Today
India a country located in western Asia has double the population of united states while the size of the country itself is about half the size of united states. Today over 21% of india’s diseases are related to their water and only 33% of the country has the access to clean water this means 97 million Indians lack access to safe drinking water.India is the largest user of groundwater after china.
India will reach critical condition or draining of their groundwater soon an about 20 years because of the population growth and the overuse of groundwater for as their main water supply. Accurate data shows every second woman in rural India walked an average 173 km to fetch potable water in 2012 making her trek 25 km longer than what it was in 2008-09. As a result in 2012 about 54% of rural women had to travel between 200 meters and five kms daily to get drinking water. They walked 20 minutes in a day on an average and spent another 15 minutes to get clean drinking water. Every second rural woman spending 210 hours in a year for fetching water also meant loss of 27 days of wages for these households Which this also represents not being able to pay for food or shelter and other expenses. About 80% of the country's drinking water needs are met by groundwater that is highly contaminated. The NASSO statistics reveal that less than 10% of rural Indian households have the facility to treat water before consuming. The Problem is that not that only that india doesn't have water but its more that the water in india is not drinking water and its extremely expensive to treat that water for the population drinking use. Today in the list of 122 countries rated on quality of potable water, India ranks a lowly 120.The ground reality is that of the 1.42 million villages in India, 1,95,813 are affected by chemical contamination of water. The quality of groundwater which accounts of more than 85% of domestic supply is a major problem in many areas as none of the rivers have water fit to drink. 37.7 million People –over 75% of whom are children are afflicted by water borne diseases every year. Nearly 6 million children below 14 suffer from dental, skeletal and non-skeletal fluorosis.Arsenic is the other big killer lurking in groundwater putting at risk nearly 10 million people.Often babies die of dehydration and there are major fights in villages for freshwater. Some villages have seen 80% migration due to high salinity.
What Lead India to what it is today?
The indians have found ways to gain more water by extracting the water from the ground to grow crops. India had a plan to clean the Ganges River to get fresh and clean water. In 2010 India extracted 251 billion cubic meters of groundwater for the people to drink instead of the bad water that they were drinking. Filtering and cleaning the water was very expensive for the government and was very time consuming. The population is going to use too much of the water and it will cause an end to growth of population so that they could keep drinking water. India set a plan to clean the Ganges River in 25 years to add to water resource. India was running out of fresh and clean water quickly and they had to do something about it.
Vision of Tomorrow
The solution ... is reaching for help from The Water Project, and send them our donation so they can build water purification facilities in regions of India that have no substantial source of clean water. The first step is to divert a river to have a substantial amount of water coming in to purify. We will have to divert the river into the center of the region that is in need, so we can evenly distribute it to all the people. Then we will re-divert the water from the central point to all the separate towns, which will all have their own water purification facility. Many of these areas have had trouble with water in the past and still do today, but with enough funding, we can fix it for good.