Written by Dr. Yamini Srivastava
Millions of Indians currently lack access to clean drinking water, and the situation is only getting worse. India’s demand for water is growing at an alarming rate. Water crisis is predominantly a manmade problem. Extremely poor management, unclear laws, government corruption, and industrial and human waste have caused this water supply crunch and rendered what water is available practically useless due to the huge quantity of pollution.
A few days back I was going through an article in the newspaper that said that in a Global summit held recently, the countries have shared their agenda to conserve water and are focused to increase rainfall. I wondered how they possibly plan to do this. Maybe H2O will be created in laboratories in gallons and then supplied in bottles or maybe they plan to use flying drones as a way to induce rainfall, I thought.
Curious to learn about water conservation, I spent long hours surfing the web and ended up reading dozens of articles on the imminent water crisis in India. All of them pointed at the same conclusion: if India makes significant changes in the way it thinks about water and manages its resources soon, it could ward off, or at least mollify, the impending crisis. While the challenges were pretty clear, the solutions, not so much. Hence I continued searching for answers…
Until one day, when I was cooking, I heard the sound of big droplets of water dripping from my kitchen basin tap (it was apparently leaking). It was then I realized that the solution I was looking for was no farther than my home. The solution to water crisis is right at your doorstep.
Conservation of water needs to start from the household level. As it turns out, each household uses about 340 litres of water per day and the most amount of water inside our homes, up to a third, is used up from flushing the toilet.
(Source: http://www.metrovancouver.org)
Six steps of water conservation at the household level
These are few of my contributions in conserving water. Please share your feedback on how these measures helped. I’d like to also hear on other measures we could adopt to conserve water.
