Water Scarcity In My House
“Mom! No water is here, switch on the submersible I need to wash the dishes. “ Instructed someone. “ Mumma! Don’t worry I am opening the motor with the alarm,” said another.
A few moments later…
It’s been five minutes and no water is out from the tap, Is there any leakage happening? Check it out!” said the first person.
“Mom! I checked all the taps but there is no leakage” the other one added.
“ What!, this couldn’t happen! If that is the case, your dad will check what is the problem when he will come back from work” the mother replied.
“ What if the water ran out? What if the groundwater level went below, remember our sister forgot to shut the motor two days back which resulting in leakage of water for more than an hour” said both of them.
This is the conversation from not anywhere else but of my own house and this incident took place on 22 June this year. The three people in this conversation were my sisters and my mom. Also, you heard it right the person who forgot to turn the motor off was me, Safoora and this happened the first time ever in my parent’s house. I regret this and yes I will surely remember to not do it again.
From this incident don’t judge me about what I did because all I did was just the icing on the cake you may say. Because we just got the alarm which tells whether the water is full or not a few years back and before that, it happened a couple of time ( as much I can remember) that the water came out but in any of the cases it happened for so long. It happened only in my case and I did a diary entry of it.
Now coming up to what happened next is that we had an up-gradation in our house and another pipe of 10 feet was attached to the previous pipe which was installed 13 years back in 2007 when our house was upgraded. All thanks to my parents and their efforts that the water level isn’t too low as recently I heard that someone who has a phone number in our phone ( I mean to say that we know that person but they are not our relative) got this whole process done and the groundwater level in their house is about 200 feet. ( the time I heard that I was shocked and was awestruck by imagining that how much 200 feet might be by the way it is about 40 times my height) And our groundwater level is about 100-110 feet (I know that is too much but not way too much than the one mentioned above)
After this whole incident happened I was too much shocked and decided to write a blog post on this topic. So, here I am sharing what I found.
The content you will find below are questions I googled ( only eight of them) and the wisdom I got after reading all the seven articles in which there lies the answer to my questions. All the blog post from which I got the wisdom are going to be listed at the end of the post so, for now, let us discuss the knowledge.
QUESTIONS
How much water do we have?
To this question, I got the answer from the blog post that the earth has plenty of water and is been used by generations to generations but the distribution of the water is unequal, leaving many of us thirsty and on the other hand leaving others with plenty of water.
On the other blog post, it is been said that earth will never run out of the water as the water is in massive form and is been recycled from ages. Also when a volcano erupts, the water which is present inside the earth surface come out of it and we make use of it. However, fresh water isn’t distributed equally so, some places face water crises and in other places, we are able to see lots of water. That is why we must save water the earth will never run out of water ever.
The other question I was having in my mind was about the distribution of water among humans, so I asked a few questions and one of them is:
What is the population of human beings?
After listening to this question, you might be thinking about what kind of person am I? I don’t even know the current population but to me, I want to not only want to answer this question but to answer many other questions related to this.
So, the current population of the world is about 7 billion, according to the 2011 census and talking in contrast to water, we are not the only people who drink water all of the living organisms need water to survive and to see what is the population of living beings I came across a blogpost which described who is in the 7 billion clubs other than humans.
To this, I was able to find this table which I copied exactly from there because I do not want to mess with any of the information.
Species (1)
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Terrestrial plants: 560,000
Marine plants: 5-10,000
Terrestrial animals: 5,000
Also, I want to quote more than a paragraph from there and it says:
In 2011 we touched the mark of 7 billion and we are not the only one to touch that mark, instead, there are many other species who have touched that mark way before then we do.
In terms of animals whose bodies are around the size of a human's, WWF International consultant Jonathan Loh, an honorary research associate at the Zoological Society of London, wrote to us to say: "No other large mammal comes close to us in terms of numbers. According to the FAO, there are around 1.4 billion cattle in the world and about 1.1 billion sheep (in 2009). The total cattle biomass would be greater than ours (more than 500 million tons), but sheep biomass would be considerably less (below 100 million tons)."
The next question that I got was the one from which I was able to collect a lot of wisdom and that question is:
How many of us are not able to find clean drinking water?
