How water and waste are becoming inseparable

IN a rather wonderful though ironic twist of seasonal behaviour, 'Winter Proper' arrived in north India this year on Basant Panchami, which marks the first day of spring. One wonders what Percy Bysshe Shelley would have said of this anomaly, given his famous line "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

This time, though, winter caught up with spring in a display of festive solidarity — the yellow of mustard swayed brightly under the pristine white of mountain snow. The much-needed moisture finally freshened the air and rejuvenated the land, ending one of the longest dry spells that the Himalayas have witnessed in recent decades.

But for all its celebratory ethos, the idea of 'washing away' simultaneously embodies a somewhat unsettling impulse, especially when viewed through the lens of our crisis-prone era. The fact that year after year we need rainwater to 'wash away' the gigantic smog-blankets throttling our capital and nearby cities says something about our exceptionally selfish dependence on nature to solve human-made problems. It brings to mind many other images from our years of growing up: from using more water than necessary for cleaning private cars to dumping everyday waste in canals and rivers as if it is the most natural thing to do.

Here, then, is another irony. That what was always regarded as the 'elixir of life' is now invariably also interpreted as a crucible of our collective egotism. If at one point in history, holy rivers were supposed to wash away our sins, today they accumulate them, serving as silent witnesses to an existence gone awry.

Who can forget those haunting images of dead bodies floating in the Ganges during the Covid pandemic or the persisting visuals of the toxic Yamuna in Delhi, with its lethal froth and foam resembling snow? There is no denying that water and waste have assumed a shocking synonymity with each other in the present age.

It's only the first month of the year, but the unholy coupling of water and waste has already defined the news several times. It hopped into the headlines when Indore, India's 'cleanest city', suddenly spewed forth hundreds of hospitalisations and over 15 deaths due to sewage-contaminated drinking water. Soon after, reports on sewage-related water contamination began emerging from Greater Noida, Hyderabad, Jhajjar and Rohtak while Gandhinagar revealed a typhoid outbreak. A few days ago, a new overhead water tank, constructed at a whopping cost of Rs 21 crore, at Tadkeshwar village in Surat, Gujarat, collapsed during its very first water-filling test.

But one mustn't look at these examples in isolation. They form a part of an ongoing continuum of technological ineptness and slapdash development that has beleaguered the country for a very long time now.

Last year, during the Chhath Puja festivities, authorities in Delhi created fake ghats on the Yamuna banks by propping up borders between filtered-water pools and the real river. And in 2024, three UPSC aspirants lost their lives to heavy flooding in the illegal basement library of a coaching centre in Delhi's Old Rajinder Nagar.

Waste, in this context, doesn't only refer to the defilement of our most celebrated natural element, but also to the decaying of the imagination responsible for generating infrastructure around it. Undoubtedly, the stunting of both vision and inventiveness lies at the heart of this growing crisis. And like all crises, this too manifests itself in a multipronged manner, where dealing with one department in the hope of some solution leads us to another division, area or issue. The blame is everyone's and no one's, and passing-the-buck becomes the norm, with apathy and indifference quickly assuming the order of the day.

There is also a societal amnesia at work. It makes us forget the people who have worked hard to elicit change. They include GD Agarwal, later known as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand, who lost his life in 2018, fighting for the cleaning and protection of the Ganges. An 86-year-old environmentalist and a former professor at IIT Kanpur, Swami Sanand breathed his last after a 111-day fast in Haridwar. Prior to him, Swami Nigamananda Saraswati had passed away in 2011 after fasting for 114 days, protesting against illegal quarrying in the same river.

Recent viral reels on social media centred on sacred water bodies have drawn attention to the liberal amounts of milk being poured into them in the name of religious practice. While on the surface, one encounters a preponderance of platitudes on living hygienically and caringly, in reality, the majority — including the government — hardly appears genuinely interested in addressing the issue sustainably.

My small village in the Kangra Valley, for example, has repeatedly faced resistance by many residents who are against the idea of drain expansion outside their houses. This is a necessary step for the establishment of a properly networked system, but it is also something that is hugely 'repulsive' to the imagination of a significant number of people for purely parochial reasons.

But no matter how much we exhort individuals to change, for a country as big as ours, models for long-lasting transformation must primarily be provided by the government and bureaucracy in charge. And for these models to take shape, a thorough understanding of the society's material and emotional make-up must be acquired in an interdependent fashion.

Templates from other countries too are available to learn from, but only if we are actually willing to shed our wilfulness. Otherwise, instead of becoming a reality, potable water and healthy rivers shall only flow in the realm of dreams.