The unsustainability of Centralised Used Water Management

 The rage these days among urban planners in India with regard to used water management is to implement city wide sewerage systems with the collected used water to be treated in Sewage Treatment Plants before release into water bodies. This is without the basic understanding that sewerage systems require water supply at 150 litres per capita per day which is not there even in the large metros in this country let alone in smaller towns. The capex and opex of these centralised systems is huge and beyond the financial capabilities of urban local bodies and so in most cases they are malfunctioning even where they have been implemented at huge costs. In fact the financial and operational sustainability of these centralised systems is now endangered even in the developed countries despite their greater resources. Listed below are the problems that centralised used water management is facing in these countries.

1. Outdated Combined Sewer Systems: Many cities rely on combined systems that carry both stormwater and raw sewage in a single pipe. During heavy rainstorms, the volume exceeds capacity, forcing utilities to trigger raw sewage overflows into water bodies to prevent water logging.
2. Intense Climate Events: More frequent and severe storms driven by climate change overwhelm the systems faster than historical design standards ever anticipated.
3. Aging and Deteriorating Assets: Much of the underground piping, concrete structures, and mechanical pumps have exceeded their intended service lives, suffering from internal corrosion, structural cracks, and root intrusion.
4. Underinvestment and Maintenance Backlogs: Decades of deferred maintenance and tight municipal budgets have left public utilities struggling to inspect, clean, or replace kilometers of hidden underground sewers.
5. Modern Contaminants: Contemporary waste streams include difficult-to-break-down pollutants like microplastics, persistent pharmaceuticals, "flushable" wipes, and high volumes of fats, oils, and greases (FOG) that clog or pass through traditional treatment processes.
6. Huge Operating Costs: Extensive use of energy to both pump the sewage and treat it has pushed up operating costs apart from exacerbating climate change.
Consequently, even in developed countries the stress now is on localised, household and community based circular used water management and reuse using natural solutions which are cheap. However, we here in India are still labouring under a colonial hangover and opting for centralised systems.

The Controversial Upper Siang Hydropower Project

 The Northeast of India only catches media attention when there is unrest there. We already have the ongoing ethnic violence in Manipur and now another flashpoint has arisen in Arunachal Pradesh. The people residing near the River Siang, which later becomes the Brahmaputra, are protesting against a proposed dam on that river because it will displace close to 1.5 lakh people of the Adi tribe and submerge not only their farms, ecological niches and religious sites but also a few major towns along the river.

Even though the proposal to build a dam on the Siang has been there for many decades, it has gained urgency in recent times with the Union Government because China has started building the Medog dam in Tibet on the Yarlung Tsangpo as the Siang is known there. China is taking advantage of the world's deepest canyon in Medog on the river where over a distance of 50 kilometers there is a drop in elevation of over 2000 meters. So a series of cascading dams are being built along this stretch to divert water into steep drops which can be utilised to generate electricity to the tune of 60000 megawatts that will make it the world's largest hydropower project. The topography is such that it is not possible to build a big storage dam on this stretch which is known as the "Great Bend" and so a series of smaller run of the river dams will be built which will return the water to the river after going through the electricity generating turbines.
The Government is saying that to counter the possible effects of massive floods that may arise due to some earthquake related disaster in the Medog dam which is in a highly seismic zone, it is necessary to build a dam on the Siang in India with a large storage capacity of 9 billion cubic meters. For this to be possible the dam height has to be 300 metres or more. A dam of this great height with such a large storage capacity has to be built considerably downstream so that the upper limit of the reservoir is well within the India-China border at village Gelling. That is why the headquarters town of Upper Siang district, Yingkiong, will come under submergence along with 30 other villages and towns and this will completely destroy a large swathe of the homeland of the Adi tribe.
No wonder then that the Adi people are protesting vehemently against this dam. They are faulting the Government on its logic by saying that the total annual flow in the Siang when it enters India is around 30 billion cubic metres mainly from snow melt in Tibet. In fact three times more water flows in the Siang in Arunachal Pradesh after it enters India, mainly from monsoon rains and the floods occur due to this. Moreover, the dams in Medog are run of the river projects with minimal storage so even if they are destroyed by an earthquake there will not be much of a flood downstream. The Adi are saying that it would be better to undertake extensive soil, water and forest conservation work in the Siang basin to counter floods than build this dam.

