The Holiwater Project is an international collective of highly acclaimed music and visual artists who have gathered together to celebrate and stimulate attention around water. The issues facing humanity today necessitate evolving sustainable solutions that ensure its availability for future generations. The artists comprise of classical, folk, electronic and video artists performing together as a symbolic gesture of tradition working with technology. This fusion serves to underscore the need for traditional environmental practices to be re considered and so inform the modern technological ones currently influencing how humanity work’s with or against the environment. With attention at a precedence around immanent climate change on a global scale the message the project carries is more pertinent than ever - we need to action innovative intelligent solutions towards sustainable management of the Earth’s natural resources if we are to avoid increasing strife and conflict over the use of Water. The Holiwater Project is a meeting place for humanity to be entertained, inspired and informed through the experience of Art and Intention.
A background to the issues informs us that the entire human population of over six billion as well as all the living beings with which we share our planet rely on merely 0.5 per cent of the total freshwater available on Earth.
The needs of humans vary from water for drinking and sanitation to productive purposes such as agriculture, fisheries, industry, and energy generation. Water has been an essential element of civilization and today, water conflicts stand to put civilization at risk.
Once empires were founded around rivers; soon, empires are likely to fight over them.
Water, previously an object of worship, is now, in many cases, a commodity for sale. The importance of water has never diminished – from the time when temples were dedicated to Poseidon to this age when dams and desalination plants stand as testaments to our unquenchable thirst for water.
In the past, nature was equally a nurturer and a tyrant. Man was not only dependent on nature, he was at its mercy. While nature provided man with all the elements he required, it could also destroy his life, his work and his past in one fell swoop.
As man progressed, his control over the elements increased. Rivers could be channelised and storms predicted. When man began to understand, and to some extent control, the elements, especially water, he stopped fearing them. Sadly, as he lost this fear he also began to lose respect for all that nature had provided him with, forgetting that the seas may be conquered, but the earth cannot be made to yield more water.
Water conflicts bring into view larger issues and raise bigger questions – questions dealing with social equity and stability, the meaning of development and the nature of rights, as there is no one who is not affected by these conflicts. Water, perhaps, is the best mirror of inequity and injustice in a society. These conflicts do not just reflect the water situation of a country, but also its past, culture and economy.
Perhaps the first of these conflicts is over how is water viewed – as a need or as a right? As a property or a resource? Every society has its own way of viewing water and what works for one culture may be a cause for conflict in another
Countries where farming does not rely on artificial irrigation, have little idea of how much water it takes to grow our food. It takes between 2000 and 5000 litres of water to grow 1 kilogram of rice, for instance. That is more water than many households use in a week, for just a bag of rice. It takes 1000 litres (of water) to grow a kilo of wheat, 11,000 litres of water to grow the feed for enough cow to make a quarter-pound hamburger and between 2000 and 4000 litres for that cow to fill its udders with a litre of milk. Clothing only adds to the hydrological pain. You could fill 25 bathtubs with the water that grows the 250 grams of cotton needed to make a single T-shirt.
Water is a finite resource: This reality has manifested itself in a fresh water crisis across the globe. Competition over limited supplies of water for use in agriculture, industry, recreation and for animal and human consumption is becoming more intense. Inadequate water management and environmental degradation has led to reduced access to safe water supply for millions of people. The gap between demand and supply of water is increasing rapidly, and has to be viewed in the context of ever increasing requirements of a growing population, which making it imperative to review the methods used by the various stakeholders to exercise their rights over water.
By 2025, we are told that 40 percent of the world’s people, more than 3 billion, may be living in countries experiencing water stress and chronic water scarcity.
Today the world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago, but it uses three times as much water to grow it. Two-thirds of this water is meant for irrigation purposes – massively unsustainable in future.
From China to Iran and Indonesia to Pakistan, rivers are running dry under the impact of increased exploitation. Millions of small farmers have bought pumps and are sucking water from beneath their fields. India, China and Pakistan are estimated to account for more than half the world’s total use of underground water for agriculture. The consequences of the eventual & inevitable failure of underground water could be catastrophic. It is a slow- burning drought disaster that will one day affect hundreds of millions of people. Yet so far it has not registered on the radar screens of governments or aid agencies as much as it should have. International strategic studies are showing that in the near future there is the likelihood that wars will be fought on water issues. Conflicts will arise between rural and urban areas, between states and between regions of the world.
If our children and grandchildren are to have a secure future on this planet, the proper stewardship of the world’s water resources simply has to be continually addressed. Population growth, increasing urbanization, pollution and climate change are likely to result in a drastic decline in water supply in the coming decades. The declining ground water level is emerging as a critical issue for the urban areas as people bore deeper in search of the water. At the heart of the urban ground water problem is population density.Salt, fluoride and nitrate continents of groundwater are increasing drastically, and if this trend continues we in Rajasthan are going to run out of drinking water very soon.
The case studies point to the near absence of rational policy decisions that consider the interests of all stakeholders, in particular the weaker sections and women. Such behaviour has been corroborated by research studies on political models of policy making where the concept of ‘iron triangles’ highlights the nexus between politicians, technical professionals, bureaucrats, and other vested interests. These iron triangles become exclusive clubs where policy decisions are taken by the representatives of these groups to the exclusion of the masses that are affected the most.
Less than 3 percent of the world’s water is fresh while the rest is seawater and undrinkable. Of this 3 percent over 2.5 percent is frozen and inaccessible to human population. Therefore, the entire humanity relies on a mere 0.5 percent for all its fresh water requirements. Globally 10,000,000 km3 of water is stored in underground aquifers, which caters to 50 percent of drinking water needs, 40 percent of industrial use and 20 percent of domestic use. The remaining fresh water is made available from
Net rainfall after accounting for evaporation : 119,000 km3
Natural lakes : 91,000 km3
Human made storage facilities : 5,000 km3
Rivers : 2,120 km3
Fresh water availability is not evenly distributed over the globe. Fewer than 10 countries possess 60 percent of the world’s available fresh water supply.
Quotations courtesy
Jal Bhagirathi Foundation ,
Mr. Antonio Armellini,
Italian Ambassador to India