India's daunting challenge: There's water everywhere, and nowhere
It is the villagers of Rajasthan. They watch us pass in the hot light of the Thar Desert. We are unwashed, covered in coarse dust, darkened by sun: charred scarecrows trudging across India with a cargo donkey. Local people mistake us for vagabond performers, traveling quacks, circus nomads. They believe we are sorcerers. The answer to their question is: Yes, of course. We carry magic. But then, so does everyone.
It lies in water.
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The world’s second most populous country, home to more than 1.3 billion people and a landscape defined by iconic rivers—the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and all their mighty tributaries—now teeters at the edge of a water emergency with unknowable consequences. Roughly a hundred million people in 21 Indian megacities, including Delhi, Bengaluru (Bangalore), and Hyderabad, may gulp their last groundwater dry by the end of this year. Farmers in northern India’s Punjab, an important Asian breadbasket, complain that their relentlessly overpumped water tables are dropping by 40, 60, even a hundred feet in a single generation. And the problem doesn’t end with supply. Pollution in the form of industrial waste, urban sewage, and agricultural runoff has poisoned entire river systems. In total, some 600 million people—roughly half India’s population—live without enough clean water. Meanwhile, 20 million human beings are born every year in India, each requiring water to live.
I trek for nearly a year and a half across the river plains of northern India. I plod over concrete highway overpasses, balance atop railroad bridges, and sit on my pack in tippy canoes, navigating river after river. There are hundreds. Each one, according to Hinduism, is sacred—a deity even. (The Ganges, or Ganga in Hindi, is a pale goddess depicted with as many as four arms, riding a crocodile.) The future of India churns within their silty currents.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/08/indias-daunting-challenge-there-is-water-everywhere-and-nowhere-feature/