Pradip Prabhu - An Activist Par Excellence is no more

 Pradip Prabhu passed away at the age of 78 after a long illness on August 25th 2026. Even though I came to know of this sad loss immediately, I was unable due to various other commitments to write then about this phenomenal person who has influenced significantly the history of Adivasi India in the Fifth Schedule Areas in the ten states of Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan. There were two very good obituaries written then https://lnkd.in/dj-cVC22 and https://lnkd.in/dFKsNmWV which describe in detail his life as an activist, policy maker and teacher. I would like to remember him here as an elder and colleague from whom I have learnt a lot.

Born Peter D'Mello in Mumbai he first became a priest. While serving as a priest in Mumbai he came in close contact with the people living in the slums and was attracted to Liberation Theology and Marxism. Finding that his vocation as a priest prevented him from fighting whole heartedly for the rights of the oppressed, he left the church, assumed the name Pradip Prabhu and began working with the Adivasis of Dahanu Taluka of the then Thane district of Maharashtra which is now in the new Palghar district. He set up the Kashtkari Sangathana, organisation of the toiling people, in 1978. This was in line with the earlier setting up of independent Adivasi organisations like the Bhumi Sena also in Palghar and the Shramik Sangathana in Nandurbar district. These organisations relied on both Marxist socio-political analysis and the inherent rebelliousness and simplicity of the Adivasis to forge a new Adivasi politics that broke away from the orthodox Marxist mold.

It became clear by the 1990s that working in isolated niches as small organisations would not be able to fight the larger structural injustices that Adivasis have faced from the British colonial times and which have been replicated by the independent India State. Pradip along with the late Dr B. D. Sharma began a campaign for the setting up of a truly independent Adivasi Self Rule framework which led eventually to the enactment of the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act 1996 which has come to be referred to as a Constitution within the Constitution for Fifth Schedule Adivasi Areas. Later he led another campaign for the grant of rights to forests for Adivasis which resulted in the Forest Rights Act in 2005. Together, these two legislations have gone a long way in establishing the rights to natural resources and self governance of the Adivasis.

Despite his immense activism and scholarship for which he had been invited to teach in prestigious institutions, he remained a very simple person accessible to all, especially the Adivasis for whom he dedicated his life. Rest in peace comrade you will be sorely missed.

Planetary Boundaries Have Been Breached

 A team of scientists created the Planetary Boundaries Framework in 2009 for nine ecological areas which ensure the continuance of life on the planet. Since then this framework has been assessed from time to time and currently, six boundaries, climate change, biosphere integrity (genetic diversity and energy available to ecosystems), land system change, freshwater change (changes across the entire water cycle over land), biogeochemical flows (nutrient cycles), and novel entities (microplastics, endocrine disruptors, and organic pollutants) have been severely breached as shown in the graphic. Only stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading and ocean acidification are within bounds as described in this article in Down To Earth https://www.downtoearth.org.in/.../six-of-9-planetary...

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The main problem at the base of all other problems is excessive fossil fuel energy use. This is what has created the present human over consumption and ecological crises. We need to both rein in energy use and also transition to renewable energy immediately if we are to avert climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, pollution and the like.
The linear resource extractive economy is causing this problem. A local circular economy needs to be prioritised and this will be possible only if all governments strictly apply the polluter pays principle to garner the resources for subsidising the mitigation measures. 

