Introduction

Red, hand-painted letters in Devanagari script inscribed on a yellow background tell visitors, in Hindi, “This water is as pure as the water from Ganga. Please keep it clean.” The sign is painted on a wall near the entrance to a spring housed in a small temple in the Indian town of Almora. A shiva lingam painted red sits atop the tile roof that shelters a rectangular pool of clear water, embraced on three sides by white stucco walls below street level. Most of the people who come to this spring in the Himalayan foothills of eastern Uttarakhand obediently remove their shoes before descending the stairway to the stone pool. The spring, called a nola in this part of India, is several hundred years old, locals say. Until fairly recently all the water used in this area came from hundreds of springs; some are small ponds like this one, others are spouts or dhara from which water flows. Now many of the springs are contaminated by trash and sewage. New construction destroyed some of them or blocked the sources that fed them. The river that flows at the bottom of the valley below Almora does not have enough water both to support the region’s agriculture and to supply household water for the city of more than forty thousand, where many people are now accustomed to water piped into their homes. Besides, it’s expensive to pump water uphill into the town. Almora will soon have a full-blown water crisis. Already people go to the old springs that are still functioning. They need water because the supply in the city pipes sometimes dwindles; and many still prefer the taste and coldness of the spring water and believe it’s good for their health. The nola and dhara of Almora suggest some of the contradictions in South Asia’s growing water crisis. Traditional systems have been neglected or abandoned, even abused, in favor of the promised convenience of modern ones. But those twentieth-century replacements have sometimes turned out to be unreliable and have left many people unserved.