A severe water crisis is expected

“Dear Community, this is to inform you of the water scarcity that Auroville is facing. And though there is still water flowing from our taps, it is important to know that many of our supply wells are showing depleted levels, some are already dry. The summer is still ahead and there is a need of action from all of us to assure our water needs.”

The Town Development Council Interface Team, April 2019

The Auroville Town Development Council (TDC) has declared Water Security for Auroville to be its priority and has called on all Auroville residents “to become very, very conscious in our use of this valuable resource,” stating that “Water is Life!”

This is not the first time that the alarm bells about water scarcity are sounded. Over the years, Auroville Today has published many articles about the need to secure our water needs. Many solutions have been studied. In February 2007, we reported about a proposal to set up a central water organization for a large area around and including Auroville. In March 2013, we reported on the proposal of Auroville’s Centre for Scientific Research to capture surface rainwater and use it as a fresh water supply for the Auroville city. In the June-July 2014 issue we reported on other proposals ‘to tackle the drought’. And many more articles have appeared since.

But what effectively has been done? According to Gilles Boulicot, one of Auroville’s water experts who has been living in Auroville for the last 25 years, the answer is a depressing “almost nothing.”

The emergency, he says, has been building up for years. “But no strategy has ever been decided by the community and successive TDCs have not acknowledged the situation or taken adequate actions: most investments have been on water supply systems. But where is the water to be supplied? In fact, the community has been sleeping over it and probably will only wake up when the tap runs dry. Worse, the water budget for the last financial year has been substantially reduced to hardly anything. There were many reasons for this, but the bare fact remains: access to water is no longer secure. To top it, an Auroville Water Master Plan doesn’t exist and neither a plan of action of what to do in an emergency.”

Gilles is skeptical about the call of the Town Development Council ‘to be conscious of our water use’. Promoting water saving measures such as installing drip irrigation systems and water saving showers is all very well, he says, but they are no more than drops on a hot plate. “Even if all of Auroville would stop pumping groundwater, it would not change the scenario. For around Auroville, more than 6,000 wells supply water from the same aquifer. Auroville is a minor water user. While the efforts made by Auroville to recharge ground water are very valuable, the extraction by far exceeds the recharge. Groundwater levels are going down and will continue to go down.”

Emergency measures

We are in crisis; wells are falling dry. Two years ago, Auroville faced a similar threatening situation. Then, everybody managed somehow. But today, says Gilles, the situation is worse. For the groundwater level on which all of Auroville depends is now much lower than two years ago and it keeps gowing down.

What emergency measures can be taken? The best wells of Auroville are situated in the Aspiration and Auromodèle areas, but Auroville does not own the lands connecting these communities to the city and there is a village in between. In the absence of a pipeline connecting these wells to Auroville, the only option is to use a small fleet of water tankers and start ferrying water to places where the wells have run dry.

Gilles mentions the situation in the Residential Zone. “Auroville’s largest collective water distribution system which serves 42 communities and about 1,000 people is the ‘elephant’ water tank in the Residential Zone. It gets its water from five bore wells which are located in the same area and tap into the same aquifers. One well is now out of use as the water level has dropped too much, another is full of silt. So only three wells supply the system, but meanwhile more buildings are being constructed. That’s not great. Ideally, we should connect other wells to this system. The problem is that nobody wants to share ‘their’ water. The concept of mutual benefit is not understood.”

He gives the example of the Matrimandir, which is Auroville’s largest water user. It has three wells and large underground storage facilities, but the executives have so far refused to share ‘their’ water. “The Water Group is in discussions to convince them to use recycled water instead of groundwater for their gardens. This is possible as a few months ago a centralized wastewater collection system for eight communities in the Residential Zone was finally completed [a video on this system can be seen at https://vimeo.com/331749431, eds.] The black and grey wastewater is collected, treated, and recycled. It is redistributed to the eight communities for their garden use and the excess water is collected in a 200 m3 storage tank close to the Matrimandir. If the Matrimandir could start using this recycled water for their gardens, their wells could be connected to other distribution systems and be used for drinking water purposes. This would require an overhaul of Matrimandir’s water distribution network, but I do not think there is much choice, especially if you consider that they plan to build new gardens which will also require a lot of water.”

Interconnecting wells is also a priority need in other areas of Auroville. If funds would be made available, says Gilles, we could within a time frame of two years develop more reliable supply networks, e.g. in Centre Field and Aurodam areas, in the Cultural Zone, in the Industrial Zone, the Service Area and in Auromodèle.

The missing Master Plan and the need for water governance

The lack of vision and agreement on what is to be done is now harming Auroville. There has, in fact, never been a coordinated effort to look at the Auroville water situation and take the required action. The cupboards of the TDC are full of studies, but what are missing is an Auroville Water Master Plan and a ‘water authority’ which not only approves the plan but also is charged with implementing it. Otherwise, says Gilles, we’ll have yet another document gathering dust in some cupboard.

