Every little thing counts in the crisis

The world is facing a gradually worsening crisis in the coming years, and it’s predicted to grow a global crisis by 2025. Today, half a billion people survive in conditions of water scarcity, but, if current trends continue, demand will outpace supply by 40% by the year 2030.

With the excavation of sand in some places going unabated, the villages resided on the banks of the river are facing drinking water shortage. High dry spells leaving nearly 2,000 villages high and dry, and random sand mining around major river basins changing towns prone to the water crisis. (1) Some people block the canal water with the excavated sand, this stops the flow of the canal to join in the mainstream rivers. It leads to a lack of water to the village and town situated in and around the canals.

Next, poor sanitation is a major water woe, and nowhere is this more apparent than India. The nation’s Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) calculated that 70 percent of India’s sewage is untreated and is settled off in its rivers and lakes.

The committee also discovered that 275 of India’s 445 rivers are seriously polluted. People drink from it, wash their clothes in it, bathe in it, consume its fish which cremate it with these activities. (2) Thirty million reservoir wells and pumps were built to overcome water scarcity, draining groundwater quicker than it could be recharged.

Runoff is the word for rainwater that drops on land and then runs downstream into the water system. In a natural water cycle, a high percentage of rainwater would be consumed by the earth, flowing down into the aquifer and replacing groundwater. Or rainwater would be absorbed by plants in a natural environment, where much of that water would ultimately be returned to the atmosphere.

However, buildings, roads, and sidewalk redirect rainwater away from the soil and into sewerage systems, preventing it from entering aquifers or nourishing plants. These processes not only stimulate fresh rainwater along a path to the ocean, decreasing our level of readily-available fresh water. (3)

Over a billion people lack access to fresh and clean water. And while some of us, particularly those in developed countries, are predisposed to clean and safe water, there are lots of people who employ a whole day searching for water to drink. It is up to us to perform any of the viable solutions in order to rectify the issue of water scarcity and make the world a reliable place for many.

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