With a historic drought underway in neighbouring India, the fear that Pakistan will face a similar situation soon is very real. Hundreds of villages in India have been evacuated after temperatures in Delhi hit 48C. Up to 90 percent of those living in villages just 250 miles from India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, have been left deserted as well, as hand pumps and tubewells have run dry. Three-fourths of the crops cultivated in Karnataka and Maharashtra have been hit by drought and crop failure. Officials say that the situation is worse than the 1972 famine that affected 25 million people in the state. Water tankers have been supplying water to villages to keep life going, but one must wonder for how long that can continue. It is estimated that 43 percent of India was experiencing drought by the end of May. There is no water left in 35 major dams while water levels are below 8 percent in 1,000 smaller dams. Groundwater, which provides 40 percent of India’s water, is depleting so fast that 21 major cities in that country could run out of water by 2020.

Is what is happening across the border a scenario that Pakistan is moving headfirst into? There is little doubt that Pakistan too has been facing a water crisis for decades. Hydrologists claim that Pakistan’s groundwater level is falling a meter every year due to extraction for drinking and for agriculture. Falling water tables is a situation that we need to avoid at all costs. Groundwater is the final defence in the face of any fall in rainfall, and long periods of drought. Instead, we have a situation where the groundwater we have is being polluted by untreated sewage. Pakistan is reported to have the world’s fourth largest groundwater aquifer, which can be a permanent defence against drought, but instead the country contributes to nine percent of the global use of groundwater. This means that the Indus Basin aquifer is the second most ‘overstressed’ groundwater basis in the world.

Groundwater provides 60 percent of the water requirement in agriculture, 90 percent for drinking use and 100 percent in industry. What this essentially means is that Pakistan is estimated to be removing 10 bcm more groundwater than is being replenished each year. Much of the problem is down to poor irrigation management, where over 60 percent water is lost in the application process. There appears to be no framework or laws to deal with the extraction of groundwater in Pakistan, despite the fact that the National Water Policy 2018 committed to passing laws on the use of groundwater. In Pakistan, the signs of water stress are everywhere. Pakistan needs to act before we get to a position like that of India’s, where entire villages have been evacuated to save them from drought. </s> Millions of people are turning to water tank trucks in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu as house and hotel taps run dry in an acute water shortage caused by drying lakes and depleted groundwater.

State Rural Development Minister S.P. Velumani said Wednesday that the drought follows a 62% shortfall in monsoon rains last year compared to 2017.

People are lining up for water cans in the state capital of Chennai.

Top elected official K. Palaniswami said the state has diminishing groundwater supplies and has asked other states for spare water until October's monsoon rains.

Monsoons reach different parts of India at different times.

Northern and eastern India have experienced heatwaves with temperatures soaring to 48 Celsius (118 Fahrenheit) amid a delayed monsoon. </s> Millions of people are turning to water tank trucks in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu as house and hotel taps run dry because of an acute water shortage caused by drying lakes and depleted groundwater.

State Rural Development Minister S.P. Velumani said on Wednesday that the drought followed a 62% shortfall in monsoon rains last year compared to 2017.

People are lining up for water cans in the state capital of Chennai.

Some companies have asked employees to work from home. Some restaurants are closing early and even considering not serving lunch if the water scarcity worsens.

Gauri Shankar, general manager of Hotel Deccan Plaza in Chennai, said two tank trucks bring water to the hotel every day from a town 60 kilometers (40 miles) away at a cost of 4,000 rupees ($57) each.

“Even a water tanker is proving difficult to get in the city. We are getting our supply because we entered into a contract with a supplier in September as the water taps started going dry,” Shankar said by phone.

Chennai is India’s sixth-largest city with an estimated population of 10 million. It is a major destination for medical tourism, and Tamil Nadu state is a car manufacturing hub.

Top elected official K. Palaniswami said the state has diminishing groundwater supplies and has asked other states for spare water until October’s monsoon rains.

Monsoons reach different parts of India at different times.

