Sopping Wet but Thirsty

The people on the soggy streets of the wettest town in the world carry umbrellas and buckets.

The reason for the umbrellas is obvious -- Cherrapunji receives an average of 37.5 feet of rain a year, a drenching that rots food, peels paint and has earned the area the dubious distinction of recording more annual rainfall than anywhere else on the planet except for an uninhabited peak on Kauai.

The buckets serve a different purpose. Despite the downpours, Cherrapunji’s people don’t have enough water.

All the rain lands on arid, deforested and stony ground. There’s no local reservoir to hoard it, so it runs downhill, plunging over the precipitous cliffs at the edge of town and onto the plains of Bangladesh below.

To make matters worse, Cherrapunji’s few water tanks are rusted and cracked, as are the pipelines that are supposed to carry water from remote springs and aquifers to the homes of the community’s 12,000 residents.

With tap water only sporadically available in their houses, the township’s inhabitants must trek through the hills to small springs to fill their buckets with enough water to drink, bathe or cook a meal. In the winter dry season, a few unlucky people in the more remote precincts have to walk for hours to get water, and others must buy it from trucks.

For years, the people of this town in northeastern India accepted the situation with the same stoicism that allows them to survive months of biblical torrents. But as the town has modernized and tried to put itself on India’s tourist map, patience has worn thin.

“As the whole world is progressing, we are running out of time,” complained Eligius Sawian, 34, a teacher and tribal leader. “People want to have a little bit of comfort.”

India is grappling with a worsening nationwide water shortage, and the strange fate of Cherrapunji says much about the country’s inability to tap its rich natural resources. Although it is sliced by mighty rivers and subject to the yearly monsoon drenching, India has struggled to provide its skyrocketing population with water.

In the capital, New Delhi, 48% of residents lack municipal water connections, and tens of millions in other cities do not have water regularly. In southern India, riots occasionally break out as farmers and urbanites in the boomtown of Bangalore battle over the rights to the Cauvery River’s water. India also has quarreled with neighbors Bangladesh and Pakistan over rights to the bloated rivers that cross the subcontinent’s borders.

“There should not be this kind of a crisis,” said Sumita Dasgupta, coordinator of the water unit of the independent Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. “By any standards across the globe, India is very well endowed as far as rainfall is concerned.”

Cherrapunji is a cautionary tale of how governments can focus too much on elaborate dams and pipelines and neglect the natural resources near at hand, Dasgupta said. The state, she said, should have figured out how to harvest the torrents that tumble from the skies.

“It just requires home-grown, home-brewed technology,” she said.

In fact, some residents are calling for greater investment in tapping nearby springs and building local water storage tanks to catch the rainfall.

Meghalaya state government officials -- infuriated that the Indian press has dubbed Cherrapunji a “wet desert” -- say that tanks won’t work. Instead, they promise that a $10-million project to divert water from a river miles away from Cherrapunji will quench the thirst of this town that is on the verge of drowning.

Cherrapunji is proud of its place in meteorological history. Although the town is dry for half the year and even gets moderate sunshine, the rains are constant during the monsoon season, from April through September. Some days there’s a deluge, some days a drizzle, but it’s always damp. A sign at the edge of town welcomes visitors to “the wettest place in the universe.”

Actually, Cherrapunji has to duke it out for the rainfall championship with the neighboring village of Mawsynram, which claims more precipitation in some years. But locals sniff that the measurements in Mawsynram are unreliable because they are not taken by a government-sanctioned meteorologist.

Regardless, rain is clearly the defining factor here.

Cherrapunji is tucked into a forgotten corner of an already remote chunk of India sandwiched between Bangladesh, China and Myanmar. The town can be reached only via winding roads that weave through rice paddies and are regularly brushed by clouds. There is no telephone service, and electricity is erratic. Most residents belong to the Khasi tribe and are Christian. Western names are common.

The heart of the community is a maze of tin-roofed -- and sometimes tin-sided -- homes hanging on the edge of a cliff. Once a center for missionary activity in northeastern India, Cherrapunji is still a regional education hub and boasts a number of old churches and religious schools.

Those institutions, plus a flourishing produce market and the region’s only industry -- a government-funded cement factory -- have slowly swelled its population over the decades.

In the 1960s, George West came to Cherrapunji from Shillong, the state capital 31 miles away, to work as an engineer in the new factory. The constant gray and the wet chill were tough to take. “I couldn’t stand it for the first month,” he said. “But then I got used to it.”

Now West prizes the quiet and peacefulness of Cherrapunji, and his grown sons, who have moved back to Shillong, get homesick when the rains begin. West scoffs at the town’s “wet desert” image. “There’s plenty of water here,” he said as a steady drizzle drummed on his roof. “It’s all mismanagement.”

Mismanagement has certainly contributed to the town’s paradoxical water shortage, as has history and geographical bad luck.

Cherrapunji sits at about 4,000 feet, perched on the southern tip of a plateau that looms over Bangladesh. The cliffs of Cherrapunji are the first place hit by moisture that forms over the Bay of Bengal, and the escarpment wrings water from the monsoon clouds as they roll toward the Himalayas.

Despite this dreary dynamic, the British chose the area for their first colonial capital in northeastern India in the 19th century. But the rain got the best of them. Not known for their aversion to dampness, the British nonetheless decamped to the marginally drier Shillong to the north.

People continued to live in Cherrapunji, partly because of what would become another factor in its bizarre drought -- rich mineral deposits. The plateau around the town became the site of heavy mining of coal and limestone. That work stripped the area of trees and topsoil and damaged the water table, leaving the region with little vegetation or earth to soak up its showers.

“So much of the land has been dusted off,” said K.L. Tariang, director of the state department of soil and water conservation.

From his office in Cherrapunji, N.K. Dhar, the town’s water officer, can see the smoke rise from a limestone mining operation down the road. He shrugged and said there was nothing the state could do to stop it. “It’s private property,” he said.

As water dripped from his leaking office roof, Dhar fingered a blotchy report that showed the effects of the mining. The document listed the amount of water that had been tapped from three sets of underground sources and channeled to the town in pipelines over the years. From 1993 to 1997, the amount from just one of those sources, a spring in a nearby cave, fell from 141,000 gallons per day to 20,000, an 86% decline.

Not all of that water even makes it to town, and what does often is not drinkable. The galvanized iron pipes have long been rusted and occasionally get swept away in the area’s regular landslides, or even cracked by wandering cows. Meanwhile, the rainwater catchment tanks that the government has provided to the town are in varying states of disrepair or decay.

The state says that with the new system, water soon will be channeled to Cherrapunji via tougher, rust-proof pipes. All that remains is to finish construction on a water treatment plant and, they promise, the town will have drinkable water by this winter’s dry season.

Sawian, the teacher and tribal leader, says he’ll believe it when the dry season comes and he still gets water through his tap, around the clock.

For now, he says, the erratic water supply is more of a headache than a catastrophe for the town. The people who must walk for hours are from traditional tribal communities on remote hilltops who prefer isolation to the convenience of living near the springs. It is professionals such as Sawian who are complaining louder, though their commutes to springs are usually far shorter.

“When we were boys, this wasn’t an issue,” Sawian said. “But it takes a lot of time to go up and down, up and down.” He said he misses meetings while making 10-minute dashes to the spring in a gully behind his house. And there’s another new development that makes going outside inconvenient.

“With the coming of television,” Sawian said, “people want to stay in their homes.”