Water, water everywhere, but…
By: K S S Pillai
It is well-known that water is more essential for survival than food. Death is certain without drinking water for some days, while one may live longer without food.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge highlighted the problem of the shortage of drinking water in his poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, where oceans with saline, undrinkable water surrounded him. While oceans cover 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface, some countries, desperate for drinking water, mechanically treat the saline water for drinking at a heavy cost.
Some rivers flow through different states and countries, and the parties have signed treaties regarding the usage of their water. Dams are sometimes built in them, subjecting other states and countries to floods or droughts. The treaties are breached for several reasons, even forcing the aggrieved parties to war.
Water tables have been going down during droughts, making water more expensive. Those selling drinking water have increased the price of the commodity. In some places, women and children walk for miles with pots on their heads to fetch drinking water from deep wells.
Countries build canals to carry excess water from large rivers to far-off dry areas, allowing people to farm and start industries. This has halted their migration to other places.
Some parts of our country receive excessive rain, which causes landslides, flash floods, and many other disasters, resulting in the loss of lives and properties, while others are in the grip of drought.
The Meteorological departments often issue alerts of different colours, asking educational institutions and offices to be closed. Roads become potholed with deep puddles of water, sometimes causing fatal accidents, and the opposition political parties take advantage of the situation by highlighting the problem.
Most parts of the country suffer from a deficiency of pure water. Those lucky to get sufficient water do not care about avoiding its wastage by not repairing leaking pipes, wasting water while brushing teeth, shaving, and many such activities.
The suggestion to use less water in bathrooms, fix leaks, and use water-efficient appliances to mitigate the problem falls on deaf ears. Selling drinking water has become a thriving business.
It is recommended to reuse water for other purposes after washing vegetables and fruits, plant drought-tolerant plants for landscaping, or harvest rainwater instead of allowing it to flow away. Rains are often accompanied by storms, causing trees or their branches to fall.
At times, they cause injuries and even death, and disruption of traffic and electric supply. Tourist spots, where many depend on tourists for their livelihood, are also affected, as few people want to spend money to get to places with heavy rains and remain inside hotels.
Open-air restaurants shift seats to the interiors, and domestic animals are not taken to the open fields to eat grass. Open manholes in flooded streets often cause fatal accidents.
Village women have a harrowing time in the kitchen, using wet wood as fuel in hearths. Smoke fills the entire house, resulting in continuous sneezing of family members with red eyes.
Some governments have taken piped water to villages and built toilets for the poor, but most have no uninterrupted water supply, forcing people to go out to the open to relieve themselves and use the toilets for other purposes.
Water bodies have become polluted. Chemical-based agriculture, factories, and houses discharge their impure water into them. People encroach upon them while the authorities look the other way. They are also used as a dumping ground for unwanted things, reducing their capacity to carry water and flooding the nearby areas during the rainy season.
Standing crops, properties, animals, and even people are washed away in floods and landslides in some parts of the country, while droughts have equal capacity to harm people. Diseases increase during the rainy season, making hospitals overcrowded.
The number of insects around lights increases, and they, in the company of frogs, make a loud sound at night, making it difficult to sleep. Fewer jobs are also some of the consequences of heavy rains. Even those repairing umbrellas do not get enough work as people go for plastic raincoats. Snakes enter small houses as their habitats get flooded.
It is high time the authorities addressed the problem seriously.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have appeared in several national and international publications)
