Water usage (or why the Indian Monsoon is important)

Check out the latest Scientific American - its got a great article on water usage by country, and what it is used for.
For my money though, the fascinating part is that

A vast amount of water is used to produce the food and products that nations consume. Large population is the greatest factor, but inefficient agriculture or dependence on water-intensive cuisine can exacerbate demand; meat consumption accounts for 30 percent of the U.S. water footprint.

Given the sheer amount of water that India uses (and exports!), the importance of the monsoons makes sense - around 80% of India's water comes from the Monsoon, as does a huge chunk of its energy.  Its pretty harsh - this is a ton of water and its all dependant on one - finicky - annual event.  As the Economist puts it

Yet the drought underlines a grim truth. India’s extremes of hydrology, poverty and population present vast difficulties for water management which it has never mastered. And they are growing. Increasingly frequent droughts may be a sign of this—if, as some think, climate change is to blame. It will accentuate India’s problems, with the monsoon rains, which supply over 50% of much of India’s annual precipitation in just 15 days, predicted to become even more contracted and unpredictable. At the same time, the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers promises to deprive the great rivers of the Indian sub-continent, the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, of their summertime source. This threatens a triple whammy: of longer dry seasons, in which these rivers do not flow, and more violent wet seasons. That would mean more bad news for flood-prone eastern India, including Bihar, where over 3m were displaced last year when the Kosi river burst a crumbling embankment.

Ominous...