If you look around when you’re driving through Goa you will observe the coastal State is remaking itself. It’s peeling off its natural skin to don a concrete one.
In many places, the sounds of seabirds and the twitter of other coastal birds are being drowned in the shrill and jarring drone of drilling machines, and the clattering noise of a construction site.
Narrow coconut-palm-lined streets are being replaced with four-lane and six-lane expressways, on which passenger cars and scooters vie for space with heavy vehicles, which are like mammoths on a cheetah lane.
In the last few years, the sight of one such heavy vehicle has become very common on the Goan roads. It is the water tanker. Its number is swelling at a furious pace. These behemoths huff and buff, and spit water, as they trundle along the road.
They are the lifelines of the residential, commercial and industrial complexes springing up across the tiny State. And, they exist because of the aggressive and mindless building of new structures, which have the potential to give robust returns on investments.
This real estate gravy train, which started chugging over a decade back, has attained breakneck speed today. It has whizzed past the State’s available water resources and infrastructure. And so, the water tanker operators have been brought aboard the gravy train.
It won’t be long before Goa will be parched – like other States with unplanned development – if the current rate of real estate activities continues. Many localities have already started experiencing severe water crises.
There are societies and complexes, which have been in the queue for piped-water connection for long with little hope of the water gushing through soon. In fact, the wait for them will only get longer as the buzz of real estate development in the State gets louder.
In the meantime, water tankers are plugging the chasm between potable water demand and supply. This is not only making water-tanker operators’ purses fatter but is also bloating the State government’s kitty. Thus, the real estate gravy train chugs.
As per the Goa Water Resource Department (GWRD) data, close to 900 water tankers are registered in the State. Their primary source of potable water are groundwater reservoirs. As they draw water from the ground, it will affect the water table levels of the State.
The frenetic pace of real estate growth has reportedly spawned several illegal water tankers, operating either without registering or renewal of their license. Village panchayats have been allegedly lenient in giving them permission or just look away as the tankers draw water from the ground.
Open wells of residents in many villages are suddenly going dry as ground water levels sink due to installation of illegal borewells.
The Central government’s Ground Water Level Bulletin – published in August 2023 – after analysing the groundwater level scenario in Goa, stated: “Decadal trends indicated a rise in shallow aquifers for 61% of wells and a decline in deeper aquifers for 56% of wells, comparing 2024 levels with the decade average for August (2014-2023).”
Goa’s State Water Policy (SWP), 2021, also expressed distress over “paucity of data (on water) in the State, whether on the revenue side or on the utilisation side”.
Interestingly, Goa was one of India’s first States to regulate groundwater by enacting the Goa Ground Water Regulation Act, 2002. Under this Act, it has made mandatory the registration of all ground water structures and to secure prior permission for sinking of wells and abstraction of groundwater for commercial use.
The aim of the law was to regulate the usage of groundwater and open up a new avenue for revenue generation for the State. Last year, the government’s 5-year revenue from tankers was less than a crore at around Rs 90 lakh.
The government numbers show the State falls short by 85 million litres per day (MLD) to meet its water demand of 645 MLD compared with the supply of 560 MLD. This shortage is likely to get more acute as buildings sprout up to cover every inch of Goa’s land.
Data put out in the SWP 2021 reveal around 27 percent of the households in the State’s 40 constituencies receive 24x7 piped water supply. In such a scenario, any claim of achieving 100 percent 24x7 piped water anytime soon would be a mere pipe dream.
If the current realty growth persists, it wouldn’t be long before we reach a water crisis of catastrophic proportion. This could result in the plunge of realty players’ fortune. Let’s wake up to this warning, and reverse the direction of water flow.