WATER FOR LIFE: THE EXISTENTIAL TRUTH

Third day of the Teacher’s Training Program.

 -Harsha P S

It is July and the sky should be covered with rain clouds and monsoon should have been in its optimum.  The rivers and reservoirs should have been brimming with water, Lands should have been looking green & people should have been sighing with relief. But the present day picture is drastically opposite.  Everyone is worried of not having enough rains & how to meet the basic need of life-WATER.

  

Distribution of water: Percentage of water

Water is the life Source on planet Earth & without water there can be no life imagined. Water forms the basic essence for all living forms. Water is not just a chemical component, water, as it is for any form of life also holds the story of mankind on this earth. It holds the key to his future. With such a prologue, Mr. U.N. Ravi Kumar, who is a Water management consultant and the Founder of CENTRE for APPLIED RURAL TECHNOLOGIES (CART), began his talk on the existing WATER ISSUES our country is facing today. The present challenges of meeting the growing demand for water and the imminent threats for future if we don’t take measures in containing the growing problem.

U.N Ravikumar speaking on water

He explained that our Indian history is laced with great many cultures & one among them is the culture of water conservation & harvesting. The examples of water conserving culture dates back to 4500 years ago in the Indus valley civilization, in a place called DHOLAVIRA fort, in the Ran of Kutch, Gujarat. It is one of the worlds earliest and the best planned water conservation model existed at those times. It showcased the ingenuity of the civilization’s social engineering. The Jaigarh fort, Jaipur in Rajasthan also had an efficient water harvesting systems where the largest tank had a capacity to store up to 6 million gallons of water. And in the south, the Vijayanagara Empire had the culture of constructing huge temple tanks to store water.

  

 

Ancient traditional water storage

His talk took us back into the historic time scale when WATER HARVESTING was practiced in our villages as a traditional wisdom. The culture of attributing reverence for Water and safeguarding it as a sacred wealth was once widely prevalent. He gave the picture of villages where water is harvested in ponds for daily requirements. This traditional wisdom of conserving water & sanctifying it can be still witnessed today in the temple "Kalyani’s".

He brought these examples to illustrate our present culture of abusing water utility & our attitude towards water as a commodity. He called it as GUTTER CULTURE.  He gave statistics of water usage in our houses, where the maximum percentage of potable water goes into flushing (40%), washing (25%) & bathing (23%), ironically the required water for drinking & cooking is around 3 to 4%.

 

Water wastage information

 The percentage average of water consumption in a country like India reads like this, 8% of water goes into domestic consumption, 10% for industry & the maximum 82% is used in agriculture. This brings a real picture of the WATER FOOTPRINT, the individual, society & the country is giving out, for it measures the water consumptive mode. The global water footprint over the past thirty decades is increasing every year at an alarming rate. As human civilization is progressing towards industrious nature, its exponential growth is directly impacting the water resources all around.

He cautioned that the way we as individual & society are using water defines the bleak future of water available for human existence.

The lecture touched on the topics of “grey water”, (the water discharged from houses after its consumption), which is getting dumped into the ponds, lakes & rivers which are killing diverse life forms which are dependent on these, such as the fishes, frogs & the birds. His talk highlighted the importance of wetland ecosystem which is biologically a diverse ecosystem and plays an important role in the water cycle. He coined them as the kidneys of the earth, for it functions as the purifier of the water.

Intensification of irrigation year by year is severely decreasing water table. Studies reveal that the ground water table of Mysore is falling at a steady pace of 1.5ft annually. In such a situation how the lakes could be thriving?  Wetlands are getting deeply impacted.

The scene is even more alarming at the global scale. The anthropogenic impact on the environment is reaching at its tipping point.

The ISSUE of WATER SECURITY & SCARCITY is at the prime defining moment for human sustenance. It may in future lead to a war of water.  To check this global catastrophe he urged the answer is in locally adapting traditional water harvesting models. Mr. Ravi Kumar mentioned several rain water harvesting methods practiced around Mysore city, including his own house. Institutionally he has successfully implemented in many villages, educational institutions and industries.

 

Thinking of a water war!

He outlined how the city of Mysore had many lakes such as Karanji, Kukkarahalli & Dalavoy lakes which were constructed to cater not only the agriculture community but to meet the growing need of an expanding city. At the same time he regretted that such beautiful lakes are being ignored and let to die. They are encroached upon, polluted with urban filth, land filled with debris!  The people who should have protected it have forgotten their importance. Sheer neglect and mismanagement have taken them to a point of no return. Today so much is being invested to revive it back in vain.

He concluded his talk saying that the future of human world rests with all of us and the teachers have a great role in passing this message to the children, who will be the next inhabitants of this planet earth.