Water Crisis Will Grip Entire India, If Solution Isn't Focused On Our Cities Says IIT Professor

In 2019, we're staring down the barrel of a global water crisis, with not a heck of a lot of options.

We agree that we have to change our lifestyles and consumption habits, but we don't even know where to start. These guys though think the answer lies in cities.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad have just completed a water study, published in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society. Professor Dornadula Chandrasekharam and his research scholar Dagani Koteswara Rao focused on understanding the water footprint of the Hyderabad Metro Development Authority (HMDA) region. Basically, they wanted to use the water crisis in Hyderabad as an opportunity to study how metros tie into water consumption.

They found that the average water consumption in the HMDA region is 2,852 litres per capita per day. The researchers were focused on just four broad categories of food consumption, fossil fuels-based energy, electric power, and direct water consumption.

The problem, they figured out, is that most of the water consumed in cities isn't even for drinking.

IIT Hyderabad visiting professor Dornadula Chandrasekharam (L) and research scholar Dagani Koteswara Rao (R)

Let's break it down

First you need to understand here the difference between physical and virtual water. Physical water is what's used directly from a source for consumption or energy. Virtual water on the other hand is what's used to produce goods that are traded elsewhere. For instance, using water to grow rice in one place and then selling it in another place means that water has now fundamentally moved out of the initial location and gone elsewhere.

And what the researchers found is that Hyderabad uses 20 times the amount of virtual water that rural areas do.

Essentially, they mean cities largely use goods and products made with another location's water, in this case mostly surrounding villages.

Specifically, 70 percent of the water consumed in urban areas is from agriculture. That means 70 percent of the water is virtual water here, coming from crops grown in farming communities around the state and elsewhere. Similarly, 25 percent of HMDA's water use is in the form of electricity generated elsewhere.

On the other hand, only 1 percent of the water used by the metro region is to produce fossil fuel-based power, and only 4 percent of water is ingested directly.

Why is that important? Well when there's a water shortage in a state, who do you think is affected first?

The people bearing the brunt of a drought are in the rural areas. These are the people using their meagre water supplies to grow crops, which are their primary (and sometimes only) source of income. But only a tiny amount of these crops actually stay in the villages; instead they're sold and shipped to cities, which are more focused on commercial activities.

Essentially, rural areas spend physical water to grow crops, converting it to virtual water when they sell and ship it. But urban areas consume all of that virtual water.

So when the wells and reservoirs run dry, villages have to keep using the scarce remains to earn a living, while cities simple keep consuming. It's exactly this sort of hidden consumption that's worsening the water crisis, both in India and across the world. When we think of water shortages, we immediately think rationing supplies to homes by municipal authorities will help. But when that water accounts for only 4 percent of all the water we're really using, the bigger problem goes unsolved.

Better then that we develop more sustainable techniques for farming and raising cattle. Additionally, it's also worth considering what to do about our international exports of water-intensive crops like rice and cotton. Because despite being among the list of countries in the world facing a scarcity of water, we're one of the biggest exporters of rice, thereby also making us a huge exporter of virtual water.

The scarier thing is, this study only looks at amenity-based water usage for things like food and energy. It still doesn't even take into account commercial and industrial usage, which requires even more work.

But it's this sort of work that can help both researchers and policy makers figure out an efficient solution to the water crisis. Hopefully that's something we can all achieve before a Third World War breaks out over the precious resource.