Last year, Marathwada saw excessive rainfall. In the 30 years I have grown up here, I had rarely seen anything like it.
Cut to this year, and we are once again struggling for drinking water.
At some point, we have to stop blaming nature for everything and ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.
What did we do with all that water?
The moment a good monsoon arrives, we celebrate and then rush to plant water-intensive crops like sugarcane. We need to seriously rethink our cropping patterns. A region that repeatedly faces water scarcity cannot keep making agricultural choices as though water is unlimited.
Then look at our farms. Over the years, the trees along the edges of agricultural land have steadily disappeared. Almost every inch of land is being used for cultivation. But agricultural land also needs trees, vegetation and healthy soil to slow down runoff and allow water to seep into the ground.
Marathwada already has very little forest cover, and districts like Latur have even less. When heavy rain falls on a landscape with inadequate vegetation and poor watershed management, a large amount of that water simply runs off instead of staying where we need it.
This is why we need village-level watershed management, not just when there is a drought, but every single year.
Every village should have a plan to capture, recharge and store as much rainwater as possible. Existing wells and water bodies need to be revived. Runoff needs to be slowed. Groundwater needs to be recharged. Cropping patterns need to reflect the water available.
We cannot keep treating every monsoon as a completely new event.
And honestly, getting drinking water from tankers cannot be the definition of water management. Walking kilometres to collect potable water every day is a stone-age solution to a problem that requires modern planning.
Water security cannot be the government’s responsibility alone either. Every farmer, household, village institution and local body has to participate in storing and conserving the water that falls on their land.
Rainfall will always be unpredictable. That is precisely why our water management cannot be.
The question is no longer whether it will rain. The question is: when it does, will we be prepared to hold on to it?
