Keep Water Sacred

editorial:
Today, 22 March, is the World Water Day, an apt moment for Sikkim to record how grateful it is for having been blessed with abundant supply, and also perhaps the right occasion for it to recognize how recklessly it wastes away much of what nature has bestowed on it by way of water resources. Gangtokians tend to be casual about their water usage, but phone in someone in Namchi [if Darjeeling’s too distant], to appreciate how special it is to relax in the knowledge that supply is assured. Two years ago, when the water supply lines in Gangtok snapped, it heaped more inconvenience on the capital dwellers than the misery which has become a constant in monsoon-inundated, but supply-starved Darjeeling district in neighbouring West Bengal. In a way, Sikkim’s abuse of water courses began with the acceptance of concrete-driven ‘development’.
Ask any old-timer about the number of dharas [springs] they would encounter on a walk up to Gangtok from Ranipool and you will realize how nearly all of them have been lost - dammed up by buildings hugging the road. This illustrates the general attitude towards natural resources - they are taken for granted, which is why their nurture is not seen as a collective social responsibility. Even government documents speak in glorious terms of the need to ‘exploit’ Sikkim’s natural resources, when the guiding principle for natural recourse-driven development should be to ‘harness’ them. Harnessing, which carries a stronger sense of responsibility to nurture, is also the traditional practice, with the recently concluded Bhum-Chu ceremony highlighting the reverence in which water used to be held in Sikkim.
When the accepted motivation is to exploit, the loss of a natural asset is not missed and resources start getting abused as permissible collateral damage to “improve” the “quality of life”. It’s an intricate web, because with the snapping of the direct connection with natural resources, also lost are traditional practices fashioned around their care and nurture. With the loss of dharas, and the proliferation of water filters in every home, the day is not far when a generation grows up believing that water is artificially manufactured and piped into homes. Once that happens, the ignorance will allow forest cover in watershed areas to be felled so that urban homes can have wood paneling to camouflage ugly cement; the water sinks in the higher reaches, sustained over a millennia, will be lost within a decade and the only thing working at the Selep water tank will be the electronic light display installed there. It is not for nothing that the hill people have attached such high reverence to natural springs and fresh water sources. They understood that these made life possible here and protected them with strict rules of conduct justified with beliefs and legends of fairies and easily-offended local deities who resided there. Isn’t it ironic that resources which were so well preserved by what we now dismiss as blind faith, have been so quickly lost with the arrival of scientific, rational thinking?