No Water, Drink Urrak? -Soter

 Lead Article published in oHeraldo on May 22, 2023

Summers in Goa are fast becoming distressing and agonising for Goan households which are solely dependent on piped PWD water supply. The water from many traditional wells in developing localities is rendered unfit for human consumption, due to groundwater pollution from sewage and destruction of local natural water bodies, resulting from indiscriminate real estate and industrial development. Several households are now dependent on bottled water to meet their daily needs. Unfortunately, the issue of water rights, equity and justice is still not a priority for Goans.

The debate over water scarcity cleverly beats around the bush by targeting the safety of drinking water supplied by tankers, but stops short of demanding a freeze on mega housing projects, swimming pools and commercial projects in villages till the needs of potable PWD water to existing households are sufficiently met. While people struggle with frequent power outages and scarcity of drinking water, there is talk about the government mulling on a proposal to increase the FAR in villages adjoining urban areas. The Town and Country Planning agencies are aiding the desertification of Goa by irrational zoning changes and increase of FAR in villages, least bothered about the fallouts on basic public amenities.

The lack of transparency and accountability in governance has brought about a situation wherein the consumption demand far exceeds the carrying capacity of existing infrastructure for providing basic public facilities like electricity, drinking water and waste disposal. The new township of Porvorim has now begun surviving by literally stealing the water resources from the hinterland region. The water from the Tillari irrigation project which was meant for agriculture is now diverted for drinking purposes. For the last one decade 24-hour water supply to households was being promised. This bluff has now been watered down to an assurance for 4 hours of daily water supply. While the nation stares at a possible water scarcity by 2025, ministers in Goa keep making lofty and unrealistic promises which, as in the past, may never see the light of the day.

The most recent order of the Hon’ble High Court directing the PWD to release at least three hours of water supply daily, in response to a letter petition from the residents of a colony in Dona Paula, definitely gives a ray of hope to suffering citizens. But, this is not the first time that the HC has seen the need to intervene and remind the PWD about the fundamental right of citizens to get regular drinking water. A letter petition from aggrieved citizens of Porvorim, which was admitted as a PIL in 2010, had also seen then Executive Engineer, Div XVII of the PWD, committing to the court that ‘water will be supplied to the residents for one hour daily, save in exceptional situations.’ What ultimately happens is that some other areas will be deprived of their water supply to comply with the court orders, until such time that the noise from those deprived areas becomes too loud to escape attention.

Once the court petitions are disposed of, it does not take long for the ministers and the PWD to slide back into playing merry go round and hide and seek with the public on the issue of drinking water. From damaged and bursting pipelines, to breakdown of pump sets, power failures or maintenance work, it’s a rotating and recurring phenomenon of restricted water supply on one pretext or the other, even during the monsoons. The seasoned and corrupt government machinery has enough tactics to create ‘exceptional situations’ to deny water supply or play down the water crisis.

The latest appeal from the Goa Water Resources Minister, asking the public to bear with the water scarcity this year, as the 250 million litres per day (MLD) water storage project to supply water to North Goa district is to be completed in the next 10 to 15 months, may probably be another of those empty dreams of ‘acche din’ sold by successive ministers in the last three decades. No sooner such assurances on augmentation of water reservoirs are given by the government, more land conversions and building projects will get approved and ultimately the outcome will be zero improvement.

While the minister assures that there will be no water scarcity by 2025, in the same breath he claims that after 2024 some areas may still face problems until the Sal water treatment plant is ready. This assurance is contrary to the preamble in the Goa Water Policy 2021 which states that ‘though the Water Resources Department (WRD) has the jurisdiction for overall development and management of water at source, it has no control on regulating the demand and use.’ When the WRD Minister admits a shortage of water in several areas of North Goa, how did the PWD Minister recently give an assurance that every household will receive four hours of water supply daily from April 15 this year?

The water crisis is a huge business in Goa, very similar to those experiences of corruption in drought prone regions which are narrated in P. Sainath’s book ‘Everyone likes a good drought’. It requires no rocket science to understand that overstretched and overloaded public water and power distribution systems are bound to collapse now and then. From personal experiences of almost four decades in the struggle for the fundamental right to regular piped water supply in Porvorim, there is hardly any doubt that the government’s uppermost priorities are about boosting real estate and tourism instead of providing adequate drinking water for household consumption. The day is not far when the Goa government may turn around and say, ‘no water, drink Urrak’.

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