Parched India awaits monsoon rains as reservoirs run dry

Mumbai — Millions of Indians are desperately awaiting overdue monsoon rains as they struggle to secure drinking water amid a heatwave that is rapidly drying up reservoirs and sending temperatures soaring across the country.

India typically witnesses water scarcity during summer months, but the situation in 2019 is particularly grim in western and southern states, which received less than normal rainfall in the 2018 monsoon season.

“I wake early to get water from a well outside the village, as within three hours the water runs dry,” says Ramchandra Pawar, a farmer from Latur district some 500km southeast of Mumbai in the drought-hit western state of Maharashtra.

The drought has ravaged crops, killed livestock, emptied reservoirs and hit city dwellers and supplies to some industries. Hardest hit are the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, along with Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the south and Madhya Pradesh in central India.

Depleting reservoirs have forced some municipalities in Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad to cut supplies to ensure water lasts until the arrival of the monsoons.

In total, key reservoirs in western India were at 11% of their overall storage capacity on Thursday, compared with 15% a year ago and a 10-year average of 19%. State governments have deployed tankers to ease water scarcity, but people complain there are not enough.

“Tankers supply water only once in a week. The rest of the week, we have to carry water from a borewell where hundreds of people queue from early morning,” said Zeenat Shaikh from Latur, a city with population of about 500,000.

Maharashtra is using 6,209 trucks to supply water to 15,426 villages and hamlets, four times the fleet it sent out in 2018, said a senior state government official.

“Tanker requirements are going up every week as reservoirs are depleting,” the official said.

As government supplies are not enough, people are buying water from private tanker suppliers, and the price is rising with demand. In the southern city of Chennai, where many well-known IT companies are based, the price of a water tanker has nearly doubled in two months to 4,000 rupees ($57), media reported.

Gautham Prithvirajan, 27, who lives in Chennai, said nobody in his street had been able to get clean drinking water despite drilling 105m into the ground, a situation he says he has not witnessed in years. The shortage had been exacerbated by private vendors digging deep into the water table, he said.

“We are planning a protest later this week. Calls to rectify the situation have gone unanswered,” he said.

Indians now hope the annual June-September monsoon rain will also bring down temperatures that have shot up above 45ºC in many parts of the country.

But there are fears it could deliver lower rainfall than normal, according to a private forecaster Skymet.

Typically, the monsoons hit Kerala's southern coast on June 1, but could be delayed until June 6, the state-run India Meteorological Department has warned.

“We badly need a good monsoon this year. We lost crops last year and incurred losses,” says Gorakh Patil, a farmer from Beed district in Maharashtra, who has been staying for the past three months at a cattle camp where the state government provides free fodder and water.

Reuters