Better India, Chennai

Early last summer, as the Chennai water crisis inched towards its peak, 20 year old Gaurav Jain decided it was time to make a difference. Gaurav’s story of making the most of the two months of his semester break back home is a story worth sharing. As a  first step, he decided to talk to his neighbours and fellow residents to gather insight on the governing mindset towards the growing crisis. What he found was an alarmingly high rate of indifference to an issue that would soon be their city’s worst water crisis in three decades. They believed that the tankers that had been providing for their apartments so far would continue their services undeterred for the near future. To tackle this mindset, Gaurav and his team of campaigners, started to propagate the How To Save 100 Litres Of Water module, a comprehensive collection of pointers developed by the youth run NPO Why Waste? to save water in simplistic ways. Why Waste?, which was started in 2015 by Bangalore’s then 15 year old Garvita Gulhati, is the parent of the #GlassHalfFull movement, a movement that directs restaurants to serve half-filled glasses to their customers to cutdown water wastage by fifty percent, is now actively involved in helping Chennai get back on its feet. Gaurav became a part of Why Waste? earlier this year. He got in touch with his teammates back in Bangalore and decided to take their collaboration with restaurants a step further, by developing a dichotomous approach to dealing with small-medium sized and large restaurants/hotels. Some of the tips included installing aerators in taps, having bucket baths over showers in smaller restaurants, and reusing the waste water from R/O and other water purifiers for other domestic activities in bigger hotels. They also  got in touch with radio stations across the city to spread the word.Having been deeply moved by the Cape Town crisis, Garvita started a trending movement under the hashtag  #ChennaiNotCapeTown, giving a sharp wake up call to the citizens on the pending doom looming over them. She also took forward a movement called the #HalfBucketChallenge, taking to social media to encourage citizens to use half filled buckets instead of the regular filled ones. What Chennai is facing is a classic case of what is often called the resource curse – a condition by which cities with an abundance of resources are worse off than the others because of mismanagement and corruption in the high offices. It is time the citizens take things into their own hands and turn the tide over. On asking Gaurav how the experience of working with restaurants in Chennai was, Gaurav commented “I mostly used the Chennai water crises, as an anchor to explain to them (the restaurants), the gravity of the current situation, and then urged them to follow simple steps to save water. Most restaurants would understand and reciprocate, and while a few restaurants did not come on board, the rest loved the initiative and the fact that I’d picked this up as my work during the holidays.”