He goes about wasting water, buckets after buckets. He thinks that the entire responsibility to clean the staircase and the world is on his shoulders. He would clean his car by pouring water from the top of his terrace. He would keep the entire world clean (except himself). He believes that he owns all the water in the world. Well, this is my neighbor. He isn’t really a bad man but for this extra cleanliness loving nature of his, I hate him. Quite, recently I was reading in newspaper about water shortage all over the world. Almost one third of the world’s population across the countries is living in water shortage and of course this is going to increase in future. Funny how we do not understand this little fact that water is a limited resource. We all understand that water is needed for everything we do, from the point we wake up in the morning till the time we go to sleep, almost all our activities need water. Even when it doesn’t, we need water to refresh ourselves and keep doing the work. We can’t think of life on earth without water. I know this has been repeated numerous of times in numerous of articles that although we have maximum of earth surface covered with water, the fresh water available is really less. However, I believe that even when we know and hear it often, we do not believe in the gravity of this issue. We tend to live in this illusion that this problem is not going to affect us. It is almost like standing on the railway tracks in front of an approaching train and thinking that we will not get killed. Come on, if nothing else, think of your wallets. The price of water is constantly increasing, thus becoming an economic burden for our country and on individuals. Apart from that lack of availability of water in a lot of places leads to the wastage of resources to just make it accessible, as people have to travel long distances to get water. Therefore, leading to a terrible loss of human potential which can be invested in to do other things.
Irrespective of whether we choose to believe it or not, water scarcity is one of the major reasons for poverty. Like I said above, a lot of human potential is wasted in collecting water for even the basic requirements. This is also true for young children. They miss classes to collect water for their families. Also, it is extremely necessary for water to be available in schools during school hours. We can’t expect kids to study for so long without even the basic necessity that is water. More than just the availability of water is important the availability of clean water in schools. We hear about numerous instances of young kids suffering from diseases such as diarrhea and stomach infections. At schools the spreading of such diseases is even more problematic because schools are the places where children collect in large numbers and the chances of them getting affected increases by many folds. Apart from this, young girls are the worst sufferers of this water scarcity. Due to lack of proper drainage system and lack of water availability in toilets, parents make their girls withdraw from education as soon as they reach puberty. Thus, depriving them of any education. These people continue to be stuck in this vicious circle of poverty forever. Another major problem branching out of water scarcity is the scarcity of food. Let us not forget that water is only important for naked consumption but equally important for growing crops. Places with water scarcity are also going through this nightmare of insufficient food. This results in a horrific life for people living there. The population ceases to develop here.
We have to look deeply into the major reasons for such water problems. We might not see it clearly but urbanization is one of the major reasons of water scarcity. We go ahead and cut numerous trees to build cities and factories. This affects the amount of rainfall in a particular area. These factories use large amount of water for production, cleaning and cooling purpose. Beside these, a lot of factories are also guilty of throwing away toxic waste in water bodies. Thus, polluting a large amount of water. The problem is very apparent here, the consumption of water increases and the availability falls. Added to all this, we in our day to day life don’t stop wasting water we can easily conserve. Until and unless we do not take up the burden of water conservation the water problems will continue to increase. Of course, we need government to take up quick and affective steps to minimize these problems. We need better technology also. In many African and Middle-east countries, technology to convert salty water into fresh water has been introduces and is benefiting a large number of people. However, we need more monetary resources to bring something like that in our country. For which we need an honest and efficient government. In short, the solution to our problems are right in front of our eyes. We just have to initiate and move towards those solution to make not only our lives but those of others too comfortable. Let us stop taking water for granted and start valuing it.
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