“There is no strategy, no plan of action, no group in charge,” he says exasperatedly. “I am concerned because I know the situation is alarming. But the level of awareness in Auroville is extremely low. How can any group approve a new building when its water supply cannot be secured? How can we convince people that they do not ‘own’ their well and have to share it with others? Which group is in charge of metering and maintaining Auroville’s 176 wells, and which group will replace leaking underground supply systems which Auroville has aplenty? Who tells someone that he’s using too much water? Which group takes responsibility for regularly testing the water availability and quality of our wells? Who in Auroville warns the residents that the water of their well is turning acidic or contains e-coli bacteria? Who advises about proper home purification systems? The community has to get its act together, constitute a group, give it a mandate and authority, and allocate funds for all these issues!” It’s a good thing, he says, that the Auroville Water Group, constituted by the TDC, is making tentative efforts in this direction.

The coastal situation

Auroville’s best wells are in the Auromodèle and Aspiration communities close to the sea. This is strange considering that all around this area sea water intrusion into the aquifer is happening at an alarming rate. Gilles points at a map of the region which shows in an ominous red-brown colour the large area where salinisation of the groundwater has been recorded. “The borders of this map are an approximation as we have insufficient information about what’s going on exactly. In the Cuddalore area south of Auroville, salinity has been found as far as 15 kilometres inland. One reason is that many agricultural wells pump water 24/7 [the Tamil Nadu government has exempted farmers from paying for electricity for farming, eds.]” Other reasons are prowling urbanization, infrastructure development, uncontrolled pollution, and lack of sanitation facilities. All these are contributing to an increasingly fragile eco-system.”

The area between Auroville and the sea is somewhat better off, most probably due to Auroville’s reforestation and rainwater harvesting efforts. Yet, the ground water level in the Auromodèle area is also going down. For many years it was at sea level, but since a couple of years, it is below. This hasn’t yet affected the water supply as the groundwater storage there is very deep, but salinisation is bound to happen. Auroville’s beach communities are already affected. The saline ground water at the Quiet Healing Centre is now purified using a small reverse osmosis plant. This will become necessary for the other beach communities in future.

Alternative sources of supply

As we can no longer exclusively rely on groundwater, we need to develop alternative sources of water supply. These are recycled wastewater, harvested rainwater and, as a last resort, desalinated water.

Waste water treatment installations are not new to Auroville. There are 65 of them in operation, 62 as stand-alone systems for single houses or community, two with shared facilities as well as the largest one for the eight communities mentioned earlier.

As most of the wastewater is treated but not recycled, there is a large scope for improvement.

Rainwater harvesting in the urban area offers even more opportunities, says Gilles. “Urban areas generate massive runoff. Perceived as a nuisance in urban areas, runoff is actually a precious resource. The idea is to catch rainwater as much as possible and use it for all purposes. As underground storage is prohibitively expensive and we have to develop rainwater harvesting on a large scale, I have proposed we store it in the open, by creating bio-swales and open storage tanks in the urban landscape, starting in the Residential Zone where the density is relatively high.

The water only needs filtration treatment before being distributed in the existing supply network or through a separate one. This alone would reduce the fresh water requirements by 75%. This idea is not new: It was used in urban centres of India during the Harappa civilization period some 5000 years ago. What is new is to integrate such system in a modern urban context.”

Desalinated water is yet another possibility. As reported in Auroville Today, the Auroville-related company of Varuna Pvt. Ltd has started the process for obtaining permissions for erecting a small, 5 million litres a day, desalination plant. But the plant is not expected to become operational for the next four to five years.

The Matrimandir lake

Would the envisaged Matrimandir Lake have a role to play in the city’s water supply? Gilles firmly believes so. “The lake could become a large storage area to supply water for gardening and even drinking water, if properly cleaned. We studied the matter in 2012 and proposed a system where the lake would be built in a kind of terrace form and have different water levels according to the season and availability of rainwater. It would be filled from water runoff around the lake. Each terraced section of the lake would be fed by a dedicated drainage system extending through the city, in accordance with the topography, with water overflowing to the terrace below. But the proposal has never been taken up. The lake will also generate a very large overflow in the monsoon, which should be collected in a secondary tank. But all this, for the time being, is mere theory. My main concern at this stage is that the proposed lake doesn’t become a liability.”

In conclusion

We don’t have time to spare. The crisis requires immediate action: we need to implement emergency measures, agree to start a plan of action towards water security, start drafting a Water Master Plan, constitute an Auroville Water Authority and allocate the necessary funds to improve the existing supply systems and develop alternative sources. “We need to invest 3 to 5 crores each year for the next few years,” says Gilles. “And only then can we talk about Auroville approaching sustainability in its water management.”