What Will It Take To Stop Us From Wasting Precious Water?

A noise woke me up in the wee hours of the morning. It was coming from the bathroom of the company guest house that I was sharing with one of the employees. This noise was made by the continuous flow of water from the tap of the wash basin.

As the tap was not being closed the water gushed continuously. I began to wonder ….was my roomie using water from the wash basin to take his bath? As soon as he came out with his towel to dry his face I realized that all this time he had not been bathing but shaving. He had kept the water flowing the whole time. Why do we need to keep a tap on while we shave?

With this thought of water wasting in my mind I finished my daily chores, got ready for office and went to the kitchen to check out the menu for breakfast. There my eyes caught the faulty tap of the kitchen wash basin from which a very small stream of water flowed down the drain. I wondered to myself — can’t we call a plumber and get it repaired? Won’t this save us a lot of water? On the way to the office, my mind was kept busy by the thoughts of precious water being wasted at the guest house. I started calculating the amount of water that was flowing down the drain.

A rough assumption of the water that might be wasted while shaving was about ¼ of a bucket, and with that faulty kitchen tap it may be around 3 to 4 buckets in the whole day. Here we are talking of wasting three to four buckets from one room of one house in one street of one city of one state of one country. I multiplied that by an arbitrary figure of a modest 100 million every day for the world, and the shocking realization hit me like a ton of bricks. We are wasting hundreds of millions of buckets of water every day on a planet that has a shortage of clean water.

Where are we going wrong? Why don’t we understand that we are wasting this precious resource through carelessness, laziness and indifference. Is it basic education? No I don’t think so. One out of the two people involved in today’s wastage of water incident was educated and working at a middle level management position and the other was hardly educated.

Maybe it is just general awareness that is lacking among all of us? Maybe we are unaware of the consequences of this dreadful wastage of water? Maybe we are so selfish we have decided that the future generations – our children and grandchildren – will look out for themselves.

How can we stop wasting water? First we will have to change our attitude. We will have to feel responsible for the world that we will create for future generations. And what is the solution? How can we make everybody aware of this problem? Through public education programmes, water metres and higher water rates perhaps?  As far as I am concerned I have always felt that the children can make a world of difference. Let’s  also begin by adding water conservation and environmental studies as key subjects on schools’ curricula.

Just imagine that you are shaving one day and you have kept the tap gushing water …. then your kid comes up to you and tells you, “Dad please close this tap. You are wasting a lot of water. The planet is drying up.  You need to save this water so that I can have enough clean water to drink when I get older.”

Won’t that make you change your attitude?