Elixir of Life - Water

Future wars are likely to be faught over issues arising out of WATER. We must adopt rain water harvesting that will save us from problems during dearth of supply of potable water.

Novel ways of saving water as also fuel/gas for bathing, cooking have been adopted by me as follows:

(1) For my hot water requirements and also to get bacteria free water for drinking and cooking, I have installed solar water heater system in my house - I have kept the sump and overhead tanks clean and when there is bright sunlight and the water is quite hot, I switch on the built-in electric heater inside the solar water drum, for about five minutes and switch off. Result is I get boiling water through the tap in my bath room. I store this boiling water in clean containers, cool it and use it for drinking - this way I am avoiding major e-coli bacteria that spreading diseases through water borne polluted water.

(2) Same boiling bacteria free water is being used in my kitchen for cooking and to clean greasy vessels. If we use the hot water, time taken for cooking on LPG/electric stove gets halved and I can save considerable amount of LPG gas/electricity, help the nation conserve foreign exchange since we depend upon imported gas for LPG supply with so much of subsidy.

(3) As responsible citizens, we must help the authorities to conserve and supply water to the poorest of the poor people who cannot afford buying bottled water for their health and potable purposes. By installing rain water harvesting system, we can have unlimited supply of water throughout the year and need not burden the municipal authorities.

Example: source: Bangalore Mirror dated 15-10-10 - Gist: Bangalore had two major showers in 20 days - First shower gave us 106 mm rain fall and the second gave us nearly 20 mm rain fall per hour. If 28,000 identified homes had adopted rain water harvesting system, we could have saved FOUR HUNDRED MILLION LITRES OF WATER that went down the drain. This much of water could have been sufficient to supply all of Bangaloreans for half a day.

We should not imagine that fossil fuels, water and other natural resources are available in plenty. They are depleting by the minute. Human beings are over exploiting them and one day, our future generations will be literally 'POWER'LESS and WATERLESS. Every minute, billions of litres of sweet water is flowing into the oceans only to become salty and unavailable to humans due to climate change and melting of snow caps all around the world. Time to reduce CO2 and other Green House Gases to less than Vasanthkumar Mysoremath
Mysore Grahakara Parishath
Mysore City, Karnataka, India