Editorial

Running Out of Water and Time

By the Editor: Siddharth Sehgal

If you are living in India, the headline of this article is sufficient to convey the future we are heading towards at an unprecedented rate. Like innumerable problems that plague our county and like typical Indian reaction to those problems, we’ll deal with it when it knocks our door, we are waiting for a miracle to happen but miracles don’t happen now a day in this country.

The NITI Aayog’s report, which I highly encourage you to go through, elaborates the peril that is looking at us. 600 Million citizens of this country are struggling to find water to fulfill their daily needs and given the problem of population and pollution that is increasing day by day, it’s an obvious predication that water shortage will become adverse by the year. As with all the problems, the water problem too can be traced back to mismanagement and ill conceived planning with no vision for future. For one instance, water harvesting is mandatory by law in new construction of residential apartments and building but how many people do you think, implement this while constructing a building. Agriculture and bunch of other govt. departments are required as part of their work to help farmers implement water saving techniques that require less amount of water. Even we as citizens are not good at conservation of this precious resource, we expect the other person to do his due and give ourselves a free pass. So it’s very high time that we go in saving mode. Reach out to your neighbour, your colleagues, your residential societies to talk about this issue, take some steps, even small steps would do or at the least, plant a tree and take responsibility in protecting and rearing it. But its important that we start somewhere.

But as there are problems, there are solutions as well. Biggest strength that we have is the innovative ability to survive and adapt with the resources we have in hand. We are surrounded with water from three sides, some parts of our countries experience flooding each year and some get more rainfall than they need. There is no reason we can’t put our brightest minds to work on this problem and don’t find a solution. This may take some very courageous leadership and out of the box thinking, but stakes can’t be higher. There is a reason behind the saying, the water is life.

The nature has way of relieving stress when subjected to extreme circumstances. The overpopulation, cutting down of trees, exhaustless consumption of resources and urbanization has burdened the environment to an extent that probably sooner rather than later it will reach that point of no return. Let us hope a timely course correction may still prevent that from happening.

 

One Comment

  1. O K R Sivagnanam

    It’s shame on the government that we’re still talking about scarcity of water – for drinking and farming, despite our land being surrounded by all but one sides!
    Is it the lack of will and determination of the government authorities to intervene at the right time and succeed in finding out the solution to this nagging problem?
    We the people are also to blame for our casual approach to the water problem, by not using the scarce commodity judiciously!
    Even now it’s not too late, and possibly rain water harvesting and avoiding enormous water flow into the oceans can at best redress the problem effectively!