9

HUNTING DOWN WATER IN INDIA: IN SEARCH OF VOX POPS

Sanjay Barnela and Vasant Saberwal; Poems by Maya Khosla

‘The third world war will be a war over water’, proclaims Chattar Singh, a farmer, standing on his plot of land in the desolation of Ramgarh in Jaisalmer district, in Rajasthan. We grapple with knots in the audio cable in a futile effort to get our camera rolling in time to catch his sound bites. This was 2002, and we were shooting for a five-part series of video documentaries on ‘The Politics of Water’. Always in search of such vox pops (vox populi), we roll the camera while Chattar Singh solemnly relates his story.

The diminutive farmer tells us how he, his kin and numerous others like him have been reduced to penury because they believed the local politicians. ‘The Indira Gandhi Canal will bring you water from Punjab. It will green this desert.’ Verbal assurances like these resulted in a scramble for lands adjacent to the government planned canal. Villagers in Ramgarh, like Chattar Singh, wanted to be sure that when the water arrived, they would have seed-strewn land ready and near the canal to tap the water, and so change their lives. Many did not have the funds in hand, so they sold their family jewellery and borrowed money from the village moneylender to buy land along the canal.

Chattar Singh swears he never gambled before—yet this transaction turned out to be the biggest gamble of his life—and he has lost. Fifteen years on, and he is still waiting for water. Still waiting for the remote possibility of a first harvest from his fallow land. He breaks down sobbing, while the camera rolls away translating his story into digital (1-0-1-00-1-0) signals, or ‘footage’ in film parlance! We get our human interest story and move on to interview the next person, Laxman Singh—‘3 acres of land,’ he says, a loan from the moneylender at 48 per cent interest per annum. He too has nothing left.

It’s not that the government failed to build the Indira Gandhi Canal. But the canal design—sometimes going up-gradient and sometimes going down-gradient—was a failure. It was one of those grand multi-crore schemes that put money in some pockets and left other pockets completely empty—even less than empty. And now there is no cash compensation for hopes dashed to pieces. The Ramgarh farmers show us an area where one part of the canal has crumbled away into a scattering of concrete debris—much like their dreams.

‘Nobody listens to us’, Chattar Singh sobs. Despite the fact that our camera missed recording his ominous proclamation about the ‘Third World War’, it is easily committed to memory.

Khaali Nallah (Dry Canal)

Strangers drank from bottled water.

They drew a line in the dust.

Vowed that water

would travel for miles

until it reached us.

I watched the ants,

and dreamt of moist soil

between my toes,

fields of gold wheat.

That night I said to her

Grip the end of your saree

With both hands

and I will fill it:

A basket of wedding jewels;

Don’t look,

The best ones must go.

I bought dust. Acres of it.

Canal construction shimmered

in the distance.

It came uphill and downhill.

It came across the dunes

and earth cracks;

It came across my line in the dust;

It came with empty hands.

I watched the ants,

the salt-dry dust.

The Ramgarh story was by no means unique, as we were to find out. Between 2001 and 2003, we took our camera across rural landscapes and cityscapes in search of a hierarchy of water stories—stories rooted at individual, community and broad socio-political levels. We found large locks on village homes. We documented canals that traversed drylands—canals that moved up the slope and down the slope on a journey destined to bring no water to their destinations. We conducted interviews atop trains, within wells and on the back of motorcycles to document the story of current water needs from village to village. We documented water related displacement and mass migrations to urban areas. We found water stories that connected cities—full of those with an ‘I-couldn’t-care-less’ attitude—to water impoverished villages full of those who were waiting or leaving.

Ultimately, we were searching for a bigger picture of the trends in water resources issues nationwide. As presented in our film, Hunting Down Water, a stark picture of water resources in rural India—in contrast with water resources in urban India—began to emerge. In place after place, continued mismanagement of water resources, unmet water needs in rural areas and excessive water use in urban areas seemed to lie at the heart of today’s water crisis in India. Through these stories and encounters, we discovered the connection between the complacent attitude of the city’s water users and the diminishing hopes of those having to eke out their living in water impoverished rural areas. In each story that we documented, the overtones of government-level mismanagement and consequent crisis appeared remarkably similar. The picture was turning into a water resource crisis of national proportions.