Northern and eastern India have experienced heatwaves with temperatures soaring to 48 Celsius (118 Fahrenheit) amid a delayed monsoon. At least 90 people have died due to heat stroke in the eastern state of Bihar since June, according to the state disaster management department.

This year’s monsoon arrived in the southern state of Kerala a week late and slowly started moving to other parts of country.

India is facing a 43% shortfall in monsoon rains across the country because of its late arrival, according to the India Meteorological Department.

Meteorologists said monsoon rains usually cover two-thirds of the country by mid-June. However, they currently have reached less than half that area. But the monsoon’s progress is expected to pick up in the next 10 days. </s> More than 600 million people dependent on agriculture have been adversely affected by drought conditions across swathes of India.

Soaring temperatures since early June, averaging about 45 degrees, have stifled most of the country, while the progress of the annual monsoon rains, which normally bring relief from the searing heat and are a vital source of water, has been the slowest in 12 years.

An estimated 43 per cent of the country is affected by drought.

According to countrywide news reports, hundreds of villages and small towns in states including Uttar Pradesh in the east, Rajasthan and Maharashtra in the west and Andhra Pradesh in southern India are surrounded by parched farmland and have been deserted.

The country’s meteorological department predicts a deficient monsoon that in all likelihood may not be able to resuscitate some 91 life-sustaining reservoirs across India, where water levels in some cases are hovering at about 30 per cent capacity.

The federal government, however, has played down reports of water shortages. Addressing a press conference in New Delhi on Monday, water resources minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said media reports of the water crisis were exaggerated.

He said there was adequate water in dams and reservoirs in the northern Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh and the crisis was “not as bad as created by the media”.

But the reality is starkly at variance with the minister’s assessment and palpably evident everywhere else. Cities have seen queues of people with plastic drums, buckets, kitchen utensils and empty bottles at municipal water distribution points.

A recent report by the National Institute for Transforming India, or NITI Aayog, headed by prime minister Narendra Modi, said that 21 cities, including Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, are expected to run out of groundwater by 2020.

“Critical groundwater resources that account for 40 per cent of India’s water supply are being depleted at unsustainable rates,” the NITI Aayog analysis warned.

It affirmed that climate change, deficient rainfall, extended summers and rising populations across India were collectively making it impossible for urban municipalities to meet rising water demands.

The NITI Aayog report also forecast that by 2030 India’s water requirements would double and the resultant water scarcity could trim 6 per cent off its annual gross domestic product. It would also seriously affect food security.

The southern city of Chennai – formerly Madras – is at present the worst afflicted by the water crisis. The port city, which is India’s sixth largest, with a population of about 5 million, requires 800 million litres of water daily, but is able to provide only 525 million – and that too is reducing rapidly.

Many of its private offices have asked their employees to work from home until they figure out ways to mitigate the water scarcity, whilst numerous small hotels and restaurants have temporarily shut down.

“Chennai is now in panic mode,” city resident Syed Altaf told the NDTV news channel on Tuesday. It took at least four days to get access to a water tanker now, whereas earlier it had taken just a few hours, he added.

Farming activist Devinder Sharma said decades of unplanned exploitation of groundwater resources and poor monsoon rains in consecutive years had turned vast portions of central and western India into an arid dust bowl. He predicted that the agriculturally rich northern Punjab state too would become a “desert region” within two decades, if exploitation of underground water resources continued at the prevailing rate. </s> Millions of people are turning to water tank trucks in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu as house and hotel taps run dry because of an acute water shortage caused by drying lakes and depleted groundwater.

State Rural Development Minister S.P. Velumani said on Wednesday that the drought followed a 62 per cent shortfall in monsoon rains last year compared to 2017.

People are lining up for water cans in the state capital, Chennai.

Hotels in the southeastern city of 4.6 million are rationing water for guests amid searing heat.

