The flood of thirst

I was expecting this for a long time now and kinda relieved (lament) to find this yesterday - India's thirst making us all wet

"One nation's thirst for groundwater is having an impact on global sea levels. Satellite measurements show that northern India is sucking some 54 trillion litres of water out of the ground every year. This is threatening a major water crisis and adding to global sea level rise.
Virendra Tiwari from the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad, India, and colleagues used gravity data from the GRACE satellite to monitor the loss of continental mass around the world since 2002. Regions where water is being removed from the ground have less mass and therefore exert a smaller gravitational pull on the satellite.
The data revealed that groundwater under northern India and its surroundings is being extracted exceptionally fast. Tiwari and colleagues calculate that between 2002 and 2008 an average of 54 cubic kilometres - enough to fill more than 21 million Olympic swimming pools - was lost every year. Boreholes in the region show the water table is dropping by around 10 centimetres a year.
Agriculture is the primary culprit, says John Wahr of the University of Colorado at Boulder. If the trend isn't reversed soon, the 600 million people living in the region could face severe water shortages in the next few years.
The "lost" water doesn't just disappear, though. Most of it runs into the oceans. The team calculates that it could be pushing up global sea levels by as much as 0.16 millimetres each year. That's 5 per cent of total sea level rise."

The worst part of this news is that the data is for only northern India!! Its been 20 years but I do vividy remember the cacophony of borewell drilling by every neigbour who could afford in every city I have lived in Southern India.

Anyone who was bought up with ubquitous water scaricity might gape at the American Lawns. I was no exception their. Here's an old article by Micheal Pollan:

"NO WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE LAWNS AS PRIZED AS IN America. In little more than a century, we've rolled a green mantle of grass across the continent, with scarcely a thought to the local conditions or expense. America has more than 50,000 square miles of lawn under cultivation, on which we spend an estimated $30 billion a year, this according to the Lawn Institute, a Pleasant Hill, Tenn., outfit devoted to publicizing the benefits of turf to Americans (surely a case of preaching to the converted)."

The Lawn: A History of American Obsession, is a great book for the much needed wake up call and a good cure. To paraphase some I read last year, says it all:
"Someday we might look back with a curious nostalgia at the days when profligate homeowners wastefully sprayed their lawns with liquid gold to make the grass grow, just so they could then burn black gold to cut it down on the weekends. Our children and grandchildren will wonder why we were so dumb."

Here's one country pouring water into earth for decor which makes no ecological sense and another which is sucking every drop from earth to quench the thirst of billion people.
There are great ongoing debates about the coming water wars. 
Its impossible to appreciate and relish the simplest pleasure of having abundant water until one's body hasn't experienced the lack of it.

This is not someone else's problem - its a human problem and its already in this country slowly creeping into California , Nevada , Carolina/Georgia et al and famous ongoing Indian Cauvery controversy for decades.

Having seen the politics of thirst, this quote sounds naive but I hope it comes true in future.

“I think water hits us at a profoundly different level than other resources. People are willing to do horrible things to each other. What they seem not willing to do is turn off each other’s water.” —Aaron Wolf

Eschewing hypothesis, I am optimistic about the evolving pragmatic solutions, check out this recent demo by Michael Pritchard.