India's Coming Water Nightmare - Shreyasi Singh, The Diplomat

The turnaround in India’s water situation has been dramatic. In 2005, the Global Water Initiative said India had ‘abundant’ water in 1975 but that by 2000, this happy state of affairs had turned into ‘stress’ even as demand has continued to grow.
‘Water–The India Story’, a widely quoted study by market research firm Grail Research, points out that India’s per capita domestic consumption of water is expected to grow to 167 litres a day by 2050, up from 88.9 in 2000. Factor in the growing population (expected to increase from 1.13 billion in 2005 to 1.66 billion by 2050) and the picture starts to look bleak.
One recent report, by Ravi Narayanan, vice chair of the Asia Pacific Water Forum, stated that even conservative estimates suggest that over 40 million people still need to be provided with safe water and about 100 million people with adequate sanitation just to reach Millennium Development Goals for urban India, much less reach universal coverage.
Such forecasts should be sounding alarm bells among policymakers.http://the-diplomat.com/2010/09/22/india%E2%80%99s-water-nightmare/

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