If there is an environmental crisis in India today, it is the water crisis. While pictures of drought and floods fill the electronic and print media at the height of a crisis, the question of water management fades no sooner than water levels recede from the flood plains and the first signs of the monsoon arrive. And yet, many of India’s poorest, in cities and villages alike, are facing a silent violence. Drought, in the sense of inadequate access to potable drinking water, has become a year-round reality that centres around growing disparity in accessing water, fluoride poisoning, dysentery, mass migrations … It is a reality that many of us are completely unaware of. In that sense, the violence that is represented by mismanaged water resources is silent, and its consequences often invisible.

In the state of Gujarat, the unmet water needs assume another form. Wealthy farmers can afford to dig deep enough to tap the ever-lowering table of groundwater. Take the case of Somabhai Patel of Memna village, who owns 14 borewells on his agricultural land. Water conservation efforts make little sense to Somabhai, a wealthy farmer, for what one farmer conserves will be harvested by another farmer. So why not take all the water that is available? Indeed, Somabhai does harvest water in excess of his needs as he can sell the excess to poorer farmers like Veerabhai, at a costly price. Also, Somabhai will not sell water to other farmers unless they grow cumin, a crop requiring much water. A third of their cumin crop goes back to Somabhai as payment for the water he allows them to use.

The system will not last forever, however. Somabhai must dig deeper and deeper to maintain his now-ample water supply. ‘The water used to be at 100 feet below the ground just a few years ago, now it has gone down to 500 feet.’ What is implicit in this ever-deepening search for water is its eventual depletion.

… Ultimately fewer and fewer farmers will control this water. Even wealthy farmers like Somabhai will have to abandon their fields at the point when water can no longer be sucked out. They will have made their profits and will move on. But in their wake, they will leave behind hundreds of small and marginal farmers like Veerabhai with no water—no drinking water and no water to irrigate their fields. More and more Rewabhais will migrate in search of water and work.

(Excerpt from Hunting Down Water)

Veerabhai

One day it happens.

The fields go dry under your open palms.

Not all the monsoon unleashings

or trickle-down flows from your neighbour

will soak them enough.

The trickle will burn into nothing.

For a moment, this knowledge

is a dazzling flash

lit by hard sunlight

And you, a speck hovering, hopeful

floating high above it.

You comb the cumin leaves

with hands that recognize this moment.

As if it already occurred.

There is no turning back.

Metamorphosis takes the old self

down in milliseconds.

And you know that to stay

means to perish.

The dust cloud under your footsteps

is small as you leave

the shed earth of your life.

The water crisis is a multi-faceted complex problem, fraught with widely varying beliefs. Even the experts have made new realisations about the dire consequences of overuse, or unsustainable use. The ‘India Mark II hand pump’ stands as a case in point. As recently as fifteen years ago, experts were extolling the virtues of the Mark II as a revolutionary way of extracting groundwater. At the time, we, at Moving Images, even made audio-visuals to help spread the good word about the Mark II to policy makers and NGOs across India. Essentially, the Mark II made it easier to draw water from the ground. Several national and international aid agencies used to pour in money to assist in the installation of Mark II hand pumps in remote rural areas. We celebrated the Green Revolution whose success was premised on the availability of abundant groundwater. Distinguished scientists proposed growing rice in the month of June in Punjab to boast their technological breakthroughs in agricultural science.

There has been an absolute turnaround on this position now. Today, the same experts are shouting their voices hoarse about the need for regulating the extraction of groundwater. It turns out that the Mark II is best used in areas with alluvial aquifers, or areas where the groundwater is capable of recharging. The Indo-Gangetic plains and the Cauvery delta are the best examples of lands where use of the popular Mark II hand pump is relevant and sustainable. Not all of India is alluvial, however. In fact, about 60 per cent of India is underlain by an impervious basaltic layer of rock that makes groundwater recharge virtually impossible. So in those lands, the Mark II is simply pulling out groundwater supplies that will not be replaced by nature. It has taken our planners this long to recognise that water is being harvested out of the ground in ways that are not capable of being sustained for long. That groundwater supplies will not last forever!

