Adam’s ale: Why Bengaluru water crisis reflects hydrological destiny of peninsular India

Water scarcities that enervate the cities of peninsular India each year are by now passé. Yet, this summer, as Bengaluru and all of Karnataka face a shortage of the gravest kind, think of how a tiny molecule of an atom of oxygen to two of hydrogen, has seeped into and soaked through our destiny on this remarkable planet.

This gedanken experiment strikes a personal chord, as much of my scientific life was spent researching a curious type of interaction called the hydrogen bond. The hydrogen bond and water are intimately connected. The water molecule in itself has little to boast of. Its identity is only in how it interacts with others of its ilk—it’s quite the sociological freak. These interactions form the hydrogen bonds and they result in assemblages of water molecules, which when spiked with other ingredients like nucleic acids, proteins and lipids within the temperature range of earth, give rise to conditions for life. So unique is this serendipity that transforms the inanimate to the animate, and chemistry to biology, that it is almost as if a higher power intended for life to exist on our planet, and through this magical aqua pura we call water.

Due to life originating from this watery, primordial soup of amino acids, all chemical and biochemical reactions and processes in the cells of living plants and animals are mediated in aqua. So living things need to ingest water to keep living. After air, water is the most vital commodity to sustain existence. At a secondary level, humans consume plant and animal-derived food products. Since these are generated from entities that are living in themselves, humans depend acutely on a steady and plentiful source of water to lead meaningful lives.

Planet Earth can be considered as a huge distillation experiment involving water. Water evaporates gigantically and continuously from warm oceans and an equally humongous amount of evaporated water condenses in the form of rain as temperatures fall. A small amount of this rain falls on 25 per cent of the planet’s surface which is land mass. Even this is not uniform but depends greatly on prevailing winds, local temperatures and the presence of elevated areas in the land mass. A very favoured condition concerning these variables is called the monsoon and has led to India becoming the most populous country in the world today.

Nature jealously guards its supplies of freshwater, sensing that humans instinctively seek this precious commodity, hiding it in regions that are either too cold or too difficult to access: the polar ice caps, the Siberian permafrost wastes, and the tropical jungles of Africa and South America for example. The Great Lakes are another enormous reservoir of freshwater but let us not forget that they are found in an area that was largely uninhabited till 300 years ago. So, was North America ever intended for habitation by so many people in an ecological sense?

The small volume of freshwater left over has sustained civilised life over the past several millennia beginning with the river valley civilisations in tropical and subtropical Eurasia. Milder climates and favourable conditions for the cultivation of cereals have driven a disproportionate mass of humanity into a rather small land area, a cornucopian quadrilateral defined by say Baghdad, Jakarta, Tokyo and Samarkand.

Geography defines history and barring an accidental interregnum over the last 600 years, when the scene of action moved to Europe and North America, major world events have occurred only within this aqueous quadrilateral. Present indications are that the future too belongs to these old areas, India, China and their hinterlands. Not many realise that the Tibetan highlands are the source of say a dozen or so legendary rivers that feed 80 per cent of humanity today. He who controls Tibet controls the world, as water becomes less of a “taken for granted” and more of a valuable commodity. India has been defined as the land of the seven sacred rivers, even as we wonder why the sombre Krishna and the mighty Brahmaputra are not included in these seven. Water is life. One of the sacred seven has since dried out and a once prosperous Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation, possibly the oldest in the world, has now been reduced to a desert.

As I write this, India has captured the choke point of Pakistan, when it finally cut off the flow of the Ravi river to that country utilising its full share as per the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. That water-starved neighbour of ours is at present in very poor shape—as of now, salt water has intruded upstream from the Sindhu delta mangroves, due to reduced flows and its river beds not being desilted. After the water supply from the three eastern tributaries has been cut off, it is estimated that the Sindhu will gradually become saline for at least 50 km inland, causing widespread famine. Water has become a geopolitical weapon. Will Lahore, situated on the banks of the Ravi, become a ghost city even as its main source of fresh water has been compromised?

Traditionally, cities have sprung up along rivers and grown and prospered. The river not only gave life but facilitated communication. When the water dried up, the city evaporated too-Fatehpur Sikri and Daulatabad have humbled great kings. The Ganga-Yamuna plain has seen the zenith of intellectual growth in parallel with huge demographic growth. It is no wonder that India commanded a third of the world’s GDP in 1800. Even today around a tenth of humanity lives in a narrow stretch of the Ganga-Yamuna basin 100 km wide from Delhi to Kolkata. This area is still ecologically sustainable because its rivers are perennial, and watered by the melting snows of the Himalayas.

Peninsular India however, depends upon the caprices of the monsoon and rain-fed irrigation. All the southern states, barring possibly Kerala, face water shortages of one type or another. Most of Tamil Nadu is in the rain shadow and the people here had over time designed an elaborate system of storage tanks, anicuts and channels for a steady supply of freshwater. This was sadly, and possibly deliberately, destroyed by the British in the early 1800s which led to massive devastation and famine. Water shortage in Tamil Nadu is a fact of life today. Coming to Andhra, till the Cotton Barrage came up near Rajahmundry in 1852, the waters of the massive Godavari would disgorge completely unutilised into the Bay of Bengal. Today, this area has become the rice bowl of India. A visionary plan to connect the waters of the Godavari and the Krishna put forward by KL Rao in the 1960s was consigned foolishly to the dust.

In this context, I return to my city of residence and will question even the reason for its continued existence. It should not be forgotten that the Bangalore of yore was a tiny outpost of the British in the early 1800s and that the Maharaja of Mysore preferred to have the “friendly” British resident situated conveniently 130 km away from his royal capital, in itself nicely slaked by the munificent Kaveri. The pleasant climate in Bangalore, situated as it is,1000 metres above sea level, meant that the British succumbed to this outpost readily and escaped there at the slightest opportunity from the stultifying heat of the plains.

The city, however, has never had a water supply of any reliable sort. It depended on lakes and the further the lake, the further the water had to be pumped, defying gravity, upwards to the higher elevation of the city. Today in Bengaluru, 1.4 crore people peer downwards into deeper and deeper borewells for sustenance—yet another silly-con game for our own silicon valley. Piped, treated water for the populace remains a pipe dream.

Considering that it will still be another 25 years before the population of the world peaks, and that, for all the reasons delineated, peninsular India will be one of the worst-hit areas in the global water lottery, there is an urgent need for politicians, administrators and urban planners to reverse the inward migration into Bengaluru from other parts of the country and indeed the world. For, Bengaluru has been, rightly or wrongly, given the label of a happening, high-tech city where the latest innovations in the world of computers and AI will be seen. All this hyperbole ignores and selectively overlooks the basic fact known to us from the dawn of history where there is no water, there is no life.

And we have Daulatabad and Fatehpur Sikri as precedents. And Ozymandias and the Ancient Mariner for poetic truth.

For the reader: “Adam’s ale” is an epithet and colloquialism for unadulterated water, alluding to the fact that Adam had only water to drink in the Garden of Eden. Variations include “Adam’s wine” in Scotland, and simply “Adam”.

The author is an Emeritus Professor in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and is the author of Bharat: India 2.0 published in 2021. He has an H-index of 104. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost_’s views._