Save Water

#Water, a life sustaining natural resource, is limited and around 1 in 4 people do not have access to safe drinking water. In India, its 6% of population who lack access to safe water, and 54% to safely managed household sanitation facilities.?It is the responsibility of every individual to save water and ensure a #sustainable future for the upcoming generations. We all are aware about the importance of water. If water supply does not meet our requirements, the entire nation would suffer immensely. Despite such importance, water is being wasted at an alarming rate. India, a country with 18% of world’s population has 4% of freshwater resources. Water scarcity is one of the serious concerns for countries across the world. In 2019, #chennai made international headlines by declaring ‘Day Zero’, as the city ran out of water and all the reservoirs dried up. A report by #nitiaayog , said that if methods for water conservation in India were not adopted, another 20 cities including Bengaluru, Delhi and Hyderabad, would run out of groundwater in the next few years. The only solution to avoid this grim situation, is to adopt universal methods?of #waterconservation , which could be replicated across households.

Water Conservation becomes extremely important for us as we are already facing with challenges like #waterpollution , #sanitation , #waterscarcity , #climatechange and #groundwater depletion. In order to handle these, every measure taken to save water from the individual level by changing their habits to the national level by adopting the relevant technologies would matter. On an individual level, one can minimize water usage in regular household activities like using a bucket instead of water pipe to clean vehicles, watering plants with a sprinkler, checking for any leakages, closing taps when unused, re-use water, using a low-flow shower, and installing a rainwater harvesting system.

It would be fruitful to relook at ancient farming practices that seemed more sustainable. The country’s agricultural system is still largely dependent on rainfall. Given the changing rainfall patterns, the government has been considering the revival of traditional water conservation methods. Some of them are talab, jhalaras, baoli, kund, bawari, taanka, bamboo drip irrigation etc. The government is also committed to providing safe tap drinking water to every household by 2024. Some of the corporates initiatives like #hindustanunilever Foundation water for public good initiative, stressed on diversion-based irrigation system. ITC’s watershed development programme covered around 1.2 million acres of water-stressed areas through its soil and moisture conservation programmes. ?

To save water, we need to address the issues of budgetary support for the maintenance of infrastructure and supplementing and building up source stocks. Huge investments in water harvesting are needed to build and protect water availability and to harvest a reasonable part of the monsoon flows. We also need a massive restoration drive to clean up our existing water bodies, be it village tanks or baolis. Equally important is a national literacy mission around water to create multilevel hydro-literacy in schools and civil society. The media has a strong role to play in reiterating the message. Corporates need to educate their staff to create an all-pervasive ISR (individual social responsibility) structure. It is important to recognize the changing patterns of water availability due to climate change, especially modelling future scenarios to study the impact of receding glaciers that will cause our rivers to dry up and altered rainfall patterns affecting cropping patterns and impacting food security.

The government cannot manage to save water alone, it will take the combined efforts of civil society, the private sector, and the public at large to meet the challenge.

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