Water Scarcity: Kala Bazar to the South China Sea

As usual Radu drove to work in his aging Hyundai i10 one spring day in 2018. As he caressed the bank of the Wangchhu River to reach his office, the river appeared to beckon to him. ‘Come and drink me. Why don’t you tap me up?’  The river knew that Radu was thirsty. He heaved a sigh, that was neither of relief nor of pain and hit the accelerator, for he could not bear to see so much water flow freely!

Radu was a career bureaucrat. A cohort of 1990, he had risen through the ranks to head the Disaster Management Division in the Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs, Royal Government of Bhutan. After twenty years of working in Bhutan’s civil service, Radu had saved enough to book a 3BH apartment in Thimphu. However, after he booked the apartment, Radu was worried that he had probably bitten more than he could chew. But then the sales deed done with the real estate company came with the luscious ‘loan transfer’ option.

‘Pay half between now and the completion of the apartment. The remaining half can be paid through a transfer of loan with Bhutan National Bank’, said the sales deed.  

The location of the apartment was as abstract as they come in Bhutan, which doesn’t yet use the western style of defining addresses using street number, house number and PIN codes.

‘From the Druk school junction, you head towards Kalabazar. After about 200 meters you come to a sharp turn on your right. Take the turn and head towards the Ashi Building. Turn left and then right until you see a cluster of white buildings located right below the Guru Rinpoche painting on a large rock face that you can see from the other side of Thimphu’.

This is quite a mouthful for direction to a residential building. Quite exotic too! However, like other residents in the area, Radu had memorized it. 

Long ago, when Thimphu began its tryst with modernity, hordes of skilled as well as unskilled labourers poured into the valley from as far as Nepal and the southern foothills of Bhutan. They lived in shacks of houses, most with roofs and walls made from flattened bitumen barrels they would have emptied in the course of paving the emerging city’s roads. The long rows of black huts on the upper ridge of Changedaphu earned the place the moniker ‘Kalabazar’, literally Blacktown. 

Blacktown reminds me of a town by the same name in New South Wales, Australia. East or west, human beings fall on the same basics and logic to recognize and accept things around them. Blacktown, a suburb of Sydney is a melting pot of residents from myriad background, most of whom are not white, but brown, grey and black. Hence, the name, I guess!

Besides the loan, two things kept worrying Radu – road and water. Water supply in most parts of the city that Radu lived in was sporadic and unreliable at best. Indeed, it is a pity that Thimphu, the capital city of Bhutan has been grappling with water scarcity for domestic consumption.

The deal was done, but the builder betrayed. What was to be a 24-month project took over six years to complete. When Radu moved into his new house in November 2017, with his two sons and a wife, he suffered from post-purchase cognitive dissonance. On one hand, he had a brand-new apartment of his own, on the other, he was once again reminded of the three worries hanging over him - loan, water supply and the road.

As the last carton box was emptied from the Mahindra Bolero truck, Radu’s wife ran to the two bathrooms and the kitchen and opened the taps. Wonder of wonders! The taps came running out in full vengeance. At first the water was brown, then turned into the colourless and ordourless liquid as defined in grade two science books.

‘Water no problem, hubby’, Dema shouted in excitement at Radu.

Ha! Radu sighed. After all, water is not a problem.

However, the relief was short lived. In the third week of their moving in, one afternoon the taps ran completely dry. The whole colony was without water. People poured to the verandah overlooking each other and shared their frustrations. Some started making jokes out of the situation. By the third day, a lady cracked, ‘my husband is smelling like goondrook’ (Goondrook is a typical fermented spinach, considered a Nepali delicacy). Well, she knew what she was talking about!

Radu and Dema bundled their dirty laundry and went to their friend’s place near the Swimming Pool to wash and launder.

On the fourth day, the water pipes connected to the ground storage tanks started to sing. Everyone ran outside. Adults were excited as kids would be on seeing an ice-cream vendor. Everyone started filling their jerry cans and empty oil jars.

Radu and his wife went down with two of their biggest buckets. They were able to beat the residents of the other block to the pipe, with whom they shared the water connection. From the other end of the block came Rachna with her fat body and a bucket made of emptied building paint. Then a fight ensued!

Not an exaggeration!

Rachna removed the water pipe from Radu’s bucket and started filling her own. Dema intervened and requested that they be allowed to do first as they had already started. Rachna would not listen.

‘You have filled one bucket already. Let me fill one first’, she exploded. Frustration of being without water got the better of Radu, who was normally mild mannered. ‘Our bucket is already half-filled, let me finish it,’ he stared angrily at Rachna.  Similar screaming and swearing could be heard from the other block.

Radu had had enough. It had been a long day and he wanted to forget the water ordeal they had gone through. He reclined on his sofa and switched on the TV for his favourite news channel NDTV 24x7, that broadcasts news in Indian English. The newsreader seemed to talk directly to him:

‘The Supreme Court of India has instructed Karnataka to release 177 TMC ft of water to Tamil Nadu from the Cauvery barrage’.

His thick upper lip parted into a half smile. ‘How I wish, our Supreme Court would instruct the Thromde (Municipality) to release at least four buckets of water daily’.

Life imitates life, he thought as he changed the channel on his Toshiba LED TV to CNN.

‘President Trump has warned China that China’s claim over large parts of the South China Sea is illegal’, read Becky Anderson from her teleprompter.

‘Everyone is fighting over water, it is not Rachna and I alone’. Radu comforted himself, with a sense of regret for the tussle he had with Rachna.

Radu was trained and skilled in disaster management. Every day, he reviewed the Standard Operating Procedure titled ‘Should Disaster strike’. He led a team that was well versed in handling emergency situations during earthquakes and glacial lake outburst flood. Alas, solving his own water shortage was not part of his training or responsibilities!

Radu moved to the kitchen to help his wife prepare dinner. As usual, Dema was listening to music from her mobile phone. And playing at the moment was the popular song by Kunti Moktan, which translates to – Even if you go to the ocean, the quantity of water you can bring is limited by the size of the container you have!