A shepherd walks with his livestock at the dried out Puzhal reservoir on the outskirts of Chennai. Water levels in the city's four main reservoirs have fallen to some of their lowest levels in decades. (Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images)

All four reservoirs that supply Chennai, known as the Detroit of south Asia for its flourishing automobile industry, have run dry this summer, largely because of poor monsoon rains last year.

Chennai is one of 21 cities that a government think-tank warned last year could run out of ground water by 2020. This year's monsoon is delayed, further compounding problems across a swath of western and central India.

Water storage levels in the city's four major reservoirs were one-hundredth of what they were this time last year — and at a mere 0.2 per cent of capacity, according to state government data.

People in New Delhi are also being forced to rely on tankers delivering water amid a searing heat wave. (Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters)

Some companies have asked employees to work from home. Some restaurants are closing early and even considering not serving lunch if the water scarcity worsens.

Gauri Shankar, general manager of Hotel Deccan Plaza in Chennai, said two tank trucks bring water to the hotel every day from a town 60 kilometres away at a cost of 4,000 rupees ($76) each.

"Even a water tanker is proving difficult to get in the city. We are getting our supply because we entered into a contract with a supplier in September as the water taps started going dry," Shankar said by phone.

Women fetch water from an opening made by residents at a dried-up lake in Chennai. (P. Ravikumar/Reuters)

Top elected official K. Palaniswami said the state has diminishing groundwater supplies and has asked other states for spare water until October's monsoon rains.

Monsoons reach different parts of India at different times.

Northern and eastern India have experienced heat waves with temperatures soaring to 48 Celsius amid a delayed monsoon. At least 90 people have died due to heat stroke in the eastern state of Bihar since June, according to the state disaster management department.

This year's monsoon arrived in the southern state of Kerala a week late and slowly started moving to other parts of country.

India is facing a 43 per cent shortfall in monsoon rains across the country because of its late arrival, according to the India Meteorological Department.

Meteorologists said monsoon rains usually cover two-thirds of the country by mid-June. However, they currently have reached less than half that area. But the monsoon's progress is expected to pick up in the next 10 days. </s> • Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, is suffering from an acute water storage after a historic drought. Many of the region’s reservoirs are almost completely dry.
• Residents have been forced to line up for hours for tanked-in water or have attempted to collect water from holes dug in lake beds.
• Satellite images and photos on the ground have captured what it’s like living through the drought and its effect on the city’s water supplies.

Residents of Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India are running out of water.

Since 2017, due to low rainfall and a failed monsoon season, nearly all of Chennai’s four major water bodies are drying up, India Today reported.

The crisis means that the majority of Chennai has depended heavily on water trucked in by the government.

These photos show the effects of the drought from the sky and on the ground for the over 6 million people who live in the area.

Chennai is in crisis after its four main water reservoirs ran completely dry. Drought has been an issue in the area for years, but conditions have gotten dire in the last few months.

On June 14, the Puzhal reservoir on Chennai’s outskirts dried out. This tower measures the amount of water in the reservoir.

In 2018 before the drought, this was the size of the Puzhal reservoir.

But during the drought it looked like this. The Copernicus Sentinel satellite captured this image on June 15, 2019.

Some restaurants and dozens of hotels were forced to temporary close due to the lack of water. Chennai’s water authority cut the entire city’s piped water supply by 40%.

Thousands of people were forced to wait in line for hours every day so they could fill cans and containers with water.

And it wasn’t just Puzhal that was affected. Here is Chembarambakkam Lake in 2018.

And here it is on July 20, 2019.

Residents even tried to get any water they could from openings in dried up lake beds.

Or used muddy water from the dregs of Chennai’s reservoirs.

The drying out of Chennai’s lakes and surrounding bodies of water caused a buildup of dead fish.

On June 20, it finally began to rain. But according to a 2018 government think tank report, more than 600 million people face “acute” water shortages, and 21 Indian cities, including Chennai, are likely to run out of groundwater by 2020. </s> A government-backed report has announced that the India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history.

Demand is growing, but supply is running short. Experts predict that 21 cities will run out of groundwater supply by 2020 — that includes Delhi, which is home to nearly 19 million people.

