GS Paper 1 10 marks · 150w 9 min Easy
Why is the world today confronted with a crisis of availability of and access to freshwater resources?
Subtopic: Geography · freshwater resources crisis
How to structure your answer
Introduction (under 1% of global water is accessible freshwater; 2.2 bn lack safe water) → Availability crisis: demand surge, groundwater mining, climate change → Pollution and ecosystem degradation → Access crisis: governance failures, urban inequity → Transboundary and virtual-water dimensions → Conclusion (IWRM and SDG 6)
Written within the word limit
173 words · target 150 words · 9 min
Though water covers 70% of the Earth, under 1% is accessible freshwater. With about 2.2 billion people still lacking safely managed drinking water (UN 2023), the crisis has two faces — physical availability and social access.
Crisis of availability
- Exploding demand: population growth, urbanisation, industry and irrigation (nearly 70% of withdrawals) have multiplied global water use several-fold in a century.
- Groundwater mining: aquifers are pumped faster than recharge — India, the world's largest extractor, draws roughly 250 bcm annually.
- Climate change: glacial retreat, erratic monsoons and prolonged droughts destabilise river flows and recharge.
- Pollution: untreated sewage, industrial effluents and agrochemicals render rivers and aquifers unusable, converting available water into unsafe water.
- Ecosystem loss: draining of wetlands and degraded catchments shrink natural storage.
Crisis of access
- Governance deficits: intermittent, inequitable urban supply — 'Day Zero' scares in Cape Town (2018), Chennai (2019) and Bengaluru (2024) — hit the poor hardest.
- Transboundary disputes politicise sharing: the Nile (GERD), the Indus and the Mekong.
- Virtual water embedded in exports drains already water-scarce regions.
With SDG 6 off-track, integrated water resources management, recycling and reuse, rational pricing and cooperative basin governance are urgent.
What an examiner expects to see
- Split the answer explicitly into availability (physical scarcity) and access (social-economic scarcity) — that division is the question's demand.
- Demand drivers: several-fold rise in global water use in a century; irrigation alone takes nearly 70% of withdrawals.
- Groundwater mining: India is the world's largest extractor (~250 bcm/year); aquifer depletion is invisible and weakly regulated.
- Climate change destabilises supply through glacial retreat, erratic monsoons and droughts.
- Pollution converts available water into unusable water — sewage, effluents, agrochemicals.
- Access failures: inequitable urban supply (Cape Town, Chennai, Bengaluru), transboundary disputes (Nile/GERD, Indus, Mekong), weak governance.
- Conclude with IWRM, reuse and recycling, demand management, and the off-track SDG 6 target.
Concrete cases, schemes and judgments
- Cape Town's 'Day Zero' scare (2018) and Chennai's reservoir crisis (2019)
- Bengaluru's acute water shortage of 2024
- Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute among Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia
- India extracts about 250 bcm of groundwater annually — the highest in the world
- UN (2023): about 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water
- NITI Aayog's Composite Water Management Index warned of extreme water stress affecting some 600 million Indians
Terminology to weave into the answer
water stressgroundwater miningDay Zerovirtual waterintegrated water resources managementSDG 6