No water down under!-Action need to be taken now before we drain the earth.

By Meghna Lal/ India Syndicate,

20/07/2010

No water down under!

The speed at which the water tables in urban and rural areas are depleting is alarming. Action need to be taken now before we drain the earth.



Simple steps taken by us like cautious water usage may actually be able to reduce the over extraction of water.

India's 'millennium city' is headed for a severe water crisis. Famous for its glass and concrete skyline and home to the who's who of the corporate world, Gurgaon's underground water table is fast declining. A study by the Gurgaon administration states that excessive drawing of groundwater has led to the water table receding a frightening six metres in the last two years.


Environmentalists monitoring the depleting aqua-table, predict a scenario where Gurgaon could go the way of Fatehpur Sikri - Akbar's grand city, which was abandoned because of water scarcity.

And urban cities are not the only ones facing this problem. In Bilari, an agricultural town in western UP, Hom Singh who grows sugarcane and wheat laments about the reducing water table. "Till the early 90s, water was available at 20-30 feet below ground level for irrigation. But things have changed in the last 10 years. Now you have to go down to 40-60 feet to get water for bore-wells," he says. "There have even been instances of 'missed borings' where we dug and dug but no water came and then we went and dug somewhere else."


Groundwater normally replenished itself with rainfall and till recently it had been considered a dependable source of uncontaminated water. But the increased paving over land has forced rainfall to flow into the drainage system rather than seeping back underground. There has also been a radical increase in water extraction. The number of wells drilled for irrigation have indiscriminately increased and so has the demand for domestic and industrial need for water.

So when demand is more than the supply, a crisis is inevitable. But the good thing about Mother Nature is that nothing is permanent. If there is a problem, there is also a solution.

Artificial recharge is a very common process to replenish groundwater. One example of artificial recharge is the use of "reclaimed municipal wastewater" through infiltration basins or direct injection.

Reclaimed municipal wastewater is surface water that is not drinkable. But this water needs to go through a certain number of pretreatment steps before the water can be introduced to the groundwater to prevent contamination of ground water.


Some other examples of artificial recharge are water traps, cutwaters, drainage wells, septic tanks and effluent disposal wells, and sinkhole injection of excess surface flows.

But the most natural way it to allow plenty of green spaces and green corridors in urban areas which will allow for the rain to seep back into the ground. And simple steps taken by us like cautious water usage may actually be able to reduce the over extraction of water.