Water – Makes or Breaks Societies

The power of water is such that no nation or entity can fight it forever, and this is the main reason why water has always influenced the peace & stability on our planet. In the near future, the richest people and countries will be classified on the basis of the amount of water they own or control and not on the basis of the size of the land they
occupy, the industries they run or other assets that they possess.

Just as the energy from the Sun or nature’s forces like cyclones, hurricanes or earthquakes cannot be divided and are for all people to share and bear likewise the air, snowfall, rivers, rain and the groundwater are indivisible and its abundance or lack thereof are destined to be shared by all, be it for good or bad.

The UN has declared access to clean drinking water as a basic human right. Any attempt to control water as a social, economic or political tool goes against the principles of humanity and encroaches upon fundamental human rights.

One individual or entity thus cannot be permitted to appropriate a resource that belongs to all, especially the most important resource for life – water.

Surface and groundwater are public resources which should be managed by public entities. Since, water is as shared resource for all people in a region it needs to be handled and allocated by public institutions and agencies of a government of the people. A government chosen by the people is finally responsible to look after the needs of the people.

When the control of water is designed to benefit individuals or companies, as the recent events in California have showcased, few become rich and in the clatter of their
riches, the voice of so many water-starved people goes unheard.

In order to maintain peace & stability in any country, the administrative authorities from the local communities in the villages right through to the state and national levels must ensure the safety of its water resources and stock. It is essential for the state to make clean water available to all its citizens, without jeopardizing the availability of this resource to future generations.

Just like the Police acts as a government’s primary agency for maintaining law & order and is tasked with apprehending criminals, the water management agencies bear the vital mandate of safeguarding and controlling access to our most important shared resource. And just like the Police does not to merely publish the annual statistics on crimes committed, the water management authorities cannot merely collect data or keep on only classifying locations with depleting water resources as critical.

The water management agencies have to maintain a strict vigil on the water table in a region. With the help of advanced telemetry, these agencies should monitor the monthly depletion of the water table and undertake aggressive and proactive actions to stop it.

Such proactive actions to reduce groundwater depletion include installing new artificial water recharge structures to restore more water than that being extracted. These actions additionally include constant silt removal efforts to prevent sedimentation from reducing water holding capacity of ponds, lakes and reservoirs.

Through such measures, the water management agencies can report to the public about their the availability of water and also help establish a proper balance between water extraction and renewal so that the water table is not allowed to decline.

One thing is for sure – the demand for water will never decline, rather it will continue to rise due to many reasons – the biggest of them being, rise in human population and increased livestock. This factor by itself requires expansion of agricultural activity,  additional infrastructure and other human activity – all of which call for consuming more and more water every year.