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Revisiting Machla

 Three decades ago Subhadra Khaperde and I came to Indore from Alirajpur to start rights based work in a new area so as to expand the mass base of the organisation. We stayed on the campus of the Gramodyog Vidyalaya of the Sarvodaya Shikshan Samiti in the village Machla situated about 13 kilometres from the city for about two years. At that time we had very little money so we used to live at subsistence levels initially. We used to go around on a bicycle trying to sell copies of a monthly magazine that we used to publish at the time to eke out some funds. Slowly, we started doing consultancies and then landed a project for organising Bhil Adivasi women to fight for their reproductive health and rights and work got under way in the nearby districts of Dewas and Khargone and today the organisation (https://lnkd.in/dV-nhpBz) has a vast spread across the whole of Western Madhya Pradesh working to make the independence gained 77 years ago more meaningful for the masses who still lead a precarious subsistence existence at the margins. So this campus in Machla has a special place in our hearts.

Some of the shootings for the film on our love story, Rah Sangharsh Ki, episode four in the series Lovestoriyaan on Amazon Prime Video (https://lnkd.in/dKbUsT6C), were shot in Machla and so we had an opportunity to visit it again last year and revive those sweet memories. Ravi Uchhe, one of the cinematographers of the film, has shared a lovely photo of us that he took at that time.

The Water Wisdom of the Mughals

Burhanpur town on the banks of the River Tapti in the foothills of the Satpura Range was the southern outpost of the Mughals. Consequently, it had a massive garrison of soldiers numbering two lakhs and a supporting civilian population of around thirty thousand in the early seventeenth century when the Mughals not only wanted to defend their territory against possible incursions from southern kingdoms but also had plans to expand further south. Providing safe drinking water to this huge population was a major concern of the Mughal administrators. They feared that the water of the River Tapti and its tributary Utavali may be poisoned by their enemies and so they preferred the use of ground water. However, wells themselves could not provide enough water and also it was laborious to draw water out of them for such a large population in those days when there were no mechanised pumps.
The Subedar or Governor of Burhanpur Abdul Rahim Khankhana commissioned a Persian geologist Tabukul Arj to devise a system that would be able to harvest the rain water falling on the Satpura ranges and bring them by gravity to the town in 1615. A very ingenious plan was drawn up wherein a few large tanks were constructed to harvest the rain water and recharge it into the ground. Finally a 3.5 km long tunnel about thirty feet below the ground level, lined with marble, was constructed just uphill of the town into which the water from the t Bhandaras seeped in through the ground.
There are 103 round wells that reach this tunnel from the top at intervals and provide access to it for cleaning it of any debris and sediments that might have accumulated. The water in the tunnel flows by gravity from the first well to the last well at the end of which there is a tank from which pipelines take the water to the town below. The wells are called kundis whereas the tunnel is called Khooni Bhandara possibly because of the slightly reddish colour of the water in it.
Currently about 0.15 million litres of water per day flows out of the tunnel.
What struck me most was the ingenuity of the Mughals in devising a system that first tapped the rain water by harvesting it and then used an underground tunnel to extract it and take it by gravity to the town. This was a necessity at the time because there were no mechanised pumps to do lift water from the underground aquifer at that time. This tunnel was dug by human labour obviously as there were no machines then and this adds to the uniqueness of the system. Water harvesting is the most sustainable means of water supply. The Asirgarh fort on a high hill nearby too has excellent water harvesting systems for its water supply.

 

Communitarian Ecosystem Restoration

 Four decades ago in 1983 a few activists from what was then the Social Work and Research Centre and is now the Barefoot College in Tilonia in Rajasthan, came to Alirajpur district in Madhya Pradesh and teamed up with a few Bhil Adivasi activists to form the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS). The mass organisation was set up against heavy odds to fight for socio-economic justice and ecological sustainability in an area which had been devastated by the independent Indian state in pursuit of urban industrial development, making the Adivasis thieves in their own backyard and converting a once proud community into labourers contributing to primitive capitalist accumulation.

