Water, Water Everywhere... Nor Any Drop to Drink. Wailed the Thirsty Mariner!

Water

“Water, water everywhere… nor any drop to drink.” wailed the

thirsty mariner!

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Assignment by Group 4:

Dhanya | Farhan | Karthik | Praveen Kumar

Sripriya | Vignesh P | Vignesh V

The times we live in this is a rant that we hear often, both in the rural and urban

landscape. Water is unquestionably a resource that is precious, life giving and

scarce. This resource that is essential to both agrarian and industrial growth is,

like everything else in nature, not equally distributed. That is why we see

countries that are water rich but sparsely populated and vice versa. There are

huge belts in the world that are water deficient or water stressed. The

management of this resource then becomes all the more urgent and

imperative. Water can be viewed from all the four approaches to economics:

Scarcity, Wealth, Welfare and Social.

The management of water when it is scarce is riddled with all sorts of economic

and moral questions. For instance, the Narmada project that started with the

intention of irrigating the barren regions of the country, led to widespread

protests because the burning question was “development at what cost?”.

Closer home, water sharing of the river Cauvery still remains unresolved.

The welfare aspect of the resource is intricately related with that of wealth. Water

and energy (read wealth) go hand in hand. You need one in order to access or

harness the other. So inadvertently we are moving towards an era where only if

you are affluent you will have access to clean water. This is where the positive and

progressive role of the corporates come in. Companies are taking their social

responsibility much more seriously and “Sustainable Development” as a

concept is the need of the hour.

The social aspect of water is far reaching than what meets the eye. The drought

hit villages see a total crumbling of family and social structures. There are