A STUDY ON WATER SCARCITY
~~Lekshmidevi
E O, Jilu Mathew, Akhil Viswanath~~
INTRODUCTION
Water scarcity is
the lack of sufficient available water resources to meet the demands of water
usage within a region. It already affects every continent and around 2.8
billion people around the world at least one month out of every year. More than
1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Water scarcity involves
water stress, water shortage or deficits, and water crisis.
While the concept of water stress is relatively new,
it is the difficulty of obtaining sources of fresh water for use during a
period of time and may result in further depletion and deterioration of
available water resources. Water shortages may be caused by climate change,
such as altered weather patterns including droughts or floods, increased
pollution, and increased human demand and overuse of water.
A water crisis is a situation where the available
potable, unpolluted water within a region is less than that region's demand. Water
scarcity is being driven by two converging phenomena: growing freshwater use
and depletion of usable freshwater resources.
Water scarcity can be a result of two mechanisms:
v physical (absolute) water scarcity and
v economic water scarcity,
Where
physical water scarcity is a result of inadequate natural water resources to
supply a region's demand, and economic water scarcity is a result of poor
management of the sufficient available water resources.
Some
of the major reasons for water scarcity are:
v Inefficient use of water for agriculture. India is
among the top growers of agricultural produce in the world and therefore the
consumption of water for irrigation is amongst the highest. Traditional
techniques of irrigation causes maximum water loss due to evaporation,
drainage, percolation, water conveyance, and excess use of groundwater. As more
areas come under traditional irrigation techniques, the stress for water
available for other purposes will continue. The solution lies in extensive use
of micro-irrigation techniques such as drip and sprinkler irrigation.
v Reduction in traditional water recharging areas.
Rapid construction is ignoring traditional water bodies that have also acted as
ground water recharging mechanism. We need to urgently revive traditional
aquifers while implementing new ones.
v Sewage and wastewater drainage into traditional
water bodies. Government intervention at the source is urgently required if
this problem is to be tackled.
v Release of chemicals and effluents into rivers,
streams and ponds. Strict monitoring and implementation of laws by the
government, NGOs and social activists is required.
v Lack of on-time de-silting operations in large water
bodies that can enhance water storage capacity during monsoon. It is surprising
that the governments at state levels has not taken this up on priority as an
annual practice. This act alone can significantly add to the water storage
levels.
v Lack of efficient water management and distribution
of water between urban consumers, the agriculture sector and industry. The
government needs to enhance its investment in technology and include all
stakeholders at the planning level to ensure optimization of existing
resources.
OBJECTIVES
v To find out the availability of water resources for
demostic use
v To provide necessary awareness on water crisis and
importance of saving water
v To ensure the purity of drinking water
v To understand the role of climate change on water
shortage
v To ensure about various water harvesting methods
houses, ie rain water harvesting methods
HYPOTHESIS
v Abuse of water resources would be the cause of water
scarcity
v Climate change also contribute to water scarcity
METHODOLOGY
As a part of two yuear B.Ed course we conducted a
survey on the topic Water Scarcity. It was conducted among 30 families in rural
areas using questionnaire inorder to find out the water scarcity problem.
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
Our results shows that 95% of the families selected for the
survey are affected by water scarcity. Yet everyone have well facilities at
their own home, or nearby houses, 90% of the wells are drained during summer
season.
Careless use and management of water at household activities
enriches the depth of water scarcity. Each individual use drinking water for
various activities including indoor and outdoor activities like, personal
hygiene, showering and garden watering respectively. This reduces the clen
water or drinking water availability to large extent
Major findings regarding the domestic water usage can be
summarized as follows
|
TYPES OF USING WATER
|
NUMBER OF FAMILIES
|
|
· Paying for drinking water
|
22
|
|
· Using pipe water for brushing
|
25
|
|
· Using drinking water for uses other than drinking
|
24
|
|
· Using shower water
|
20
|
|
· Provide rain water harvesting methods
|
14
|
Ø Pie-diagram showing the percentage of household
depending on different sources of drinking water during water shortage
CONCLUSION
From the pie-diagram it is clear that 60% of the
families depending upon pipe line facilities of the government. 25% and 5% of
households depending on mobile water service system and bore wells respectively
for drinking water, and 10% of the families get well water during water
shortage. From the data it is clear that , availability of drinking water is at
a tragic condition even at rural areas.
Our hypothesis was that the abuse of water resources
would be the cause of water scarcity, which indicate mankind himself would be
the reason behind it, and climate changes also contribute to water scarcity
The survey report also do support my hypothesis .We
think the survey we did went smoothy and we had noproblems during the
collection of information. The project highlights various ways of domestic use
of water. Although the people are aware about the importance of water
preservation most of them abuse it in one way or another . In addition to these
, climate changes also lead to water scarcity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
