Blue-less Earth

“Mom”, she called out from her room, “bring the mineral oil, quickly! I am getting late for school”. Tanya’s mother comes into the room with a small bottle and a piece of cloth. She then dabs the cloth with the oil and wipes her daughter’s hands, legs, face and baldhead.

According to our country’s former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, what has been described above is almost certainly going to be a daily ritual practiced by most people in their homes, say, fifty years from now. What else could one resort to, in the absence of our life sustaining resource…water?
This is how we kick started our first Environmental Science lecture in college - by coming to terms with the predictions made by one of our country’s best scientists. What it did, more than anything else, was to bring everything into perspective, show us exactly where we stand in time and how far we have come, in both a positive and negative light. It is indeed alarming and absurd to think of humankind reaching such dire circumstances where going bald and switching to mineral oil will be the only means of staying clean and hygienic. So, fifty years from now would mean that whatever Dr. Kalam claims might happen, and IS probably going to happen, if not in our lifetime, then definitely well within that of our children.

General statistics say that water covers 71% of the earth’s surface. To those who do not feel the need to study further into matters such as the subsequent division of that water, 71% seems like more than just sufficient. What they don’t realize is that of the 71%, up to 97% of the water is saline rendering it virtually unusable by man. The remaining is fresh water. Again, part of that water is locked in the ice caps, glaciers and hot springs, together constituting about 2.4%.

That leaves us, a population of almost 6.5 billion, dependent on just 0.6% of consumable water. This 0.6% is being used for varied purposes ranging from agriculture and hydroelectric power generation to cooking, drinking and bathing, by people all over the world.

In countries like the United Kingdom, the average person uses more than 50 litres of water a day flushing toilets. The highest average water use in the world is in the US, at 600 liters day. Statistics will also tell you that 85 per cent of urban India has access to safe, piped drinking water. However, statistics lie. Every person in cities today get by with about 71 litres per day, less than six flushes of an average toilet.
At this rate providing 145 litres of piped, treated water per day to the rest of urban India in the next three years will require an astronomical investment of about Rs 34,000 crore. Already states like Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are suffering due to shortage in the piped-water supply in many of its cities and towns.

It is indeed overwhelming to think of how pressed for resources we really are, and it is only going to get worse if we don’t wake up and take action soon.

The presence of water, like air, is always taken for granted, on the assumption that it will last forever. And Man is such that he is likely to do nothing about it until the very last moment, when he realizes that he is late for a meeting with an important client and has no water to wash the soap off his face. And once it is too late he will wake up, protest and demand answers as to why the government did not look into the matter sooner why nobody warned him. Each one begins to blame the person sitting next to him and starts trying to find excuses in defense. When all along, all he had to do was think wisely and use sensibly. With respect to our present day water crisis alone there are many choices that can be made to rectify our shortcomings.

Trapping rainwater and reusing it instead of letting it evaporate from our roads and terraces alone can solve some of our problems. Using buckets instead of hosepipes and showers on a day-to-day basis will also cut down the rate of consumption. This way more can be benefited. However, practically it will be of little use if only one person or one group of people puts these ideas into practice. This is where spreading of awareness comes into the picture.

The whole concept of sustenance needs to be taught or rather inculcated in the people right from childhood - ‘catch them young’ as they say. They need to learn to use and at the same time preserve for the generations after them. Many people take pride in knowing what the present situation on our planet is, in terms of how we are impacting the earth & nature. However just knowing isn’t enough, you need to take the next step and become accountable for what you do.

Dr Kalam had also said that if we continue to waste our water resources the way we presently are, by the year 2070, we would most likely be killing one another for a mere bottle of drinking water. Desalinating water will probably be one of the only jobs available. Children will start dying of mere desiccation of skin. All in all, life will become unimaginable.

Do we want that? Do we want our children to be born into a world where wanting to quench one’s thirst is like wishing that money grew on trees, something simply out of the question! No, we don’t. No one does. Hence, we must act before what we are left with is a lifeless, blue-less earth.