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Indian Farmers Sell Precious Water to Tourists
In the popular tourist town of Kanyakumari on India's southern coast, local farmers have found they can make more money selling their water to tourist hotels and restaurants than using it to grow crops.
By GSReport
Start Date: 3/10/99
In the popular tourist destination of Kanyakumari on India's southern coast, local farmers have discovered that they can make more money selling their water directly to tourist hotels and restaurants than using it to grow crops. It means a short-term economic windfall for any farmer willing to draw down his own well water and pipe it to town. But in the longer term, it could spell disaster.
The booming tourist trade of Kanyakumari threatens to suck up all the available water in the region. Water is sold in shops by the bucket or the bottle. It is delivered every day by pipelines, in tanker trucks, and even on the backs of poor peasant women who walk miles to fill bottles from small streams, then trek them to town.
As a result, the water table of the area is dropping rapidly, so much in some places that brackish seawater is filtering into the fresh water aquifers.
In many other parts of India, for varied reasons, the story is the same -- water tables dropping by as much as three feet per year. In a nation that will soon have a billion people, the implications are ominous. Without water, farmers will not be able to grow crops.
It would be possible, experts say, to create a nationwide system of rainfall catchment tanks that could substantially reduce the impending water crisis. Many parts of India get a great deal of rain, but almost nowhere is there a systematic effort to collect it. In some places, old catchment structures date back to the 7th or 8th century AD, but they are poorly maintained, often filled with debris and not cleaned for years.
Bad management is also blamed for the fact that, in the town of Ramanathpuram, 250 miles north of Kanyakumari, the Indian government spent billions of rupees to set up 14 desalination plants, but only one is functioning today. The rest are out of order due to poor maintenance.
Potential solutions do exist for India's impending water crisis, but only if national and local leaders coordinate an all-out effort to meet the demand before catastrophe strikes.
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