Realisations like this never seem to stop the big projects, which continue to thrive. Big pipes carry water for hundreds of miles into big cities. Rural areas with excess water are being turned into areas trapped in permanent drought—this so that urban populations can get an ample supply of water for their daily use, which includes drinking, bathing, car-washing, as well as entertainment. Mumbai is such a city. One hundred and twenty kilometres away, the local people, mainly Warli tribals of Tansa must now tap leaks in the giant pipe to obtain water for their needs. The pipeline looms large overhead, foreshadowing continued difficulty for the Warli tribals. The pipeline’s presence emphasises the extreme inequity, which justifies Tansa’s tribes robbing their own water. Tansa was once an area with a surplus of water. Now women hunch under a trickle flow from the giant pipeline, waiting for their shining vessels to fill.

And this is how the local people—mainly Warli tribals—source drinking water for themselves; from leaks in the 120-km pipeline to Mumbai, or, the same old method which has passed the test of time for centuries in India …

(Excerpt from Hunting Down Water)

Filling the Ghadas at the Pipe

Measure me not

By cup, bucket

Or ku-wu ku-wu call

Of the koyel

Measure me not by coins

counted back

Or by scent of drying jasmine

In my hair

Listen instead

For the song that vanished:

The monsoon calling

For fish to dance

On their ears.

Take that song in both hands.

Recreate its gold

And tea-light warmth

Now turn your head away,

Leave me here.

I am darkness, I am the miles

You cannot imagine walking.

India’s bottled-water industry today has an annual turnover in excess of Rs 1,800 crore. While this may be partially related to the emerging purchasing power of the middle class, it is also an accurate reflection of the accelerating water crisis in urban India. This crisis does not, of course, affect everybody equally. For if the upmarket Lutyens Delhi (Delhi Imperial Zone as marked in the map) receives 250 litres of water per person per day, the slums of Najafgarh on the outskirts of the national capital receive less than 30 litres per person per day.

This crisis is rooted not so much in the overall availability of water as in the patterns of consumption, a failure to regulate consumption through appropriate and equitable tariff structures, and a mindset that seeks to source water from the rural countryside, rather than in conserving water that falls within our own cities. Instead, traditional temple tanks are being converted to indoor stadiums and inter-state bus terminuses in fast growing cities. Every piece of land is looked at as real estate! The Kanta Veera indoor stadium in Bangalore stands on what once was a traditional water tank for harvesting rainwater. The inter-state bus terminus in Madurai has been built on an old water tank. In both instances, the state is the encroacher.

In another film in our series, Water Business is Good Business, we travel from Delhi to Indore and from Mumbai to Chennai to explore the politics of urban water supplies. In each instance we come across the same mantra to the emerging crisis—the construction of mega-projects to bring water from distant rivers to our various cities. But this is firefighting at best; crisis-management, not strategic planning. For, even as we source water from distant locations with all the attendant problems of displacing rural people from their homes and livelihoods, the growing needs of exploding, upwardly mobile urban populations will simply ensure an insatiable thirst for water and more water.

October 2002. The threat of starvation deaths looming in Baran district of Rajasthan. The Sahariya tribals eat chapatis made from dry grass seeds. Successive droughts in the previous years have resulted in crop failures. Handpumps have run dry and give out coloured water after violent pumping. Grass chapatis will not take them too far and so they pack their ‘potlis’ and leave.

(Excerpt from Hunting Down Water)

Migration from Mamuni village

Eyes stinging. Smoke means twilight

slipping from empty skies like a match

blown out. The third spark catches,

twigs whispering harsh nothings

at the chapatis. One pot comes to a boil,

bubbles surging through mud-red water.

This we will drink. Backs chilled, palms hot,

over the flame as we flip the toasted chapatis

of grass. We taste sapling and leaf

eyes on a distance too dark to dream about

But dry enough to smell, even from these miles

Away. By dawn there will be only this

The rhythm of walking

Under the weight of a long, focused heat.

‘These things look good only on television … things about economy and saving water and all that’, say Nidhi and Madhur with a dismissive shrug, looking fresh after a rollicking rain dance party. Our sound recordist exchanges a quick glance with us to ensure unanimity in approval of the quality of the vox pop. Or take the case of Somabhai Patel of Memna village in Gujarat, who owns 14 borewells on his agricultural land. ‘The water used to be at 100 feet below the ground just a few years ago, now it has gone down to 500 feet.’ The Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai reveals startling facts to highlight the misuse of water by the urban elite: ‘Mumbai has 15 lakh cars each using 15 litres of water per day for washing—a total of about 2.25 crore litres of potable water is used only on cars everyday.’ Quotes that reinforce the fact that the present water crisis is largely a crisis of our own making.

