Heard of something called Minor Irrigation?

May be not. If we learn from China’s grim lessons on water, we will front-page this ministry’s doings often.
With most towns and cities sucking up groundwater at an alarming rate, it looks like India will face a major water crunch if we don’t price that resource, within the next decade. Apart from, of course, vast tracts of land being ‘reclaimed’ for the clamour of urban needs like housing. What most of us don’t realise is that these—supposedly—’unproductive’ tracts are havens for a rich variety of flora and fauna that form a vital link in the food chain that humans are also part of. But there is hope if we learn from others’ mistakes.
The Guardian reported recently from Beijing that more than four–fifths of the wetlands along northern China’s biggest river system have dried up because of over-development.
Fifty years ago, the Haihe river and its tributaries formed an ecologically rich area that included 1,465 square miles of wetlands. But in the years since, the expanding mega–cities of Beijing and Tianjin have sucked much of it dry. The wetlands have now shrunk to 207 square miles.
Conservation officials blame the decline on excessive exploitation of the Haihe—one of China’s most polluted waterways—and the damming of the major tributaries.
In January this year, water conservation was identified as a national priority in the government’s five–year plan. Water supply for China’s 1.3 billion population is at less than a quarter of the world’s average. The situation is even bleaker further north, such as on the Liao river delta, in north–east China’s Liaoning province, where farmers regularly harvest the dried–up reed beds. The near–permanent drought is worsened by the expansion of urban city populations and the encroachment or desertification.
The annual water shortage in the basin of the Haihe and two other major rivers—the Yellow and the Huaihe—is estimated to be more than 15 billion cubic metres at present. By 2010, this shortfall is expected to rise to 28 billion cubic metres. With reservoirs drying up, the authorities have turned to increasingly desperate measures, including cloud–seeding and ever deeper ‘mining’ of groundwater.
So much has been extracted that the water resources ministry says more than 90 rivers, including the Yellow River, run dry for part of the year and 70 per cent of water supplies are contaminated.
Compared to the 1950s, nearly a thousand lakes have disappeared and the nation’s wetlands have shrunk by 26 per cent.
The extent of the dry–up was apparent last year, when a week–long blaze destroyed 6,667 hectares of wetland in the giant Zhalung nature reserve. No one had imagined a fire would be a problem in what historically was a marshy area.
Will India make the same mistakes in its mindless race for economic growth at the cost of its environmental health is a question that will haunt us for some time to come. Are there lessons here from these stark realities of China that we can learn from, and shore up the country’s own water reserves?
Ministries in state governments that manage minor and major irrigation works are never given enough attention. Most urban politicians don’t understand the grave implications of ignoring priorities in these portfolios. The vast network of tanks in India, for instance, and the staggering amounts that are wasted in the name of allocations for rejuvenation, restoration and even creation of such water reservoirs, are handled with little expertise, and even poorer management skills.
There are just these few voices in the wilderness, confined mostly to segments of readers such as those limited few that the serious media such as Xover reach, which can do little to bring such fundamental change to the process of water management.
Will these calls remain just the lament of a few, or will the elected and the appointed bureaucrat make that much-needed concerted effort?
Maybe time will tell.
—Xover team