![]() The crisis is global and growing, but remains largely out of sight and out of mind. But we do know that the reserves are being emptied. Nobody knows how much water is buried beneath our feet. Who will feed India when the water runs out? The revolution is living on borrowed water and borrowed time. Researchers estimate that a quarter of India's food is irrigated with underground water that nature is not replacing. India now produces enough food to feed all its people the fact that many Indians still go hungry today is an economic and political puzzle, because the country exports rice.īut that may not last. Once a country of widespread famine, India has seen an agricultural revolution in the past half century. In India, the water is being taken for industry, for cities, and especially for agriculture. We are mining water now that should be the birthright of future generations. The water tables are falling, the wells have to be dug ever deeper, and the pumps must be ever bigger. We are emptying these giant natural reservoirs far faster than the rains can refill them. That is water stored by nature in the pores of rocks, often for thousands of years, before we began to tap it with our drills and pumps. As we pump more and more rivers dry, the world is increasingly dependent on subterranean water. Except during droughts, this is true for water at the surface. However much we waste and abuse it, the rains will come again and the rivers and reservoirs will refill. We are used to thinking of water as a renewable resource. It is a trade that is growing all over India-and all over the world. So the factories had taken to buying up underground water from local farmers. The reservoir was nearly empty most of the year. But the Kaveri was now being pumped dry by farmers and industry farther upstream. The factories once got their water from a giant reservoir on southern India's biggest river, the Kaveri (see picture). Ponnusami and his neighbors were selling water to dyeing and bleaching factories in Tirupur. We are all trying to make as much money as we can before the water runs out." Why not go back to real farming before the wells run dry? "If everybody did that, it would be well and good," she agreed. We drilled two new boreholes a few weeks ago and one has already failed." But, she said, "every day the water is reducing. "While the water lasts."Ī neighbor told me she does the same thing. "It's a good living, and it's risk-free," he said. He sold every tanker load for about four dollars. I don't have to do anything except keep my reservoir full." To do that, he had drilled boreholes deep into the rocks beneath his fields, and inserted pumps that brought water to the surface 24 hours a day. Ponnusami explained: "I no longer grow crops, I farm water. The driver dropped a large pipe from his vehicle into the reservoir and began sucking up the contents. And as we chatted, a tanker drew up on the road. The source of his wealth, he said, was a large water reservoir beside his house. He had a TV, a car, and a maid to bring him drinks and ensure his traditional white Indian robes were freshly laundered every morning. He was not rich, but for the owner of a two-acre farm in the backwoods of a developing country he was doing rather well. Suresh Ponnusami sat back on his porch by the road south of the Indian textile town of Tirupur. This piece is part of Water Grabbers: A Global Rush on Freshwater, a special National Geographic Freshwater News series on how grabbing land-and water-from poor people, desperate governments, and future generations threatens global food security, environmental sustainability, and local cultures. With a drumbeat of facts both horrifc.and fascinating.the former New Scientist news editor documents a 'kind of cataclysm' already affecting many of the world's great rivers.To learn more about global water wars, watch Parched. This is that rare thing - a journey through a hugely important and complex subject in the company of a natural storyteller who makes you feel intelligent." - Tim Smit "Of all the travel books I have ever read this is the most frightening, the most inspiring and the most important.A book every politician must be made to read and understand." David Bellamy "Environmental journalist Fred Pearce's book, When the Rivers Run Dry could not be better timed" - Robin McKie The Observer ".Pearce argues powerfully that unless mankind can rethink its whole attitude towards the use and misuse of resource, the consequence could be famine, pestilence and even war for huge numbers of human beings." - Trevor Grove Daily Mail "Veteran science writer Pearce (Turning Up the Heat) makes a strong - and scary - case that a worldwide water shortage is the most fearful looming environmental crisis. ![]() "If ever a book has been written that demands to be read it is this one. ![]()
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