Numbers are supposed to be neutral. They arrive without emotion, sit quietly at tables, and wait to be interpreted. But some numbers refuse to remain silent. India’s rank of 120 out of 122 in global water quality is one such number. It does not merely describe water;  it speaks of memory, governance, neglect, and the quiet erosion of trust between a citizen and the most basic promise of the state, the promise that water will not harm those who drink it.

To rank 120th is not to fail dramatically. It is to fail systematically. It means that almost everyone has done marginally better, and we have learned to live with marginally worse.

The Illusion of Abundance

India is a land shaped by rivers. Our myths are born on their banks, our civilisations named after them. The Ganga is not just water; it is ancestry. The Indus is not geography; it is identity. Yet, somewhere between reverence and reality, abundance became illusion.

Nearly 70% of India’s water is contaminated, a statistic so staggering that repetition has numbed its shock. When contamination becomes the norm, purity begins to feel like a luxury product. Clean water migrates into gated communities, packaged bottles, and filtered exclusivity, while the majority negotiate daily compromises with safety.

The kitchen tap, once a symbol of modern dignity, has become a site of suspicion. Is it safe today? Should it be boiled? Filtered again? Avoided? Rank 120 does not live in reports; it lives in these daily calculations.

Water as a Health Sentence

Approximately 200,000 people die each year in India due to unsafe water. This is not a natural disaster;  it is a slow administrative one. These deaths do not arrive with headlines or sirens. They arrive as diarrhoea, kidney failure, stunting, and weakened immunity—diseases of prolonged exposure rather than sudden catastrophe.

In philosophical terms, this is structural violence harm inflicted not by intent, but by prolonged inaction. When a state knows the quality of its water and still allows its citizens to consume it, responsibility does not dissolve into complexity; it concentrates.

Rank 120 is therefore not about water alone. It is about whose lives are considered resilient enough to absorb contamination.

The Ground Beneath the Crisis

India extracts over 25% of the world’s total groundwater, a geological overreach that borders on desperation. Aquifers, once considered eternal, are now treated like emergency savings accounts withdrawn without replenishment. In Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and parts of the Deccan Plateau, the water table retreats like a memory fading faster than it can be recorded.

Groundwater contamination is particularly cruel because it is invisible. Rivers at least smell. Groundwater arrives clear, tasteless, and lethal, laced with arsenic, fluoride, nitrates, and industrial residue. The clearer the water looks, the more it lies.

Thus, India’s low Water Quality Index rank is not an anomaly;  it is the mathematical consequence of extraction without ethics.

The Composite Mirror

Domestically, the Composite Water Management Index (CWMI) holds up a mirror that international rankings merely polish. When NITI Aayog described India as facing its “worst-ever water crisis,” it was not forecasting the future; it was documenting the present.

Nearly 600 million Indians face high to extreme water stress. This means scarcity is no longer seasonal; it is structural. Water stress shapes migration, agriculture, gender roles, and urban conflict. Women walk farther. Farmers gamble deeper. Cities grow taller while their water sources shrink lower.

Interestingly, some states, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, have shown that governance matters. Their relative success exposes a philosophical truth: scarcity is not always natural; often, it is managerial.

When Rankings Become Warnings

The Environmental Performance Index places India consistently in the bottom tier for sanitation and drinking water. These rankings are often dismissed as Western metrics imposed on developing realities. But water is not ideological. Bacteria do not respect GDP. Arsenic does not respond to national pride.

To rank between 116th and 140th globally in drinking water safety is to receive a warning written in epidemiology. It tells us that economic growth has outpaced ecological care, and infrastructure has expanded faster than its maintenance.

Rankings, in this sense, are not insults; they are early diagnoses.

The Arithmetic of Neglect

Water quality indices are built on weighted parameters, including dissolved oxygen, biological contamination, chemical load, accessibility, and treatment capacity. India scores poorly not because of one catastrophic failure, but because of many small ones accumulating over time.

This is the arithmetic of neglect. One untreated drain here. One unregulated borewell there. One postponed sewage project. Multiplied by decades, these add up to Rank 120.

Philosophically, this reveals how nations decline not through collapse, but through tolerance of the unacceptable.

An Economic Crisis, Not Just Ecological

If current trends continue, India risks losing up to 6% of its GDP by 2050 due to water stress. This reframes water from an environmental issue into a macroeconomic one. No factory runs without water. No data centre cools itself on ideology. No agricultural surplus survives salinity.

Water quality is economic confidence made liquid.

Beyond the Rank

To obsess over escaping Rank 120 is to misunderstand the problem. The goal is not to climb indices; it is to restore trust. Trust that water will nourish, not poison. Trust that development does not require dilution of life itself.

The Jal Jeevan Mission and similar initiatives are steps, but pipelines alone cannot carry integrity. Treatment plants must work, monitoring must be transparent, and data must be public. Water governance must move from episodic crisis management to continuous care.

The Moral Question

In the end, the water crisis asks a moral question: What does a nation owe its people before asking anything in return?

Before taxes, before productivity, before patriotism, the answer is simple. It owes them water that does not kill.

Rank 120 is not a verdict. It is an invitation to rethink progress, to repair systems, and to remember that civilisation does not begin with concrete, but with clean water.

And until that memory returns, every glass poured from the tap will carry not just water, but a question mark.

.    .    .