Water Crisis

Interesting article in the New Yorker about the water crisis, the last drop confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe by Michael Specter. Here is an .audio interview.

A person needs fifty liters of water a day, the Indian government provides forty. Americans consume 400-600 liters of water per day. In the slums of new Delhi, women line up early in the morning waiting for water tankers to arrive. The slum residents spend a larger percentage of their income on water, much more than other people, whose homes are connected to municipal pipes.

Delhi gets fewer than 40 days of rain each year. India has to sustain 20% of the worlds population with less than 4% of the worlds water.

When you cannot get enough water from the surface of the water, the only two alternatives are to pray and to dig. In India, Africa and china people are digging for their water. As the population increases, the freshwater reduces, and people begin to dig deeper. If they drill too deep, saltwater and arsenic can seep in.
Diseases like cholera, typhoid, and malaria are caused due to sewage in drains, clean water helps to keep drains clean of sewage.

Most countries subsidize water to its citizens. This makes people not value the water they get, and often waste it. Urbanization causes diet changes, leading to more people eating meat, which requires more water. India by following western eating habits is abandoning native dietary tradition which includes a variety of grains. The indian government promotes crops like rice and wheat which use the most water.

The author seems to suggest that the most effective way to control water is to build dams. Another option are desalination plants, that separate freshwater from salty sea water. For this there are two methods distillation which requires a lot of fuel, to evaporate water and remove salt and impurities. Another method is reverse osmosis, where water is forced at high pressure through a series of tightly wrapped membranes so that water molecules, which are smaller than impurities and salt pass through.

By conserving water and pricing it more realistically we can reduce our needs. Agriculture requires a lot of water, but until the sixties, the California vineyards did not use drip irrigation, now 70% of the vineyards are watered through this system, which applies water directly to the roots of the crops

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