At first glance, water appears to sparkle almost everywhere in India.
In the remote northeastern state of Meghalaya, some 38 feet of rains a year—an astonishing 460 inches—submerge the jungle hills during the monsoons, eventually replenishing the Brahmaputra River. Once the Brahmaputra joins the fabled Ganges on India’s agricultural plains, the combined outflow of the rivers surges to the third-largest discharge in the world. Even in desert spaces like Rajasthan, thousands of water wells reflect hidden caches of rainwater glinting up from their dark recesses. And yet, when you inch on foot through such landscapes, taking a closer look, a more ominous picture emerges: India is drifting inexorably into the worst water crisis in modern history.
During 2018 and 2019, I walked roughly 2,400 miles across the north of the country, from the Pakistan border to Myanmar. I spoke to hundreds of farmers along the trail: men and women who help feed a population of 1.3 billion people, or about one in every six people on the planet. Within minutes, water worries—often desperate ones—percolated into every conversation.
Troubled bounty: A lush wheat field in Punjab obscures the ecological costs of industrial farming in much of India—emptying aquifers and water tables polluted by agricultural runoff. A new interactive map designed by the Out of Eden Walk's partners at Esri plots Salopek's route across the Indian subcontinent.
Paul Salopek
In the fertile breadbasket of Punjab, wheat farmers complained of over-pumped water tables and increasingly erratic droughts strangling their harvests—a trend that is stoking mass out-migrations of rural young people.
On the main trunk of the Ganges in eastern Bihar state, entire villages had all but given up fishing; an ill-conceived dam—one of an estimated 5,000 stoppering the country’s rivers—had wiped out the hilsa, a staple fish species.
And in the yellow-sand deserts of Rajasthan, drying wells were growing increasingly polluted by toxic levels of fluoride—some leached from natural mineral formations, and from other sources linked to fertilizers and brick kilns. The result: bodies twisted by joint deformities.
One encounter lingers in mind, typical of many.
A hot white sun burned a hole in the sky above the Thar desert of Rajasthan. The day was 115 degrees Fahrenheit. I was refilling my empty water bottle from a remote well when a thin old man appeared.
“Hah!” he shouted angrily.
He was an arid-land farmer, hanging on by a thread. His meager rainwater was collected in the well. He thought I was going to waste one drop to wet my face. His name was Brijlal.
“We are like guests on the this land. Like the night traveler who stops at the inn. We are like that,” Brijlal said, bidding me to use the water sparingly, against thirst only. “Our time to move on will also come.”
River activist Siddharth Agarwal measures fluoride and other toxin levels in village wells in the arid state of Rajasthan. A new interactive map designed by the Out of Eden Walk's partners at Esri plots Salopek's route across the Indian subcontinent.
Paul Salopek
Two years ago, the Indian government commissioned a landmark national study that revealed a panorama not unlike Brijlal’s bleak assessment.
As many as 100 million Indian urbanites may be sucking their cities’ groundwater supplies down to zero this year, the report concluded. About 200,000 Indians are currently dying annually because of inadequate access to clean water—more than all the victims claimed so far by the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
Walking across northern India for 17 months, following its “river roads” through communities where millions live, it was impossible to escape this unprecedented water reckoning. Now, a new interactive story map designed by our partners at Esri plots the scale and complexity of that looming disaster.
Arati Kumar-Rao contributed to this story.
Editor’s note: Online Roundtables
On Thursday, July 23, at 10 a.m. EST (7:30 p.m. IT), join photographers John Stanmeyer and Camilla Ferrari, environmental documentarians Arati Kumar-Rao and Siddharth Agarwal, journalists Priyanka Borpujari and Prem Panicker, and writer Paul Salopek for the second of three “Walking India” Zoom roundtables. This will be a conversation about India’s natural environment.
The third roundtable: July 30, at 10 a.m. ET | Walking India: Covering the Human Environment.
River activist Siddharth Agarwal measures fluoride and other toxin levels in village wells in the arid state of Rajasthan. A new interactive map designed by the Out of Eden Walk's partners at Esri plots Salopek's route across the Indian subcontinent.
Paul Salopek
Two years ago, the Indian government commissioned a landmark national study that revealed a panorama not unlike Brijlal’s bleak assessment.
As many as 100 million Indian urbanites may be sucking their cities’ groundwater supplies down to zero this year, the report concluded. About 200,000 Indians are currently dying annually because of inadequate access to clean water—more than all the victims claimed so far by the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
Walking across northern India for 17 months, following its “river roads” through communities where millions live, it was impossible to escape this unprecedented water reckoning. Now, a new interactive story map designed by our partners at Esri plots the scale and complexity of that looming disaster.
Arati Kumar-Rao contributed to this story.
Editor’s note: Online Roundtables
On Thursday, July 23, at 10 a.m. EST (7:30 p.m. IT), join photographers John Stanmeyer and Camilla Ferrari, environmental documentarians Arati Kumar-Rao and Siddharth Agarwal, journalists Priyanka Borpujari and Prem Panicker, and writer Paul Salopek for the second of three “Walking India” Zoom roundtables. This will be a conversation about India’s natural environment.
The third roundtable: July 30, at 10 a.m. ET | Walking India: Covering the Human Environment.
