Our cities are reeling under severe water crisis and probably Bangalore city is the worst hit. I am a Bangalorean who is also involved in some activities related to managing water and electricity in our apartment society. Hence, I understand the exact difficulties regarding the water situation in our garden city.
Bangalore’s current supply of water from its utilities board (BWSSB) is good enough to meet only 50% of its demand. Further, the ground water in this region is depleting fast. The fact that even a 1000ft deep bore well doesn’t seem to find any water in certain places explains our current plight. The case is not too different in many other parts of India.
Water saving measures in our Society
In the past, we had undertaken multiple interventions in our community to save water using various available technologies. This included, installing water saving aerators in faucets, shower heads etc and also (non-technical) lifestyle changes of saving water via restricting car wash frequency, drip irrigation methodologies for gardening etc. However, one of the biggest spend item that’s not addressed so far is how we use our toilet flushes.
Like in the case of many 10+ year old apartments in India, even we do not have water saving dual flush systems installed in our toilets. This means that every flush spends roughly 8 litres of water and each person does 8 to 12 such flushes every day. The important thing here is that up to 8 flushes a day are typically used for disposing our liquid waste (urine mainly). This is where, I think, there’s a huge opportunity to save water.
Why Half Flushing?
In order to flush out urine, one just needs to spend 3-4 litres of water or half of what your toilet flush dispenses per flush. While dual flushes address this problem, majority of our toilets are still not dual flush type. Hence, we need to manually do a half-flush while flushing liquid waste and this is exactly the aim of this campaign (non-commercial) that I am trying to run.
Dear friends, please watch the following video and make sure that it reaches your contacts living in the Indian cities – especially apartment dwellers. We together can save millions of litres of water via disciplined measures such as half flushing technique. Typically, one can save up to 15% on your overall water consumption via this method alone. Hence please act today!
If the video doesn’t appear on this page, please click this direct link
And, if someone is interested in knowing about numerous practical ways to save water and cut down on your water bill, please feel free to contact me. This is completely free and I have no business interest whatsoever when it comes to conservation of water. I can just share a few tips with you that worked well for our apartment community.
Please start saving water today via optimizing your consumption!
Very good initiative. Easy to practice. I follow a very simple rule. “If its yellow let it mellow, if its brown flush it down.” 🙂
Thankfully we do not have a problem with water yet, but we are still careful with water a lot. Mom collects water she uses for dish washing (especially the second rinsing once the soap is gone) to water plants. All toilets have direct flushes without the flush tank, so its easier to save water there..
Good initiative Ajith. Hopefully we can survive this drought.
Thanks Arun. Do you have a well at home? Or is it piped water from Municipality? If it’s a well, try doing some rain water harvesting this year on using the rain water from your terrace, may be as a hobby project 😉 You may never ever face water problem again.