, but activists believe it is only a matter of time before the idea is pushed again.

The perils of privatisation

But is privatisation the solution?

The Public Services International Research Unit in London has studied water privatisation around the world in great detail.

The unit's David Hall says while the multinational corporations are mostly withdrawing from developing countries, due to the problems and lack of profits, India is too large a market for them to ignore.

However, he stresses evidence that says the public sector is just as efficient as the private, and is sceptical that the new models of privatisation offer anything promising for India.

'I think what is quite inevitable is the vast majority of them will turn out to be politically and economically expensive failures, and it will simply delay the inevitable lesson that developing water services in Indian cities needs to be done by Indians, and India is economically and professionally more than capable of doing that,' Mr Hall says.

'I think the further attempts to experiment with privatisation in India, is to waste time and delay the time when water services in Indian cities are genuinely extended to all the population.'

No quick fixes

No one has an easy answer to the problem of how to deliver an equitable water system in a country with so much disparity.

Water harvesting is one much-discussed option as a solution to India's water woes.

Many apartment complexes have drains to draw rainwater into underground reservoirs, in an attempt to replenish the water table.

But critics say these attempts are merely cosmetic.

Manu Bhatnagar, a spokesman from India's national heritage organisation, Intach, says large projects are the best way to make a real difference.

He cites the example of a deer park lake in Delhi, in which treated effluent water is pumped in from other parts of the city, as a successful 'macro project'.

'The water table in the area has gone up, there were tube wells which had dried, there were hand pumps which had become dry; they have become active,' he says.

This project, in two years, has put in around 1,500 million cubic metres of water into the aquifer.'

However, urban planning consultant A.K. Menon warns against thinking there is one quick fix to the 'multifaceted' problem.

'The first step is to understand the dimension of the problem, and one of the dimensions is there are no easy answers,' Mr Menon says.

He says there is complacency in the community that technology will solve the problem, but says this is misguided, 'partly because technology is not the answer, also partly because there's human nature involved - we are corrupt, we mismanage.'

'I don't think there are any easy answers - it's many, many small efforts that will have to be done.'

This story takes excerpts from ABC Radio National's Background Briefing program.