Along the way over all these years, the KMCS not only achieved rights to the forests for its Adivasi members but what is even more important it has restored the ecosystem through communitarian collective action. In over 70 villages as much as 13000 hectares of dense forests have been protected and soil and water conservation work has been done in many thousands of hectares. This ecosystem restoration work is of immense importance in the present context when the country is battling the triple crises of climate change, water stress and soil degradation.
This massive communitarian effort has leveraged the traditional labour pooling custom of the Bhils called Dhas and used the political mass strength of the organisation to access MGNREGS funds from time to time. The most crucial factor in saving forests is that the community must have control over their area and be able to regulate natural resource use by preventing both the forest department and outside citizens from exploiting them unsustainably. The members of the KMCS have fought hard to do this and are now masters of their forests.
The best village in this respect is Amba on the banks of the Narmada River where as much as 60% of the land is under forests. Veteran activist of the KMCS, Indersingh, has led this effort in this village along with others. This village is accessible only by foot across steep hills. Yesterday, I relived many earlier trips by accompanying Indersingh to savour the pristine natural beauty of Amba even though the trek proved to be quite strenuous at my advanced age 😊.

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Roof top Solar Electricity Policy Critique

 People are going overboard over the announcement by the Finance Minister in her budget speech that one crore households will be provided with 300 units of free electricity per month through installation of roof top grid connected solar panels. Not only have the media gone ga ga over this announcement but even seasoned climate researchers like Ashish Kothari and Anjal Prakash have publicly praised this on LinkedIn.

Let us do a back of the envelope calculation to see how much truth there is in this grandiose announcement. The average power per day over the year produced from 1 KW of solar panels in India is about 4 units of electricity at the best given the lower output due to fog in winter and extensive cloud cover during monsoons. Thus, to provide 300 units of electricity per month or 10 units per day to a household through rooftop solar panels, a plant of 2.5 KW capacity will have to be installed. The overall cost of this including Tier 1 quality panels, supporting structure, cables, inverter and meters will be Rs 2.5 lakhs. Therefore, to provide one crore households with free rooftop solar electricity of 300 units per month the investment required is Rs 2.5 lakh crores. Whereas the provision in the budget is only Rs 10,000 crores overall solar installation not just roof top. The claim made in the budget is thus blatantly false as even if we assume that all of this paltry allocation is for roof top solar, the number of households covered will be only 4 lakh at the best!!

More on Farmer's Income

 Here is an analysis of some more results from the Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India in 2019 (https://lnkd.in/drkF7wDz) conducted by The National Statistical Office (NSO) of the Government of India.

I have taken the monthly crop income data from this report for each state, adjusted it for inflation to get the 2022-23 income and divided it by the monthly household consumption expenditure (HCE) data for 2022-23 recently released by the NSO (https://lnkd.in/dW4xkjh2). I have also estimated the composite proportion of total output that was sold at the minimum support price for each state from the first report. The results are shown in the graph below.
Overall for the country only 18.4% of the household consumption expenditure for farmers is met by their crop income and they have to perforce rely on wage labour, animal husbandry and other non-farm incomes to make ends meet. Interestingly overall for the country only 17.9% of the farm output is sold at the Minimum Support Price and the rest is sold in the open market. Therefore, the argument that doing away with the MSP and promoting open market sale of crops will improve farm incomes is not supported by this data since even after 82.1% of such sale the crop income to HCE ratio is still a dismal 18.4%.
Statewise the best ratio of crop income to HCE is for Meghalaya at 107.9% and among the major states it is the highest for Punjab at 41.8%. The proportion of output sold at MSP is highest for Kerala at 78.2% and it is zero for Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Assam.
Combined with the fact that the average operational holding size is 0.833 hectares and that 89% are small and marginal farmers with an average outstanding debt per hectare of Rs 75000 these results paint a very sordid picture of the status of farming as a profession in this country. Thus, even though year on year farm output and gross value added are increasing, the farmers who are actually producing our food are not being able to make ends meet from their crop income alone.
Consequently, they are migrating in large numbers either seasonally or permanently for work and further immiserising the farm economy and also overburdening the cities where they get subsistence wages only.
The only solution is for the government is to invest heavily in transitioning to sustainable agriculture, ecosystem restoration and distributed generation of renewable energy to both raise rural incomes and counter climate change.