- Some 100 million people in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, depend on water from springs for drinking, cooking, sanitation, livestock rearing and minor irrigation.
- Nearly half of the springs in the Indian Himalayas are drying up. It imperils villages and cities dependent on springs for water, impacting millions downstream in the river basins.
- The authors of this commentary highlight a project to reverse the loss of springs in Nepal, Bhutan and four states in the Indian Himalayas, using an inclusive and sustainable nature-based solution.
- The views in this commentary are those of the authors.
It is almost a cliché to say that the wars of the future will be fought over water. Most of such predictions are focused on the contested geographies of river basins, their complex histories, and the claims and counterclaims of riparian states.
Almost completely overlooked, however, are the consequences of the rapid disappearance of freshwater sources in hills and mountains.
The drying up of local water sources are described as a slow-onset disaster. These may be less dramatic than the instances of too much water that struck communities across the valleys of the Hindu Kush Himalaya with such ferocity last monsoon, perhaps most notably in Sikkim, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh, but they are no less devastating.
It is estimated that some 100 million people residing in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), depend on water from springs for drinking, cooking, sanitation, livestock rearing, and minor irrigation. This reliance is looking increasingly risky. A 2018 report by the NITI Aayog, India’s premier think tank, highlighted that nearly half of the estimated three million springs in the Indian Himalayan region were either dry or running dry. These changes are attributed to erratic rain and snowfall, land use and land cover change and seismic events, among others.
Unlike the plains, where groundwater extraction through deep bore wells or water piped in from elsewhere can fill a shortfall in water availability, mountain communities often have nowhere to turn. When springs run dry, it means the added burden of fetching water from distant sources, a burden that often falls on women and adolescent girls. It can result in the abandonment of farming land, distress sale of livestock, and, in extreme cases, relocation.
From scattered rural settlements to urban centres
Access to water has long been the key determinant of human settlements, and this is particularly true of mountain communities, where lifting water for river valley-floor up to settlements on steep slopes and ridges is too energy intensive to be viable in the long term.
But it is not only villages that are dependent on springs. Darjeeling, with its population of more than 118,000 (2011 census), receives its entire municipal water supply from water that is gravity fed from the twin north and south reservoirs in Senchal Wildlife Sanctuary filled by 26 springs. In the Indian Western Himalaya, Mussoorie gets its water supply from 20 springs. The drying of springs also threatens the future of these hill towns, especially during the tourist season, when demand is high and water supplies are low.
Springs, too, are part of the wider hydrological cycle – generating streamflow in non-glaciated catchments and maintaining winter and dry-season flow in HKH river basins. Any change in spring hydrology, therefore, also impacts river hydrology. Eventually, the drying of springs will affect millions of people living in the river basins downstream.
As water sources dwindle, communities with greater power or in closer proximity to a spring tend to exclude or limit the volume of water or times that “outsiders” can access it. Historically, Dalits and other marginalised groups have been excluded from accessing water from springs located in and around the settlements of “upper castes.” This discrimination persists in many places.
Because water rights are subsidiary to land rights, in a context of dwindling resources and rising demand, more and more springs are being enclosed on private land, turning springs that were once common pool resources into private resources. In Himalayan towns, many of these landowners now sell spring water through tankers or private piped networks.
The drying of springs is not only an issue of conflict between or within communities but could also result in negative interactions between human beings and wildlife, with animals compelled to enter farms and human habitation in search of water.
Bringing springs back to life
It doesn’t have to be this way. While traditionally, communities have ‘hard engineered’ their way out of water insecurity in the mountains by tapping a source and delivering it to users, with little or no focus on the resource itself, new approaches that are more sustainable in the long term are now emerging: offering hope to communities across the mountains.
Moldhar, in Uttarakhand, is one such community. Two years ago, the spring on which over 100 families relied started to decline, forcing villagers to abandon their agricultural land and buy fodder for their livestock. Local women, supported by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), learned about neighbouring communities’ nature-based ways to revive water sources—and deployed these techniques on their own land. With 700 water-collecting trenches dug and a water user group that is majority-led by 29 women established, villagers are seeing water flow increase, and as moisture levels return to the soil, the grass needed to feed their livestock grows. Each household is saving Rs. 10,000 a year in fodder costs alone.
Sanjeev Bhuchar, Springs Intervention Manager at ICIMOD, says: “Through the work of this women-led committee, who manage the land and provide the water, hope arises, that we can reverse the crippling issues of water and food insecurity, outmigration, habitat loss. As we see more and more springs under lock-and-key in the hills and mountains, and lower-caste groups denied access to water, this work represents a significant contribution to human rights and peacebuilding and ecological restoration.”
The villagers at Moldhar deployed a spring rejuvenation technique that ICIMOD co-developed with the Maharashtra-based Advanced Center for Water Resources Development and Management (ACWADAM). This technique is being scaled across the Himalaya region through its UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)-funded HI-REAP programme.
The six-step methodology combines hydrogeology—the science of water recharge, groundwater flows through underground aquifers, and groundwater interactions with soil and rocks—with social science methods and community-empowering participatory action research to build autonomous water security and generate biodiversity co-benefits.
There are three aspects to this approach. The first is knowledge co-creation, which involves communities working with hydrogeologists and other experts to develop water security plans that are co-designed using participatory tools, combining traditional knowledge with hydrogeology, and identifying recharge areas for restoration. The second is the creation of a cadre of community resource persons trained in monitoring and collecting data on spring flows and mobilising communities for recharge interventions. The third focuses on building water user groups or embedding springshed management within local institutions, privileging a role for women and diverse caste/ethnic groups in spring governance.
Leveraging water for peace
Water can create or intensify conflict when it is in short supply, or access is denied and unfair. But, as the theme for World Water Day this year reminds us, water can be a tool for peace when communities and countries cooperate over this precious shared resource.
ICIMOD’s demonstrator sites, in Nepal, Bhutan, and four states in the Indian Himalayas, show how powerful a tool the six-step protocol for springshed management be in reversing the loss of springs, demonstrating an inclusive and sustainable nature-based solution that can be upscaled to enhance water security in the hills and mountains of the HKH. By working with nature to address this societal challenge of water insecurity, springshed management contributes to wellbeing and biodiversity conservation – reducing drudgery, providing water for livelihoods, and supporting restoration of catchments and freshwater ecosystems dependent on springs. Most importantly, it has the potential for building peace and shared prosperity – with the region’s complex hydrogeology bringing communities together to rebuild their water security, especially in cases where one spring’s recharge area may lie in an adjoining community forest or village.
Samuel Thomas is a Senior Communications Officer for ICIMOD’s work on Resilient Economies and Landscapes. Sushmita Kunwar is a Communications Officer for the Himalayan Resilience Enabling Action Programme at ICIMOD.
Banner image: Springs are a lifeline for mountain communities. Some 100 million people residing in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, depend on water from springs for drinking, cooking, sanitation, livestock rearing, and minor irrigation. Photo by Jitendra Raj Bajracharya.