|
|
 |
 |
 |
| Wednesday, 24 March 2004 |
 |
|
 |
Features | |
| News Business Features Editorial Security Politics World Letters Sports Obituaries
|
Rivers in distress Ground realities by by Tharuka Dissanaike The world worries about water. As we look back on yet another Water Day (last Monday, in case you didn't notice) we are (at least we should be) filled with a sense of foreboding. The earth's population is a huge burden on its water resources. This water we have to share not just among the over six billion people living on the planet, but also with all forms of natural life-trees, birds and animals that inhabit it. With the population set to increase by at least another two billion in the coming two decades, it is going to be a huge challenge to meet everybody's needs. People need water for drinking, washing and industries. But far, far more water is consumed by the way of food. Agriculture 'eats' up water in unimaginable quantities. Global estimates- something like 2000-5000 liters of water per person for a single day's food production- are stunning and worrying. Now, scary figures are thrown at us. Will we really face an acute shortage of fresh water in a decade? Will rivers continue to decline and droughts increase? Will there come a time when only the rich will be able to afford clean water, a legacy of the developing world's continuing obsession with privatizing water supplies? Monday's Editorial in this newspaper put out some startling figures of water consumption. It said that some US$ 35 billion is being spent yearly on procuring bottled, sanitized 'mineral' water for drinking. This is a phenomena not confined to the richer countries of the world but one that is increasingly common even in countries like ours, where access to clean, potable water is sometimes compromised by pollution, low-levels of ground water and high urbanization in areas that do not have good sources of drinking water. Imagine the net worth of the water market- and what a promising future it has. In Sri Lanka, except in the arid north, there are no rivers that run dry. Nor do our rivers regularly break their banks in a fierce surge of flooding. But what nature has created benign, we humans abuse and destroy. Many of our rivers, our inland water courses, urban lakes are badly polluted. We may not have reached the levels of acute industrial poisoning that happened in the US Great Lakes in the 1960s but pollution is a sad testimony to our ingratitude to the very rivers that sustain us. Urban rivers like the Kalu, MahaOya, Kelani, Walawe are especially bespoilt exactly at the locations where it provides for urban water needs. The Beira, Bolgoda, Colombo's canal system and Kandy Lake are fouled with human waste, which leads to eutrophication. Nuwara Eliya's landmark Lake Gregory is so silted and filled with weeds that SriLankan Airlines new air taxi services could not find a spot to land on it. Arresting this pollution and neglect may be the job of various diverse state and provincial authorities designated with protecting the environment. Many of us are pained to see rivers and lakes in this state but after all, it's someone else's job..... While industrialists are not without guilt, much of our water course pollution comes from domestic sources and farms. Anyone looking at the gurgling splashing Mahaoya at Mawanella will not imagine that this water is acutely polluted with human excreta. Ironically people divert their toilets to the river and then bathe downstream, secure in some vague notion that flowing water has the ability to self-purify. River courses are diverted for agriculture and power generation. Anyone objecting to this type of tampering is labeled 'anti-development' and even 'radical' . But there is little being done to arrest the shameful waste of water that goes on in agriculture. The Agriculture Department's half hearted attempts at promoting drip irrigation and protected agriculture is not making any deep dents in the demand for more water for cultivation- water that is now scarce and has to be practically 'stolen' from the trees, animals and other life forms who share this ecosystem with us. An Indian development worker is quoted saying that 'Water is the dividing line between poverty and prosperity." In our rivers we have such wealth. Let's not systematically kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
Produced by Lake House |
