Essay About Huge Belts And Welfare Aspect Of The Resource

Water, Water Everywhere Nor Any Drop to Drink. Wailed the Thirsty Mariner!
Water
“Water, water everywhere… nor any drop to drink.” wailed the
thirsty mariner!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Assignment by Group 4:
Dhanya | Farhan | Karthik | Praveen Kumar
Sripriya | Vignesh P | Vignesh V
The times we live in this is a rant that we hear often, both in the rural and urban
landscape. Water is unquestionably a resource that is precious, life giving and
scarce. This resource that is essential to both agrarian and industrial growth is,
like everything else in nature, not equally distributed. That is why we see
countries that are water rich but sparsely populated and vice versa. There are
huge belts in the world that are water deficient or water stressed. The
management of this resource then becomes all the more urgent and
imperative. Water can be viewed from all the four approaches to economics:
Scarcity, Wealth, Welfare and Social.
The management of water when it is scarce is riddled with all sorts of economic
and moral questions. For instance, the Narmada project that started with the
intention of irrigating the barren regions of the country, led to widespread
protests because the burning question was “development at what cost?”.
Closer home, water sharing of the river Cauvery still remains unresolved.
The welfare aspect of the resource is intricately related with that of wealth. Water
and energy (read wealth) go hand in hand. You need one in order to access or
harness the other. So inadvertently we are moving towards an era where only if
you are affluent you will have access to clean water. This is where the positive and
progressive role of the corporates come in. Companies are taking their social
responsibility much more seriously and “Sustainable Development” as a
concept is the need of the hour.
The social aspect of water is far reaching than what meets the eye. The drought
hit villages see a total crumbling of family and social structures. There are