Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“Not only this, but we do not have the capacity to treat such large quantities of sewage. Our sewage systems were built to treat one river. Now three times this volume is coming into the system. This is why our sewage plants treat a smaller and smaller proportion every year. Most sewage now flows directly into the river. It is a poisonous brew, full of industrial effluent, and Delhi produces it on a monumental scale. And what happens when you pour all this into a single river basin? Look how high the Yamuna is now. It is summer: we are a month away from the monsoon. The Yamuna is a seasonal river, and at this time of year it used to be a trickle. But what you see flowing there is not only the Yamuna. It is also the Ganges and the Bhagirathi and the Renuka lake. We take from all those places but when we have used it we pour it all into one river basin. That is why the river is running so high, and that is why we will at some point soon have a disastrous flood. The river will break its banks.”

We interrupt our northwards march to have some lunch. Anupam has brought some daal, roti and cooked vegetables, and we sit under a tree to eat. The landscape is uplifting, and birds sing on every side. Anupam continues.

“Now do you think our middle classes wish to pay the price of our present water shortage? Of course not. They wish to live free of any environmental context. That is the reward they expect from capitalism! They want to turn on their taps at any time and have water. The municipal supply, however, is heavily rationed, and provides water only for a few hours a day. So what do the middle classes do? They remember — they are good at history when they need to be! — that there is a rich supply of water under their feet. Over the last thirty years they have all dug private wells so they can pump out as much as they need. Every middle-class house has such a well, even though it is illegal. This water is completely unmonitored so of course the city’s water authorities now have no idea how much sewage they need to build capacity for. And all this additional water also floods out into the Yamuna, raising the level still further.

“But of course by now no one remembers the basic knowledge that governed Delhi’s water management for a millennium: if you take water from the ground you have to replenish it. People are pumping water out of the ground for their baths and washing machines and swimming pools but they have not built a single water tank to recharge the ground supply. So Delhi’s groundwater is also running dry. But let them not think about it! While it still comes out of the tap, let them pump away!

“As a result of this, many areas of Delhi are now completely dry. Whole sectors of the city have run out of groundwater and are supplied only by water trucks. There is a new five-star hotel that has no water: its water needs — baths, laundry, swimming pool, sauna — are all supplied by trucks which come at night in lines of a hundred or more. But while there is a way to spend oneself out of a problem, this city is curiously indifferent to that problem. Real-estate prices continue to rise even in areas where there is no water.

“Where does this trucked water come from? It comes from water entrepreneurs who buy a plot of land and pump out the water to distribute around the city. According to the law, owning a piece of land also means that you own the water beneath it. But water is a liquid! If you put a pump in a piece of land and start extracting water, you do not simply take it from your own land. You take water from everywhere. Even if your land is the size of a handkerchief you can pump out water for miles around, and the water table falls for everyone. So these trucks are not a magic solution. And even those entrepreneurs are running out of water, so they have to move further and further from the city to find it. How much are people willing to pay for water? If we run out of oil, we can adjust our lifestyles accordingly. But if we run out of water there is no life.

“You have seen these new water parks they have built in Gurgaon and Noida? Where thousands of litres are pumped out of the rock so families can splash around in swimming pools and water slides? I like this phrase, ‘water park’, but I use it in a different sense. I use it like a ‘car park’. Every time I meet a politician I say, ‘You can allocate land for people to park their cars. If you want your city to have any future you also need to allocate land for us to park water. Every great ruler of Delhi has been remembered for the water tanks and lakes they built to capture the rain and recharge the groundwater. You could be a great ruler too.’ But they don’t know what I am talking about, because they have forgotten where Delhi’s water comes from. They have forgotten that Delhi’s history is full of cities that have been evacuated because they have run out of water.

“We often think that recent centuries have produced a lot of new knowledge. But this is because we are no longer equipped to recognise the knowledge of the past. I see modern times as one long history of forgetting. Even the kings are ignorant now of what every person who used to live in this place once knew.”

• • •

It may seem surprising, in this place much concerned with physical security and survival, that water, that most essential of material resources, might be so neglected. Anupam’s picture of a failed government system bypassed by a middle class which builds private micro-systems of its own and thereby pushes the system much faster towards collapse, seems apocalyptic — and it is. It produces a fatally short-term, marauding mentality: when water is running out and no one is doing anything to replenish it, the rational strategy is just to take as much as you can possibly get before everyone else does.

For some, it might prompt the question: when will Delhi ‘grow up’? When will politics finally subjugate these anti-social, insubordinate energies and channel them into an objective system that works in the long-term interests of all?

That this is a tourist’s question, which very few people in Delhi ask, says something about the difference between the history of the Western city and the future of ‘emerging’ cities such as this. For the question derives not from any sense of developments in this city, but from an imported memory of how other cities have evolved. This memory is rapidly changing, however, in our time, from universal to parochial.

It is most excellently exemplified by the case of New York, icon of the century past. We still remember, somehow, the titanic struggles between order and chaos out of which that city emerged; images flicker in our heads of the scheming robber barons of the rising years, the gangs, the corrupt politicians, the slums filled with the gaunt and dispossessed. Great fists descend from the sky: the dogged mayors who took on these rogue forces, strangling gangsterism, breaking up the comfortable cartels of politicians and tycoons, securing the condition of the poor, and building the most ambitious urban infrastructure ever conceived. The battle theme turns lyric as centralised authority looks out over a city subjugated, as it grasps the reins of its varied energies and channels them into that single, glorious urban achievement that all of us know because it is our shared global mythology.

Nor have we forgotten the immense quantity of destruction that happened along the way. We know what once lay beneath: how neighbourhoods were ripped down for highways and parks, how languages sank without trace, how so much life was buried: the spontaneous energies of the street, the animals, the folk variety, the languor, the vice. At every point along the way, New York was in some sense less , and there were always New Yorkers who lamented the loss of mystery, the shrinking of horizons, the rationalisation of life. The great film-poets such as Scorsese and Coppola, through whom so many people around the world became citizens of New York without ever going there, created elegies to the older, more shadowy metropolis that was spot-lit into oblivion. The Godfather movies, for instance, brought to life this quintessential back-and-forth of New York feeling: the dark grandeur of the lost worlds that produced the modern city, but also, and essentially, the necessity of their passing. They were films about the inexorability of twentieth-century process: the loss of human grandeur and variety in the name of the serene and productive metropolis. The tale of the modern city was that of the absolute inevitability of the victory of unified, centralised administrative power over everything else. The accompanying fear — that all vitality would eventually be lost and human beings would no longer know or love anything except the mechanisms of their own control — was never sufficient to put the brakes on this unidirectional expansion.