Opinion: Droughts and floods: India’s water crises demand more than grand projects

Bhaskar Vira (Department of Geography and University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute) discusses ways of dealing with the crisis affecting India's water resources. India is facing one of its most serious droughts in recent memory - official estimates suggest that at least 330m people are likely to be affected by acute shortages of water. As the subcontinent awaits the imminent arrival of the monsoon rains, bringing relief to those who have suffered the long, dry and exceptionally warm summer, the crisis affecting India's water resources is high on the public agenda. Unprecedented drought demands unconventional responses, and there have been some fairly unusual attempts to address this year's shortage. Perhaps most dramatic was the deployment of railway wagons to transport 500,000 litres of water per day across the Deccan plateau, with the train traversing more than 300km to provide relief to the district of Latur in Maharashtra state. The need to shift water on this scale sheds light on the key issue that makes water planning in the Indian subcontinent so challenging. While the region gets considerable precipitation most years from the annual monsoon, the rain tends to fall in particular places - and for only a short period of time (about three months).