Close your eyes and imagine that you have just woken up. You are excited to start the day. You run to your bathroom for ablutions. You open the tap, but there is not a single drop of water! You run around trying to source it; no luck. Your city has run out of water; there is nothing you can do about it.
Suddenly you receive a message that a tanker is arriving with water. You collect as many vessels as you can and reach the road only to see long queues of people gnawing at each other to get just a few drops.
Vicious, right? Yes, that is how the world looks like when we run out of this elixir of life. We need it to sustain us for every single day on this planet. Even when searching for a habitable environment on another planet, the first resource we look for is water. That is how valuable it is.
That is also why water is one of the significant markers of inequality in the world we live in today.
Women and girls in the most rural parts of the world walk miles to get a pot of water that most of us get by just moving a finger. In India, 100 million children die every year simply due to the lack of access to clean drinking water.
While we are frightened to think of a world without water for many, it is a living reality. Millions do not have enough access to enough water to get through their day, or the water they have access to is in-consumable. It is time we own the fact that our hefty consumption has led to these people being unable to avail their legitimate human right.
In 2017, Cape Town was declared the first city on the verge of hitting Day Zero. The city was going to run out of water! But with a surprising turn of events, Cape Town’s Day Zero kept getting pushed. Extraordinary efforts of residents and authorities coming together to calculate and rationalize their consumption were the city’s resurrection from its water woes.
They cut their water consumption to less than half of what they consumed four years ago, pausing the Day Zero countdown clock indefinitely.
But there are many more cities on the path to Day Zero. In India alone, there are about twenty-one cities all set to reach the dry day by the year 2025. This list includes some of our most populous and advanced cities as well. While we would’ve developed on multiple fronts, this lack of access to clean drinking water would damage all of that collective progress. Every five minutes we are not acting on changing policy to build a more water-positive world; we lose out on 50 million liters of water. That is enough to power an entire village for three months!
No problem resolves with the same level of consciousness that created it, and the key to conserving water is to realize how valuable it is before it runs out. We have to let this sink in – our fates intertwine to how we choose to consume this resource today and now. Individual actions have never mattered more than now.
To take that action, we must understand the amount of water we consume daily. One of the initiatives of my organization- Why Waste? is to develop a ‘Water Footprint Calculator’ towards this goal. After that, we developed actionable items that anyone can adopt in their lives daily to save at least 100 liters of water every single day. Today, the average consumption globally is 500 liters, when the quantity that is “enough” for us is just 60 liters.
Simple acts like bathing with a bucket of water instead of a shower or using collected water in a mug to brush your teeth every day ensure a
few more years of access to water. Collective action on such daily tasks can prevent us from slipping into a global water crisis – a possible third world war – the war for water.
I became deeply impacted by the water crisis at the age of 15 when a tired girl begged me for water and not for money at the iconic stepwell of Ahmedabad. But there is no more time for us each to have such life-changing incidents for the reality of the water crisis to dawn upon us. Unless we adorn the cape of collective consciousness, the stories of parched throats and Day Zeroes reaching their brinks will keep increasing. Before we know it, we arrive at a place from where there is no return.
We need to act now. We need to learn now. We need to change, now! Every second we do not rethink our consumption today, we prevent our future selves from accessing this Elixir of Life.
About the Author: Garvita Gulhati, is the “Water Girl” of India. Forbes 30 under 30 and the Founder/CEO of “Why Waste“, an organisation which is taking water positivity to the world stage by means of innovative education and ideas that bring about a systemic change.
