Friday, September 4, 2009
Augmenting Supply vs. Increasing the efficiency of use
In class, we spoke about how most power sector reforms were targeted at increasing the supply of power (i.e installing more power plants etc) and how the actual power supplied to users could also be increased by reducing transmission and distribution losses. The same is true of water. One way of solving a water scarcity problem is to treat, recycle and re-use wastewater. This way we reduce our dependency and our impact on the natural environment. The following article by Dr. R.K. Pachauri of TERI is an interesting read, and talks about the same issue.
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The article was really thought provoking, like any other article about environment. They have done a good job in assessing the water crisis that we are going to face and in relating it to the GDP and so on. But …
o Are we really unaware of the coming crisis?
o Don’t we know until NASA warns us about the issue?
I don’t believe so. We know and used to see how the water is being wasted in large quantities due to the leakages and water tanker transportation.
o What are we doing then? Going to complain…!
o What happens if you go and complain it to the concerning authority?
o What about the strength/status of law enforcement in this regard?
The emphasize on this water crisis is fair enough that even an illiterate knows the problem that we are going to struggle with, if we are not careful about it now.
o But what jolt action is being taken to revive it either by the government or by any individual?
Let me share my funny experience in this regard- “In Vizag, at my uncle’s home there was a water supply station, which used to supply water through water tankers to other places, in the middle of group of apartments. Lot of water was being wasted while pumping it in to the tankers, which used to get stagnated on the worn-out WBM road of the street troubling the users of the road and the apartment residents near by . They have given a no. of complaints regarding the stagnation & wastage of water. After a long time, as a part of 2009 local election stunt, CC roads and drainage systems were constructed. And after that people stopped complaining or worrying about the quantity of water that was and is being wasted as they got a good road facility.”
As mentioned in the article, price incentives or disincentives and also the law enforcement besides proper maintenance and repairing the existing facilities would definitely make the things better to some extent.
I agree to Bhagat's view that everyone knows about the water crisis that we are facing.. but perhaps we are not too aware of the gravity of the problem. Probably , we are taking things too much for granted! There are simple things that we could practice such as rainwater harvesting within apartment permises or setting up a small scale waste water treatment plant in case of commercial and institutional buildings; which can help us reuse water from bathrooms, washbasins, kitchens etc. If government could implement these by making it mandatory to include such facility for every new construction( which it has in few places)and setting up some scheme to upgrade the existing buildings too with these facilities, it would be one small step that we could do to conserve water. Let me quote Mr. Anil Agarwal, director of the Centre for science and environment (Delhi based NGO), who has been promoting RWH as a promising solution for 'drought proofing' --
"The Real Green Revolution is about rainwater harvesting.
Let us catch water where it falls. Let it transform human lives. Let it change social existence. If this happens, the world will be transformed. The world will merely be an agglomeration of ecological-rainwater harvesting-democracies."
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