Sanjay Balan
Every year, without fail, an appeal is issued asking citizens to conserve water. This year, citing a shortfall in the North-East Monsoon, the advisory warns of pressure on reservoirs and groundwater, urges people to cut non-essential use, invokes the World Health Organization’s 55 litres per capita per day benchmark, and even recommends that households conduct a “water audit”.
In South Andaman, such advisories are received with a peculiar mix of patience and disbelief. Islanders have developed a sense of humour about water shortages—not because the situation is amusing, but because laughter is sometimes the only civil response left.
For much of South Andaman, piped water supply arrives every alternate day, occasionally once in three days, and in lean periods, once a week. When it does arrive, it stays for about 15 to 20 minutes. Often at unearthly hours. Sometimes past midnight. This pattern continues even during peak monsoon months. It is not a drought contingency plan. It is the standard operating procedure.
Against this backdrop, appeals to “reduce non-essential usage” raise an obvious question: what, exactly, is considered non-essential here? Is bathing daily a luxury? Is flushing after every use an indulgence? Is washing clothes more than once a week excess? Or perhaps the real extravagance lies in expecting water to arrive during waking hours.
South Andaman households already practise conservation with monastic discipline. Bucket (Baalti) baths are routine. Laundry is planned like a military operation. Water is reused, repurposed, and rationed internally long before any advisory is issued. Storage tanks, drums (peepa), and contingency plans occupy more mental space than grocery lists. This is not environmental consciousness inspired by policy—it is enforced efficiency perfected over decades.
The reference to WHO’s 55 LPCD benchmark adds an unintended comic layer. That standard assumes continuous daily supply, predictable pressure, and stable access. In South Andaman, water does not flow; it makes guest appearances. Consumption norms mean little when access itself is uncertain. The relevant question here is not “How much water did you use today?” but “Will water come tomorrow, and if not, will what we stored last?”
The suggestion that households conduct “water audits” deserves special mention. Any sincere audit would not uncover waste; it would document deprivation. It would show families already living below recommended norms, often compromising hygiene and comfort to stretch supply. Audits are useful when behaviour needs correction. They are redundant when behaviour has already been reduced to the bare minimum. At this point, an audit would merely confirm what every islander already knows—and what the system appears reluctant to acknowledge.
The uncomfortable truth is that South Andaman’s water stress is not a demand-side problem. It is the outcome of decades of inadequate storage creation, limited redundancy, high system losses, and an unspoken reliance on citizens’ ability to “manage somehow”. Rainfall variability in island ecosystems is not a revelation. It is a known, recurring condition. Treating it every year as an unfortunate surprise requiring public appeals is not planning; it is procrastination.
Intermittent supply is often presented as conservation. Modern water management literature is less charitable—it treats intermittent supply as a marker of institutional weakness. Such systems increase leakage, encourage unsafe household storage, deepen inequality between those who can afford large tanks and those who cannot, and conveniently obscure non-revenue water losses. Yet in South Andaman, intermittent supply has been normalised to the point where it is defended, endured, and occasionally romanticised as “island living”.
This is why conservation advisories increasingly feel less like guidance and more like satire. They ask residents who already wake up at unearthly hours to collect water to “be responsible”. They imply behavioural excess where none exists. And they repeat year after year without accompanying data on losses, timelines for augmentation, or visible accountability. Conservation is preached diligently; capacity creation remains perennially “under consideration”.
If we are really serious about water security, the conversation must move beyond appeals. What Andaman needs is not another reminder to save water, but a clear commitment to fix what only the system can: expanded and decentralised storage, aggressive leakage reduction with publicly disclosed figures, integration of rainwater harvesting into the network, reuse of treated wastewater for non-potable purposes, and a transition from erratic bursts of supply to predictable daily distribution—even if at modest pressure.
Islanders have already done their part. They have conserved water not because they were asked to, but because they had no choice. When people have been conserving water all their lives, asking them to conserve more is not governance—it is satire with an official letterhead.
Picture this too:- In a land blessed with over three metres of rainfall annually, we have managed to convert abundance into fifteen minutes of municipal water every alternate day—a feat of efficiency that deserves study, if not admiration. It has even achieved what policy could not, by spawning a tanker economy, creating jobs, and keeping scarcity gainfully employed-year after year. (The writer Mr. Sanjay Balan, though retired from government service, he continues to blend governance insight, land-law expertise, and candid public commentary in service of Island development) (Note: Views expressed in this column are writer’s own)
