Water, water nowhere

Striking? Well, it ought to be. There is a huge scarcity of water everywhere, and yet there is no judicious use of it. Instead, the powers that be are only making a mess of it. Not only is water being diverted for different purposes without any prioritization, there is clearly a huge conspiracy to hand over the extremely important natural resource to corporates at negligible cost. Not just in villages, even in cities there is a clear discrimination in favour of the rich as opposed to the poor. In areas that receive water from the municipality, the water first reaches the flats, thanks to an illegitimate way of putting the pipes in an inclined way. The not so well to do residents in ordinary dwellings suffer from lack of water, even as the rich have water for luxurious purposes like gardening (which is only for show off and not proper kitchen gardening either).

This article from The Hindu only reinstates the extent of mismanagement of water :

The HPC in its 21 meetings which were analysed gave speedy approval without following any norms, the report said. The bulk of the allocations, 46 per cent were reserved for industries and 54 per cent for drinking water and domestic use, belying the popular notion that industries got very little water from dams. The largest chunk of water for domestic use —16.94 per cent went for drinking water to big and small cities and gram panchayats. Mumbai, Pune, Navi Mumbai, Nashik and Nagpur were the beneficiaries while only 1.75 per cent went to gram panchyats. Of the industrial allocations, thermal power plants received the largest amount of water — a whopping 64 per cent, MIDC 19 per cent and SEZ 14 per cent.

Forty-seven companies benefited from water allocations and of this 12 companies or one-fourth of them got 90 per cent. Of the 15 thermal power plants which benefitted, 13 were private power companies including Sofia Power Company (India Bulls) Amravati, India Bulls Mega Power plant, Adani, Lanco, apart from two National Thermal Power Company plants in Nagpur and Solapur. Of the industries, three private companies– Reliance got eight per cent, India Bulls -17 per cent and Adani 7. 7 per cent of the water allocations. Prayas notes that HPC gave the highest benefits to private companies and clearly the dam waters instead of going to farmers went to industries or cities.