Burness Global: Stories

Fresh water tanker (credit: Preeti Singh)

On a stiflingly hot day at the end of May, the tour company’s blissfully air-conditioned Suzuki SUV slowed down to a stop along a dirt road leading to our destination, a water-side resort on the coast of Kerala, near the southern tip of India.  What could be the trouble?  Broken down car, livestock lingering in the road, plain old traffic?

It was a traffic jam, but one that consisted of a shiny TATA tanker truck parked in the narrow lane, dozens and dozens of plastic buckets and curved steel pots of all sizes, and people who seemed to be racing against time to make sure every one of those containers in the road was filled with fresh water.

I’d spent the previous few days marveling at the amount of water everywhere I looked in Kerala, from the extensive backwaters on which the tourist houseboats motored toward evening thunderstorms that wet the landscape but provided no escape from the humidity.

I had seen a pair of women doing laundry on the stone steps that occasionally cut the canal wall down to the water’s edge, the stones convenient for rubbing the soap deeply into the clothes and the water for rinsing afterward.

I’d seen an elderly man bathing on another set of canal steps once the sun started to set and it no longer seemed so pointless to take a chance on cleanliness.

I myself had found huge bottles of chilled, filtered water ubiquitous in roadside shops and restaurants.

But to see people scrambling for water?

Containers for water (credit: Preeti Singh)

Although I had a million questions—Why wasn’t there infrastructure for tap water? How often did the truck come? How much did this cost them? What did they do if they ran out?—I waited, silently watching until the road cleared, to keep forging ahead to the resort that didn’t lack for a single amenity from a swimming pool to hot showers.

But this nagged at me. Later that night, I Googled safe drinking water in Kerala and learned that although this state gets three times more rainfall than the rest of India, topography allows 40 percent of it to flow into the sea. Growing population pressure means the remaining amount of water is insufficient to meet people’s needs.

But through World Bank funding to the state government over the last many years, communities were to devise and manage their own water supply schemes. More than 3,000 of these projects were reported as of 2008.

I can now hope that the seemingly desperate scene I encountered was actually a home-grown solution to provide safe drinking water in the community. And I hope it wasn’t the symptom of a terrible natural resource and infrastructure crisis driving the poor to suffer unimaginable illness and thirst.

The only certainty I do have is that staying in my air-conditioned cocoon didn’t, and of course couldn’t, yield the answers to my lingering questions.