Environmental Issue Investigation: Water in India

Student name: June

 

This scientific report talks about water scarcity in India. As India’s growing population increasing sharply, economic develops rapidly and agriculture needs water a lot, these factors aggravate India water crisis. First, the purpose of this research is to identify how to improve water quality and what action the government could take. I found the information online. The finding section mentions the water situation in India is really bad and the future is not optimistic. In the discussion, I talked about my findings again and listed some solutions which were found online to address water stress, for instance, government should encourage citizens to save water. In conclusion and recommendation section, I conclude the whole ideas and provide one research limitation for this report.

The purpose of the research is to analyze water scarcity in India and propose some suggestions to remit this issue. An action plan will be worked out at last. Fresh water is very scarce in the world because 97% of the water is saltwater which means only 3% is fresh water. People use fresh water for agriculture mostly. Furthermore, people need 20 to 40 liters of fresh water every day for drinking, cooking and sanitation needs. It is obvious that human needs high fresh water demand and it seems hard to reduce it. Rivers and lakes in India had been polluted with chemical contamination like fluoride and arsenic. These toxic substances had been caused many diseases on children. In order to make the water clean again, India should adopt secondary treatment since India was not that rich. Aquatic ecosystem is really important to the environment because it not only can purify water quality but also provide habitats for wild life. My hypothesis is to address India’s water crisis, the government should improve water quality and educate people to conserve water.

Firstly, I researched the root causes of India water crisis online and then came out of three points. Secondly, solutions could be put forward as soon as the causes were found out. The internet had shown a mass of solutions to address India’s water woes and I picked some of them in this scientific report. I researched the assistance offered by international organizations as well. I also investigated the new technology which could conserve fresh water in India. The sources of information were chosen by the suffix of URL was org. or after I read the article and I made sure it was academic and useful for my report. I research this information at the same time so I am sure I researched equally.

India accounts for only 4% of the world’s water resources, but it needs to feed 17% of the world’s population. It is estimated that India will become a water-stressed nation in 2020.India has lower supply of water and requests higher demand of water. One of the key fresh water issues in India is unsafe and impure water. Although India had improved their drinking water, the World Bank figured out that 21% of India’s diseases were caused by dirty water. Over 1,600 deaths happened per day because of diarrhea. Another key fresh water issues in India that I had found was the loss of surface water. “Once surface water is exhausted, people dig to find more water. Groundwater levels across 4,000 wells studied by the authors have receded by 54% in the last seven years.” (Dutta, 2015) The study below with a picture illustrating that 80% of the surface water in northwestern India had been run out. Water is going to be exhaustible in the near future in India. ( http://qz.com/353707/india-is-already-facing-a-water-crisis-and-it-is-only-going-to-get-worse/)  The decreasing groundwater levels mean water is becoming scarcer for people to dig and acquire. Therefore, water stress is a troublesome issue for Indian farmers to overcome. The third key fresh water issue may be waste water. In order to address this issue, India must educate people to store water and how to dam. They need to change their way of washing dishes since they wasted most of water in this case. Next, they can save their leaking water in their homes and other public areas. According to the picture above, only less than 10% locations of India is in low supply. Most of the areas in this picture had shown that the northwestern India and south were facing serve water shortages, which Accounts for 54% of the proportion of the total.

The findings were successful in light of the hypothesis. The intention of my hypothesis was to certify the two proposals. One is to clean water and another one is to conserve water resources. I had done appropriate interpretation in the finding section. Let’s put it in this way, India’s water crisis could be divided into many causes, including man-made pollution, wasting water and natural factor such as the loss of groundwater in northwestern India for the using of agriculture. India is not a big country but it has a large growing population. Therefore, Indian government should increase the water supply but people also need to decrease water demand. In order to clean water quality, India government needs to adopt the secondary treatment to improve. Meanwhile, people need to be imparted how to conserve water in their daily life.

To conclude, the likelihood for success of the proposed solution would be really high since the solutions were not quite tough for Indian to solve water crisis at present. The government should educate people to conserve and impure water as soon as possible. The research barrier is we could only research English version websites instead of Chinese version. Some detailed information, news and articles were not supposed to be used which means I may miss some useful points. Regrettably, it seems that this problem cannot be addressed because Chinese version websites are not allowed to be used in academic research report in GAC course. Some further research such as recently how India treats water problem and how effective these solutions are could be done.

Sonia, L. & Amrita, K. (2013), “India’s Water Crisis: Cause and Cures” NBR [Online]. Available from:

     http://www.nbr.org/research/activity.aspx?id=356 [Accessed 28^th Sep. 2016]

Debu, C. (2013-16), “Water crisis in India- problem and its solution” MapsofIndia [Online]. Available from:

     http://www.mapsofindia.com/my-india/society/water-the-next-looming-crisis [Accessed 28^th Sep. 2016]

THE WIRE STAFF,(2016), “India’s Water Woes, in Five Charts” THE WIRE [Online]. Available from:

     http://thewire.in/29746/indias-water-woes-in-five-charts/ [Accessed 28^th Sep. 2016]

The Importance of Freshwater (2004), Uni Assignment [Online]. Available from:

http://www.uniassignment.com/essay-samples/environmental-sciences/the-importance-of-freshwater-resources-environmental-sciences-essay.php [Accessed 5^th Oct. 2016]

The Importance of Fresh Water(2010), Editorials [Online]. Available from:

     http://editorials.voa.gov/a/the-importance-of-fresh-water-88867567/1481752.html [Accessed 5^th Oct. 2016]

Understanding the Aquatic Ecosystem (2012), Aquatic Ecosystem.org [Online]. Available from:

http://aquaticecosystem.org/understanding-the-aquatic-ecosystem/ [Accessed 6^th Oct. 2016]

Key freshwater issues, WWF [Online]. Available from:

     http://www.wwf.org.uk/what_we_do/rivers_and_lakes/key_issues/ [Accessed 6^th Oct. 2016]

The Water & Sanitation Crisis in India (2016), water.org [Online]. Available from:

     http://water.org/country/india/ [Accessed 6^th Oct. 2016]

Saptarishi, D. (2015), “India is already facing a water crisis- and it is only going to get wore” QUARTZ [Online]. Available from:

http://qz.com/353707/india-is-already-facing-a-water-crisis-and-it-is-only-going-to-get-worse/ [Accessed 8^th Oct. 2016]