To answer this question I came across the blog post which gave me the most of the wisdom which I am going to discuss with you now. The first thing I need to talk about is how much people die because of insufficient water and all the fact that I am going to tell you is of India which will compare the total (I mean the whole world) Coming back to the topic, according to Global Burden Of Disease (GBD) 5,69,679 people died due to insufficient water source in 2017 only. At first sight, I was shocked to see that huge sum of people who died due to this and then, I realised that this is just India and not the world world, Here is the graph which shows the proof. After this graph lies the comparison graph between the world and India.
In this, you may see that it is on the sixth number after high blood pressure, Air pollution, High blood sugar, smoking, outdoor air pollution and alcohol use.
Now, let us talk about how much people are now getting improved drinking water because globally, 1.2 million people died due to the same reason in the year 2017. ( I shared this data to ensure that you may be able to see that there is a lot to do.)
Now, let me tell you that 9 per cent of the world’s population do not have access to clean drinking water (until 2015) which comprises 666 million humans, luckily this data is improved in comparison of 1990, where 1.26 billion human beings were affected by this when the population was less than 6,127 million people.
In 1990, 4 billion people had access to an improved water source; by 2015 this had increased to 6.7 billion. This means that over a period of 25 years the average increased in the number of people with access to improved drinking water was 107 million every year. These are on average 290,000 people who gained access to drinking water every single day.
We saw the improvement rates of water availability and now let us see this graph which is falling of the death rates due to water unavailability. The following graph to this is death rates fall per 1,00,000 people.
In India, there are about 77.23 million people who still don’t have access to clean water sources but the best thing about this is that access to improved water sources is increasing across the world, rising from 76% of the global population in 1990 to 91% in 2015. This means 9% – nearly one-in-ten – do not have access to an improved water source. Now, after reading this you must also want to know what is in the perimeter by which it is stated that the people are not getting improved water sources or not. So, the definition of improved water sources includes “piped water on premises (piped household water connection located inside the user’s dwelling, plot or yard), and other improved drinking water sources (public taps or standpipes, tube wells or boreholes, protected dug wells, protected springs, and rainwater collection).” Note that access to drinking water from an improved source does not ensure that the water is safe or adequate, as these characteristics are not tested at the time of the survey. But improved drinking water technologies are more likely than those characterized as unimproved to provide safe drinking water and to prevent contact with human excreta.
This is the chart which shows the number of people without access to an improved water source by region. The regional breakdown of those without access has changed significantly over the past 25 years (1990 to 2015) We must also keep this in mind that in 1990 nearly 42% of those without access were in East Asia & the Pacific. By 2015, this had fallen to 20%.
HOW MANY OF PEOPLE ARE AFFECTED BY DROUGHT?
I don’t need to expand this topic because already I have told you that 666 million people are not able to get clean drinking water and out of them there are 55 million people who are affected by drought every year and if you want to study in detail then you might study from the blog post published by World Health Organisation (WHO)
Coming towards the last question that I asked myself, it was one of the most obvious ones but I really want to explain this because it is often neglected and the question is
WHAT ARE THE WAYS TO SAVE WATER?
Yeah! This one is the most underestimated topic in water and I hope that after you read the data above you might have started seeing water as a privilege ( because after the “water scarcity in my house” incident I started to see it that way because we were not having water for roughly about 5-6 hours and which made me realise that there are many people who face this scarcity for the most part of their life). I am now going to tell you just 7 of the ways to save water which if you practised regularly, you will save a lot of water and they are:
You must not overwater the lawn
You must not water the lawn between dawn to dusk
You must compost or mulch to reduce water runoff and evaporation
You must cover the pool cover which reduces water loss due to normal evaporation.
You must store the filtered out water ( from the water purifier )
You must not waste water by moping the floor
You must consider saving water by frequently checking the taps.
At last, I really want to do a personal talk here because a lot happened. There was a reason why I was not able to write from a lot of time. I have not decided what will be my next blog post about so, I posted a poll today on Instagram and Facebook stories from which you may decide the most desired one or what you may do is to DM me on Instagram ( because there only personally I can answer your messages.
This is it until now, will meet you after two weeks with a new blog post. Don’t forget to drop a like here and always stay connected and be safe.