Town's people are sopping wet, but thirsty

By Nicholas Riccardi
Los Angeles Times

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CHERRAPUNJI, India — The people on the soggy streets of the wettest town in the world carry umbrellas and buckets.

The reason for the umbrellas is obvious. Cherrapunji receives an average of 37.5 feet of rain a year, a drenching that rots food, peels paint and has earned the area the dubious distinction of recording more annual rainfall than anywhere else on the planet other than an uninhabited peak on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

The buckets serve a different purpose. Despite the downpours, Cherrapunji's people don't have enough water.

All the rain lands on arid, deforested and stony ground. There's no local reservoir to hoard it, so it runs downhill, plunging over the precipitous cliffs at the edge of town and onto the plains of Bangladesh below. To make matters worse, Cherrapunji's few water tanks are rusted and cracked, as are the pipelines that are the conduit from remote springs and aquifers to the homes of the community's 12,000 residents.

With tap water only sporadically running inside their houses, the township's inhabitants must trek through the hills to closer, smaller springs to fill their buckets with enough water to drink, bathe or cook a meal.

India is grappling with a worsening nationwide water shortage, and the strange fate of Cherrapunji says much about the country's inability to tap its rich natural resources. Sliced by mighty rivers and subject to the yearly monsoon drenching, India nonetheless has struggled to provide its skyrocketing population with water.

In the capital, New Delhi, 48 percent of residents lack municipal water connections, and tens of millions in other cities do not have regular water. In southern India, riots occasionally break out as moisture-starved farmers and urbanites in the boomtown of Bangalore battle over the rights to the Cauvery River's water.

India also has quarreled with neighbors Bangladesh and Pakistan over rights to the bloated rivers that cross the subcontinent's borders.

"There should not be this kind of a crisis," said Sumita Dasgupta, coordinator of the water unit of the independent Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. "By any standards across the globe, India is very well-endowed as far as rainfall is concerned."
 
Cherrapunji is a cautionary tale of how governments can focus too much on elaborate dams and pipelines and neglect the natural resources right in front of it, Dasgupta said. The state, she said, should have figured out how to harvest the gallons that tumble from the skies.

"It just requires home-grown, home-brewed technology," she said.

Meghalaya state government officials, infuriated that the Indian media has dubbed Cherrapunji a "wet desert," say capture-and-storage plans won't work. Instead, they promise that a $10-million project to divert water from a river miles away from Cherrapunji will quench the thirst of this town that is on the verge of drowning.

Cherrapunji town is tucked into a forgotten corner of a remote chunk of India sandwiched among Bangladesh, China and Myanmar. It can be reached only via winding roads that weave through rice paddies and regularly are brushed by clouds. There is no telephone service, and electricity is erratic. Most residents belong to the Khasi tribe and are Christian. Western names are common.

In the 1960s, George West came to Cherrapunji from Shillong, the state capital 31 miles away, to work as an engineer in the region's government-funded cement factory. The constant gray and the wet chill was tough to take. "I couldn't stand it for the first month," he said. "But then I got used to it."

West scoffs at the town's "wet desert" image. "There's plenty of water here," he said as a steady drizzle drummed on his roof. "It's all mismanagement."

Mismanagement certainly has contributed to the town's paradoxical water shortage, as have history and geographical bad luck.

Cherrapunji sits at about 4,000 feet, perched on the southern tip of a plateau that looms over Bangladesh. The cliffs of Cherrapunji are the first place hit by moisture that forms over the Bay of Bengal, and the escarpment wrings water from the monsoon clouds as they roll toward the Himalayas.

Despite this dreary dynamic, the British chose the area as their first colonial capital in northeastern India in the 19th century. But the rain got the best of them. Not known for their aversion to dampness, the British nonetheless decamped to the marginally drier Shillong in the north.

People continued to live in Cherrapunji, partly because of what would become another factor in its bizarre drought — rich mineral deposits. The plateau around the town became the site of heavy mining of coal and limestone. That work stripped the area of trees and topsoil and damaged the water table, leaving the region with little vegetation or earth to soak up its showers.

As water dripped from his leaking office roof, N.K. Dhar, the town's water officer, fingered a blotchy report that showed the effects of the mining. The document listed the amount of water that has been tapped from three sets of underground sources and channeled to the town in pipelines over the years.

Between 1993 and 1997, the amount from just one of those sources, a spring in a nearby cave, fell from 141,000 gallons per day to 20,000, an 86 percent decline.

Not all of that water even makes it to town, and what does often is not drinkable. The galvanized iron pipes long have been rusted and occasionally get swept away in the area's regular landslides, or even cracked by wandering cows.

Meanwhile, the rainwater catchment tanks that the government has provided to the town are in varying states of disrepair or rust.

The state says with the new system, water soon will be channeled to Cherrapunji via tougher, rust-proof pipes. All that remains is to finish construction on a water-treatment plant and, they vow, the town will have drinkable water by this winter's dry season.

Eligius Sawian, 34, a local teacher and tribal leader, says he'll believe it when the dry season comes and he still gets water through his tap, round the clock.

"When we were boys, this wasn't an issue," Sawian said. "But it takes a lot of time to go up and down, up and down." He said he misses phone calls and meetings while making 10-minute dashes to the spring in a gully behind his house. And there's another new development that makes going outside inconvenient.

"With the coming of television," Sawian said, "people want to stay in their homes."