World Water Day 2020: Garvita’s op-ed

For World Water Day 2020,  Founder and CEO of Why Waste? Garvita Gulhati, penned down some beautiful words for the occasion, and we decided to share this gem.

Have you ever stopped by a river and carefully listened to the flowing water? Sounds like she is laughing, having a great time, living life her way. Have you ever heard her gushing out of a tap? Sounds like she is crying. Crying of confinement, exploitation, deterioration and disrespect. Water gives colour, energy and brightness to our dry and sulky world. Have you ever wondered how life would be if for just one day you didn’t have water? The first task most of us carry out in the morning is our washroom jobs and if there is no water, it seems like we can’t even start our day. We often ignore the importance of water because it is so easily available to us.

When the tap runs too slow or the pressure of water in your shower is not enough, you’re overcome with frustration and anger. Imagine if you had to live a life without any of that. Where taking a bath with less than half a bucket of water was routine not an eco-friendly choice. Children in over 100 million homes in India lack the access to water and thousands are dying in its absence. People are walking miles to obtain a resource that we have so easily at our disposal without even moving a finger. So why do we fail to respect it? 

It’s simple, we don’t know its value yet, we don’t appreciate enough this universal elixir of life. (repeat this in your mind once) Did you know that everything, literally every single thing around you has a water tag. You name it and that object has a tremendous amount of water content you don’t even know off and couldn’t even imagine. Let’s start off with toilet paper, a commodity that everyone seems to be killing for right now. Every tiny piece of toilet paper consumes 15 litres of water, can’t even imagine what the entire roll would be. Your cheeseburger takes over 600 litres of water to make, your jeans take over 2000 litres of water to manufacture and your car took over 30,000 litres. This is just the inception of calculating the water price of everything around you. Consumerism has led to water becoming a redundant resource, being exploited to no seeming ends. (Look up Virtual Water to learn more such values).

Unfortunately, this price of our exploitation is paid by people who can’t afford to, and we oh so often we turn a blind eye to them. Let’s be the responsible generation and change this. Let’s make sure that every single time we use water, we take only as much as we need, we finish it and we teach the same to everyone around us. Ask yourself at the end of every single day – How much water did I save today? Save water, it will save you in the future. When you save water, you save everything around you. Without water, the earth would be reduced to a blank dry canvas. 

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