Meanwhile, the water that is available is often contaminated by chemicals or other pollution.

Cities are growing quickly, and infrastructure to deliver sanitation is lagging behind population growth. The country's growing agricultural sector is also a problem, sucking up drinkable water for crops and farm animals.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised that piped water will reach all Indian households by 2024. He made the announcement on Saturday among a slew of other promises off the back of his convincing re-election victory in May.

"There are multiple causes, both climate and anthropogenic, and it's important to remember that both of those are important," said Veena Srinivasan, a fellow at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment where she leads the Water, Land and Society Programme. She spoke to Good Morning Europe on Tuesday.

"Of course, the drought itself is caused by a deficit in precipitation, and climate change certainly has something to do with the changing precipitation patterns. But I think it's important for us to realise as a country that we can't absolve ourselves from the crisis that we ourselves have precipitated with mismanagement, and specifically by overextracting groundwater. One of the things that the Green Revolution did was to make groundwater a possibility for millions of Indian farmers, and then allow them to rise out of poverty. But what we didn't put in place was controls to make sure it wasn't overextracted, which is why we now have a crisis when in years when we don't have precipitation to fall back on."

Cape Town experienced a highly publicised water crisis in the middle of 2017, that saw severe water restrictions imposed. But it's difficult to compare one crisis to another, says Srinivasan.

"Drought in general is a problem globally. What has happened in a lot of the western countries is they aren't dependent on agriculture for their economies and for a large fraction of their population. It's still the developing world where agriculture is the major mainstay of the vast majority of the population in terms of livelihood. And so what happens in a lot of the developed world, is when there's a drought, you're able to displace the crisis by importing fruits and vegetables from other parts of the world that may not currently be suffering from drought. And so, you hear a lot about Europe buying asparagus from South America, for example. But I think that's very different from India, where even if wealthier people were able to buy imported grain and vegetables, the larger problem is what do you do with 600 million people whose way of life and income depends on groundwater which has now disappeared."

The estimate of 600 million farmers in India is the equivalent of 50 per cent of the country's entire population, creating a cycle of water use and water shortage that puts the entire system at risk.

"We need to remember that 70 per cent of farmers and 600 million people are dependent on agriculture for a way of life. And without rain and without irrigation, there is no livelihood for 600 million people. And that could precipitate a major crisis, both in terms of security and conflict, but also what are 600 million people going to do if there's nothing for them to do in villages? And so I think that we cannot understate the severity and the magnitude of this crisis." </s> Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami on Tuesday accused the media of “creating an illusion” of water scarcity in the state, even as the Madras High Court criticised his government for alleged mismanagement of water resources.

Palaniswami said the state is largely dependent on groundwater to meet its requirements till the onset of the northeast monsoon in October. He said drought and deficient monsoon had depleted groundwater levels but claimed that the problem was not as big as it was being made out, PTI reported.

He said people should understand the situation and cooperate. “The media should not create an illusion of water scarcity using some stray incidents,” Palaniswami said. “All steps are being taken to supply water. The severe drought and deficient monsoon [in the previous years] has led to depletion in groundwater levels. But drinking water is being supplied through tankers. People are using this water to even wash clothes.”

Palaniswami claimed that steps were being taken to ensure the supply of drinking water in Chennai with efforts to augment it from Veeranam lake in Cuddalore district.

Meanwhile, the Madras High Court asked the state government to give a detailed report about the number of lakes and reservoirs in the state, PTI reported. The court was hearing a petition seeking the removal of encroachments in the feeding channel from Palar river to Udayendram lake in Vellore.

The court asked authorities for details of the steps taken for the removal of encroachments. The bench also noted that lakes had become smaller because of encroachment of some water bodies.

The court said that the water scarcity in the state did not happen in a day and that the government knew very well that this was coming, The News Minute reported. The judges said zero water management efforts were made by the government.

