7.30 a.m.

"Thud! Clank! Thump!"
A cacophony breaks out at the corner of the street—making young Chandru, who was dozing peacefully as he waited for his school bus to arrive—jump out of his skin! As if this was not enough—there is a burst of screaming voices hurling the most colourful gaalis at each other. "Ooff...the water tanker has entered Phoolrani ki Basti…its early today", he mumbles to himself.

It happens everyday. Phoolrani ki Basti is a slum cluster next to the high rise building where Chandru lives. Every morning a tanker bearing water arrives—and triggers off a mini riot among the people who live here. Women, children, men—young and old—carrying pots, buckets, cans (just about any container available!) make a beeline for the vehicle, pushing and abusing each other. Yet, not all of them manage to get their share. Chandru has watched the crowd from his balcony on many Sundays. He has seen the tanker drive out…leaving behind empty pots and angry women. The amount that the tanker brings in is obviously not enough for the people of Phoolrani ki Basti. So the race to ‘get to the tanker first’ takes place everyday. It’s more like a battle, really. A bitter one, sometimes leading to broken limbs and bloodied faces.

But today, as Chandru stepped into the school bus, a thought crossed his mind. Didn’t his father call in a water tanker to fill up the underground reservoir in his building the other day? He had heard his mother complain about the money they had had to pay for that. "We pay the government every month for water, and we still need to cough up an extra amount for tankers!" she had said. "Why is the municipal supply so erratic?".

Water Rights
who owns?

Right to water is actually right to life and livelihood. Of course, we cannot live without drinking it. You already knew that. But did you also know that water is the driving force in the economic growth of a nation? Farmers, industrialists, professionals and traders in every field need water to survive. No wonder ‘water rights’ is the most hotly debated topic in the world today. Let’s see where India stands on this front…

Water literate…by tradition
Our ancestors realised the importance of managing water wisely much ahead of the rest of the civilised societies. You see, in India it was critical to get the water equation absolutely right. Why? Because rainfall in India is seasonal. In most parts of our country it rains for about 200 hours in a year! And our lands are made of hilly terrains or large tracts of arid plains or heavily flood-prone regions. A huge amount of rainwater flows off unused during the monsoon and once the season ends, the land becomes dry. So the people who first inhabited the Indian subcontinent learnt that they needed a very finely balanced system of water supply and distribution to run a healthy economy. And that rainfall had to be captured where it fell...locally.

They prospered. Throughout the first millennium, India was the richest country in the world…and the Europeans were making desperate attempts to reach its shores.

Who owned water then? Well, the kings knew that agricultural prosperity would earn them revenue. So they built tanks, wells and canals. But they encouraged local communities—ordinary people—to manage the structures. Every village functioned like a little republic. The village assembly set down rules for sharing and distributing water, and also had the authority to punish anyone who dared to defy. History proves that very efficient local water management systems were set up in various parts of India in as early as the 4th century BC.

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