Dance for the Season’s First Rain

Watch the light bulbs glow bright, then fade,

watch the air go dark, while music booms

to the tune of a downpour;

Doors slam as monsoon winds

whistle music through this dance house—

sheets of rain dancing at the garden’s edge,

drawing closer, closer, big drops

flattening months of dust,

and the earth smells of iron and dense relief.

Let’s sing—who knows how long the lights

will be out this time? Let’s fasten payals

onto our bare feet, let’s take off our shoes,

take off our shoes singing Allah Megh De!

Arms undulating in rhythm with the flourish:

wet leaves, rich, wet breeze—

wet soil, this music for new grass,

monsoon winds urging us with their swirl.

You ask us about places where there is no water?

You ask about places where no one dances for rain?

Don’t ask these questions, this is the time

For you to sing of grasses, the green fireworks

lit by cloud spark and crash.

This is the time to sing rain, rain, it is the story of spice,

it is what turns footsteps into dance

it is what turns melons into red honey

while our payals chhing, chhing, tapping for rain.

Our filming eventually took us east to states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam and Orissa, where over-abundance of water through flooding and water entrapment seemed to be the major problem for most of the year. Interestingly, the water entrapment issue is also man made! Large parts of these states in eastern India are subject to annual flooding. Over the past half-century the government has built 14,000 kilometres of embankments in an attempt to tame the rivers of eastern states. Despite the massive expenditure, losses to flooding and the area that is now vulnerable to flooding has only increased. Sixteen per cent of Bihar is now permanently waterlogged—a direct consequence of the embankment project. River-taming mantras explore the technological, economic and political rationale that underlies the adoption of such flood control measures. The film demonstrates that because these rivers carry an enormous silt load, they have enormous power. Attempts at controlling these rivers are unlikely to succeed. On the other hand, the vast sums spent on the building and repair of these embankments, as well as the annual flood relief measures, provide endless opportunities for the siphoning of funds.

Water is one

What is there left to count? The sun

will not rise on safe land, the sun

knows no lush fields of seedlings.

When light rises it slips on these waters,

and is shattered into a thousand shards;

too unreal to be touched or tamed,

too bright to watch.

You. Can you hear me?

or is freedom’s song too loud

and rich to listen to the groan

of my home, now turned into a ship

bound for nowhere. What is there

left to count? Water is one, seamless.

You who talk of flows and meanders,

stop. Let the wet wood fires sting

your eyes. Let soaked clothes

cling to your body night and day.

Let the rice bags falling

from the sky’s motorcycles

fall too deep for you to ever reach.

While shooting floods in Bihar, we came across the concept of the ‘Punjabi’. This is how a typical introduction took place when we went visiting flood-affected families in the Saharsa district of Bihar: ‘Meet my three sons—Mukesh, Dina Nath and Ramnath. The first two stay with me while Ramnath is a Punjabi.’ Mukesh and Dina Nath were standing bare-chested, wearing only lungis, while Ramnath wore a white terrycot shirt over a lungi and had a bold metal-strap wrist watch announcing his just-visiting-from-Punjab status! Young men from almost every family in the villages of Bihar have migrated elsewhere. Punjab is the most preferred destination for most of them because of the high wages and better living conditions offered by the prosperous farmers in that state. It does not matter whether one goes to Mumbai or Delhi in search of a living; he is referred to as a Punjabi.

There are good reasons to migrate from Bihar If water scarcity is a problem in many parts of the country—Bihar has too much … 16 per cent of Bihar is permanently waterlogged. Lakhs of people in Bihar have lost their lands to this surfeit of water.

(Excerpt from River Taming Mantras, another documentary on the political economy of floods in India)

The Journey

Not all of us can take the cherry-coloured train

That whistles past mile after watery mile —

Whole hamlets afloat. Whole hamlets gone under.

Not all of us can look past our waterlogged lands

and see a city, an ironing job that anchors time

so it won’t drift away; a factory job, elbow to elbow

the village men in rows like seed-pods long forgotten.

Some of us wait here, holding on to our seeds. Wait for water

to seep away. These seeds are our journey. We listen

to the sloshing sounds; cannot see our feet when we walk.

