Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis?

On 11 March, panic struck engineers at a giant power station on the banks of the Ganges river in West Bengal state. Readings showed that the water level in the canal connecting the river to the plant was going down rapidly. Water is used to produce steam to run the turbines and for cooling vital equipment of coal-fired power stations.

By next day, authorities were forced to suspend generation at the 2,300-megawatt plant in Farakka town causing shortages in India's power grid. Next, the vast township on the river, where more than 1,000 families of plant workers live, ran out of water. Thousands of bottles of packaged drinking water were distributed to residents, and fire engines rushed to the river to extract water for cooking and cleaning.

The three-month-long summer is barely weeks away but water availability in India's 91 reservoirs is at its lowest in a decade, with stocks at a paltry 29% of their total storage capacity, according to the Central Water Commission. Some 85% of the country's drinking water comes from aquifers, but their levels are falling, according to WaterAid.

No wonder then that conflicts over water are on the rise.

Thousands of villagers in drought-hit region of Maharashtra depend on tankers for water; and authorities in Latur district, fearing violence, have imposed prohibitory orders on gatherings of more than five people around storage tanks. Tens of thousands of farmers and livestock have moved to camps providing free fodder and water for animals in parched districts. The government has asked local municipalities to stop supplying water to swimming pools.

States like Punjab are squabbling over ownership of river waters. In water-scarce Orissa, farmers have reportedly breached embankments to save their crops.

Back in Farakka, villagers are washing clothes in the shallow waters of the power station canal and children are crossing by foot.

"We would dive into the canal earlier for a swim," says a villager. Not far away, near the shores of the Ganges, fisherman Balai Haldar looks at his meagre catch of prawns and bemoans the lack of water.

"The river has very little water these days. It is also running out of fish. Tube wells in our village have run out of water," he says. "There's too much of uncertainty. People in our villages have moved to the cities to look for work."

It is a concern you hear a lot on the river these days. At the power plant, Milan Kumar says he is "afraid that this can happen again".

"We are being told that water levels in the Ganges have declined by a fourth. Being located on the banks of one of the world's largest rivers, we never thought we would face a scarcity of water.

"The unthinkable is happening."

Names that break computers

A few people have names that can utterly confuse the websites they visit, and it makes their life online quite the headache. Why does it happen?

Jennifer Null’s husband had warned her before they got married that taking his name could lead to occasional frustrations in everyday life. She knew the sort of thing to expect – his family joked about it now and again, after all. And sure enough, right after the wedding, problems began.

“We moved almost immediately after we got married so it came up practically as soon as I changed my name, buying plane tickets,” she says. When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again. Instead, she has to call the airline company by phone to book a ticket – but that’s not the end of the process.

But to any programmer, it’s painfully easy to see why “Null” could cause problems for a database. This is because the word “null” is often inserted into database fields to indicate that there is no data there. Now and again, system administrators have to try and fix the problem for people who are actually named “Null” – but the issue is rare and sometimes surprisingly difficult to solve.

“Null” isn’t the only example of a name that is troublesome for computers to process. There are many others. In a world that relies increasingly on databases to function, the issues for people with problematic names only get more severe.

Some individuals only have a single name, not a forename and surname. Others have surnames that are just one letter. Problems with such names have been reported before. Consider also the experiences of Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, a Hawaiian woman who complained that state ID cards should allow citizens to display surnames even as long as hers – which is 36 characters in total. In the end, government computer systems were updated to have greater flexibility in this area.

Incidents like this are known, in computing terminology, as “edge cases” – that is, unexpected and problematic cases for which the system was not designed.

“Every couple of years computer systems are upgraded or changed and they’re tested with a variety of data – names that are well represented in society,” explains programmer Patrick McKenzie. “They don’t necessarily test for the edge cases.”

McKenzie has developed a pet interest in the failings of many modern computer systems to process less common names. He has compiled a list of the pitfalls that programmers often fail to foresee when designing databases intended to store personal names.

But McKenzie is living proof of the fact that name headaches are a relativistic problem. To many English-speaking westerners, the name “Patrick McKenzie” might not seem primed to cause errors, but where McKenzie lives – Japan – it has created all kinds of issues for him.

“Four characters in a Japanese name is very rare. McKenzie is eight, so for printed forms it’ll often be the case that there’s literally not enough space to put my name,” he says.