Pralay without Paani: Battling the water crisis in India
Pralay without Paani: Battling the water crisis in India
From the Mayan
to the Mohenjo-Daro-Harappan, water has always determined the fate of great
civilizations, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A nation which
fails to protect such an invaluable resource is destined to fail. In today’s
age water must be considered as the single most valuable national asset and
must be uncompromisingly protected. India today faces exigent circumstances
wherein its fresh water sources are being depleted or, more alarmingly, falling
prey to pollution. From the burning and frothing lakes of Bangalore [1-2] to
the dry water basins of Chennai [3], India’s water crisis is not a mirage but a
noiseless emergency!
Water is life!
Sustaining India’s burgeoning population requires acceptable water quality for the
entire populace at an affordable cost. The crisis is a two-pronged problem involving
both quantity and quality. Increased demand through population growth and
changes in rainfall patterns due to climate change will inevitably result in disproportionate
distribution and availability of fresh water across the country. However,
measures like water recycling, rainwater harvesting, afforestation, and minimizing
loss during transport can potentially alleviate improve this problem.
Unfortunately, the issue of water quality does not have the same ‘in-your-face’
urgency as something like water scarcity! The often-invisible nature of water pollution
presents severe challenges for those attempting to create societal awareness
about such problems. Moreover, the cumulative effects of water pollution are
often overlooked or misunderstood. Such ignorance of the mortal danger posed by
fresh water scarcity puts us in the same situation as the frog, who when put in
a slowly heated water bath is unable to realize the imminent danger and stays
in the water bath even when water starts to boil and eventually dies.
Many experts
suggest that the collapse of the western Roman empire was expedited by lead
poisoning [4]. Although the Romans excelled at water engineering, their
prolific use of lead for water transport and wine making led to cases of
neurological diseases and even death.
Modern
industrialization has rendered lead as merely one of the several invisible
poisons that might be lurking in your glass of water! Available data suggests
that Indian fresh water systems are heavily polluted – many times that of their
global counterparts. For example, pollution data vis-à-vis heavy metal
concentration in sediments of the Ganga, indicate alarmingly high levels of
metal content in our beloved river (see figure; Figure credit Mr. Biswajit
Panda, IISc). Everyone should be worried about these results. First and foremost,
for all metals, Ganga has higher levels than the world average. Carcinogens
such as Cadmium (Cd) are almost 10-fold that of world-average, while lead (Pb)
is a 100-fold higher concentration than that of cleaner fresh water sources. In
India, unregulated industrialization, urbanization coupled with inefficient and
unsustainable agricultural practices are contaminating our fresh water bodies
to an extent that they will soon become unusable. The impact of pollution is
omnipresent. From the surface reservoirs like rivers and lakes to deep
underground water, every drop is being contaminated. A pralay [5] is
coming, and in this parlay there is no drinkable and usable water.
Water for
domestic and agricultural use must meet globally accepted benchmarks of purity
standards. Modern India faces serious challenges in ensuring safe water for everyone.
The agents of pollution are varied and complex ranging from industrial waste
like petroleum products and heavy metals, to agricultural waste like pesticides
and fertilizer derived nutrients.
Water
pollution issues that we face today are complex, and cannot be alleviated using
short-term jugaadist ideas. In this regard, some of the strategic issues revolve
around the: (1) difference in residence time of contaminants, where
residence time is defined as the average time the contaminant will spend in
solution before being segregated in a solid phase or being broken down to a
non-toxic form; (2) some contaminants are bio-accumulated, (organisms
preferentially concentrate contaminants in their bodies resulting in pollutant concentrations in the organisms that
are much higher than the water in which they live. More importantly, these
elements can be biomagnified, that is to say from one trophic level to the next
their concentration increases); (3) how quickly the contaminant is transported
without being chemically or biologically altered. In short,
reaction-resistant and non-biodegradable pollutants like heavy metals and
nutrients leached from fertilizers have a greater potential to impact
environmental and human health for a longer duration time and must be addressed
with alacrity.
Battling this
gargantuan asura [6] of pollution will require herculean effort from all
sectors of society with our scientific establishments playing a leading role in
this modern Mahabharat. Research labs must meticulously investigate and make informed
decisions regarding technologies that demonstrate potential to transition from
the laboratory bench to full-scale environmental application. There are possible
candidates! For example, a potentially scalable solution to environmental
protection is bio-remediation, a strategy that can be utilized to mitigate a
diverse range of environmental issues. Bio-remediation is an umbrella term that
refers to a suite of technologies that employ “either naturally occurring or
deliberately introduced microorganisms to consume and break down environmental
pollutants, in order to clean a polluted site”. For example, the Deepwater
Horizon disaster (May 2010) resulted in the release of approximately 4-5
million barrels of oil and 1011 grams of natural gases into the Gulf
of Mexico [7]. It is the largest marine accidental oil spill in human history [8].
The immediate impact of this oil spill was catastrophic to the marine and
coastal ecosystems of Gulf of Mexico. However, within a few months the
ecosystem was beginning to recover and in less than five years much of the
ecosystem has been restored. It wasn’t magic! A small fraction of this oil
spill was mitigated by direct human intervention wherein the bulk of the oil
was either volatilized by photochemical reactions or was broken down by
bacterial activity. Thus, nature has provided us with means to address
pollution issues by applying biological tools at our disposal.
The authors’
own labs are actively involved in investigating green technologies that can be
potential game changers with respect to water pollution remediation. The image below
shows a bacteria (green) which is undergoing a process of slow biocalcification
(Image credit: Dr. Tanushree Ghosh, University of Alberta). In this process,
the bacteria leads to calcium carbonate precipitation, which can sequester
carbon dioxide and even harmful pollutants from water, thus effectively removing
them. While research and development will continue, there is an urgent need for
policy makers to realize that environmental pollution is an acutely non-linear
problem and understanding it requires sustained monitoring strongly coupled
with R&D in both conventional and unconventional spheres. Pollution is a
long time-scale events requiring sustained high-fidelity monitoring, where
universities and other academic institutions take the lead in dispassionate research
into the impact of pollution on our fresh water supply. There needs to be
substantial societal awareness of this issue so that deliberate and effective policy
formulations can be enacted.
Pralay sans
paani [9] is upon us. To escape the disaster scientific
intervention, at a scale that is too little and too late, we have to act now.
References and
Notes:
4.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/04/scienceshot-did-lead-poisoning-bring-down-ancient-rome
7. Dubinsky, E.A., Conrad, M.E., Chakraborty, R.,
Bill, M., Borglin, S.E., Hollibaugh, J.T., Mason, O.U., M. Piceno, Y., Reid,
F.C., Stringfellow, W.T. and Tom, L.M., 2013. Succession of
hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental science & technology, 47(19),
pp.10860-10867.
8. King, G. M., J. E.
Kostka, T. C. Hazen, and P. A. Sobecky. "Microbial responses to the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill: from coastal wetlands to the deep sea." Annual
review of marine science 7 (2015): 377-401.
9. पानी;
potable water
Disclaimer: The article expresses the
personal opinion of the authors.
About the authors: Dr. Sambuddha Misra is an Assistant
Professor at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He tweets at @ MisraSambuddha
Dr. Aloke Kumar is currently an
Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He tweets at
@aalokelab
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