Tamil Nadu and its capital Chennai are faced with an acute water crisis that has triggered instances of violence and has forced establishments to find new ways to conserve water. The Porur Lake in Chennai, which is considered one of the main sources of water for the city, is almost at its lowest-ever level and the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board is now banking on water from desalination plants and stone quarries in Kanchipuram district, India Today reported.

The water crisis has affected almost every sector, including information technology, hospitals and restaurants. Some IT companies in Chennai have asked employees to work from home, The News Minute reported last week. At some IT offices, bathrooms only on alternate floors are operational. Hospitals have also been trying to conserve water by postponing non-essential surgeries. Several hotels in the city have decided to not serve meals for lunch to reduce the use of water, according to The Hindu. </s> A recent Niti Aayog report projects that Delhi and other cities could run out of groundwater by 2020.

Gurugram receives less than 600mm of rainfall annually, which puts the city firmly in the semi-arid zone. Rainfall is concentrated in the monsoon months and, historically, Gurugram has survived on groundwater and stored water for most part of the year.

Gurugram benefits from its location in the foothills of the Aravalli, which has a lot of cracks, fractures and fissures, making them a high recharge zone.

Public water supply is increasingly being met from Yamuna canal water. However, the future water allocation for Gurugram will depend on the extent of flows remaining in the river and on competing demands. Hence, groundwater will always remain a key element for meeting city’s requirement.

Speedy urbanisation in the last two decades has increased the demand for water, which is exceeding the sustainable supply, and Gurugram now stands at a very critical juncture. Private and public borewells indiscriminately withdraw groundwater, depleting the already low groundwater levels. According to the Central Ground Water Board, in 2006, Gurugram block withdrew about 300% more water than the sustainable groundwater recharge level (this number, no doubt, has only increased). This over extraction is leading to a decline of groundwater level by as much as 1.5 metre per year.

At the same time, the increasing concretisation of the city reduces the potential for natural recharge, which in turn increases storm water runoff. Instead of recharging groundwater, rainfall leads to floods in the city. A blessing turns into a curse.

There is, therefore, an urgent need to protect from construction areas that recharge groundwater naturally, such as ponds, nullahs, low-lying areas, bundh submergence areas and, most importantly, the Aravalli hills.

Why should we keep storm water drains unlined and open?

Once you concretise, you have lost the option of water seeping into the ground and you have no idea whether the sewage lines are flowing into it. The tendency to throw garbage into open nullahs, makes keeping them clean a challenge, but that cannot be a justification to concretise and cover large storm water drains.

Concretising large nullahs drastically reduces their cross section area and their storm water retention and discharge capacity, while also reducing recharge. It also treats storm water as a problem that has to be transported out, rather than a resource for recharge.

Also, why should we dump our rainfall runoff in Najafgarh drain when it’s known that water table in Gurugram is fast depleting? Instead, we need to find ways to channelise water into these storm water nullahs/drains, for storage and recharge.

Similarly, low-lying areas may be zoned as parks and open spaces, to hold rainfall and runoff in the monsoon months and act as green recreational and biodiversity spaces for the rest of the year.

Treated sewage can also be used for recharging groundwater and for areas such as the Ghata Bundh and the low-lying belt of Basai, which benefits from treated sewage and is a major habitat for migratory water birds.

Submergence area are prime examples that need to be conserved for biodiversity, groundwater recharge and recreation.

To become sustainable and ensure our long-term water security, we also need to reduce the per capita demand for fresh water. Metering bore wells can give feedback to consumers. Incentivising the shift to water efficient fixtures—low flow taps etc, can help, as can slab pricing that makes overuse expensive. Further, facilitating equitable distribution of water across all sections of society, especially renters in informal settlements, must be made a priority.

Without sustained effort, groundwater level will continue to decline, and leave the city with a serious groundwater shortage and even an absolute non-availability within our lifetimes.

Akbar left Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra, and went to Lahore because of water shortage. Where will the residents of Gurugram go?
Millions of people in southeast India face water shortages due to drought and depleted groundwater.