The land is full and swollen. The land is bereft of hope.

Even darkness cannot root itself under these currents.

Hear me. I am ready to bend over my seedlings.

I am ready for light and the texture of soil

In my fingertips. Instead of seeds I grip my chappals

to use them as oars.

Not all of us can take the cherry-coloured train

That whistles past mile after watery mile—

Migration in search of work has been historically common, often involving travel across continents. For the most part, such migrations have resulted in a dramatic improvement in the financial well-being of families that have chosen to migrate. This is also true of migrations within India, and there is a large, urban, middle-class that retains strong roots in the rural countryside.

There is also a migrant population that is continuously on the move—landless villagers forced to move from their villages to towns in search of employment—often in search of water. These are the poorest of the poor. But there is a new dimension to these migrations. Today, we are witnessing migrations involving farmers who own land, but are increasingly unable to cultivate it owing to a steadily worsening water situation. Drought and excessive flooding as a direct result of the mismanagement of water resources have forced a large and land-owning population to move to city slums. And, as water resources dry up in towns and cities, it is the slums that are bearing the brunt of shortages, forcing people to move once again.

Music

I look for music in my daughter’s eyes;

they are telling me that tomorrow is chained

under lock and key. And knee-deep in water.

Sometimes thigh-deep in water, for months.

It has been so long, I no longer know

the sound of grasses combed by wind.

I wear a shirt the shape of water. The shape

of being snatched and carried downstream.

Who holds you child, if I sink? If I weaken, and do

water’s bidding, get carried away? There is only water

to speak to. There are no windows, the walls dissolve.

A few plastic sheets clothe our sleeping.

Water slaps and hums.

Over the course of our filming, we were struck by the enormity of the social and ecological crisis that we will have to deal with at some point in the near future. We were also struck by the similarities in contexts to human suffering induced by floods and water scarcity, in both rural and urban landscapes. Not surprisingly, it is the poor and the marginal that have suffered the most. But of greater interest has been the common pattern that has emerged across the country that both a scarcity and excess of water are a straightforward function of the mismanagement of resources.

The creation of the permanent migrant was the other theme which emerged over the course of our work on water. And this too cuts across regions. As we mine our water resources for personal profit, we are creating an enormous pool of ecological refugees, and a pool of alienation and discontent that will spill over should we be unwilling to address the root causes of this crisis.

We attempted to capture some of this movement in our documentaries. We also tried to document the geographic scale and magnitude of this emerging crisis in Indian society. There has been a striking similarity in the overarching patterns of migration in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Orissa and Assam—migration induced by water.

Another film under production, The Algebra of Water, proposes to take this research further, by exploring the experience of the migrant as he moves from a village to an urban slum, and then on again. We see this migration as critically important in our documentation of the ‘collateral’ damage associated with the mismanagement of water. Damage that remains largely invisible owing simply to the absence of an obvious connection between a Gujarati farmer forced to sell his once profitable land and a fruit packager in a factory in north Delhi. If we do not even see these connections, or the scale at which these events replicate themselves again and again, how can we possibly begin searching for answers?

The Algebra of Water starts its journey on top of a train somewhere in the Madhubani district of Bihar. The train and its speed define the initial pace of the film that continues throughout the duration of the film. The modes of travel change from train to bus, then rickshaws, tractors, tool boxes of trucks and bullock carts—different vehicles ferrying myriad faces to one common destiny—wage labour. Only the speed changes as dictated by the carriage, but the camera never stops! The constantly moving camera provides a visual metaphor for the subject theme—people going somewhere else—pushed out by water or the lack of it!

The different modes of travel create a matrix of mobility throughout the country. We plan to use this lack of chronological structure to highlight the continuous mobility of these people. A people, outside any norm of chronology. A people in motion. A film in motion, reflective of mobile lives, a mobility driven by water.

Migratory

This morning, my eyes

level with the ground,

with the chappals of those in line

behind me. I am one of them:

the rough miles between village

and sprawling, glittering city

still clouds our eyes

with the need for water.

Drips and drops, it takes twenty

minutes to fill two ghadas (pots).

We who migrated here still listen

to our own blood, to the sounds

of the whistling, empty landscapes

we left behind.

This sprawling city will swallow

our working hands.