KARACHI: Every morning when Sohail Maqbool Malik turns on the overhead shower, he can’t help marvelling at the travails that the first tiny drops coming from his shower must have gone through to make it to his home.
“I see that every drop that hits my face has a connection with the glaciers in the Himalayas which travels from the mountain, along the plains and into the Indus, fights sea-intrusion and survives….all these issues gush through my mind,” he says in a documentary film on conservation of water titled ‘Time is running out’.
But then Sohail is the country representative of the IUCN -- The World Conservation Union -- in Pakistan and can’t help worrying about the precious liquid – water. Long, hot showers are out for him!
“You have to have feel for the environment,” says Sohail “before you can change living habits.” And with glaciers no more an unlimited water storage resource, he feels individuals have to come forward and make a conscious effort.
Considering that Karachi is the seventh largest city in the world and home to over 15 million people (with the number all set to double by 2025), many water specialists are getting sleepless nights, including Simi Kamal.
Some call her scatter-brained and others a maniac, but for over two decades, Simi, a geographer and a water specialist, has been crying hoarse and fighting an uphill battle with friends and family, trying to convince them that unless they save water and make conservation part of their lifestyle, there won’t be much left for generations to come.
Highlighting the misuse of water by the urban elites, she says the present water crises are of their own making.
It is the unending demand and consumption of the urban population – who want to water their sprawling lawns, wash their cars every day, hose the paved areas, install rain showers and Jacuzzis and pressure pumps – making water scarce for the less fortunate. It is indeed a tragic reflection of how most of us treat the environment.
“It’s not like I’m telling them to alter their lifestyle drastically; all it takes is an attitude change. And if we don’t stop and take charge now, there just won’t be enough water for any of us, rich or poor.”
If Simi had her way, she’d banish the taps, the watering pipes and even the flush tanks from homes and bathe the old-fashioned way – from a pail and a mug.
And she has figures, meticulously calculated, to show how much water is literally allowed to go down the drain by all of us daily: using a full tank when flushing uses up 45 litres/per flush; water left running while brushing teeth 13 litres, shower kept running till hot water reaches shower head 35 litres (18 litres/minute), long showers 10 litres, water left running while washing dishes 50 litres, washing car with a hose – up to 180 litres!
And then there are leaky pipes that can cause up to 90 litres of water loss; leaking faucets (one drop/second) 25 litres and toilet leaks 60 litres.
“You can take a bath comfortably in half a bucket (5-10 litres) of water or for that matter clean the car using even less if you wipe it clean with a pail and wet cloth. Use a watering can instead of the pipe to water the garden, close the tap while brushing teeth, lathering or washing hands. Save the shower water while waiting for hot water or for it to get to the right temperature in a bucket…,” Simi goes on and has a hundred other tips on how to save water on her fingertips.
What she is advocating is already being practised by a majority of the less fortunate people in Karachi.
Take for example people like 37-year-old Nighat Monica, a housewife, living in Pahar Ganj, in North Nazimabad. The neighbourhood gets water just once a week and that too, for just two hours and can come anytime in the night. It means that once a week her husband has to sacrifice his sleep. “This is enough to fill our storage tank which has a capacity for 1,000 gallons.”
But Nighat has to really be frugal to be able to make it last for six days. “If our neighbours don’t take water from us, the five of us (she has three children) are just about able to make it last for six days and by the seventh we all get very anxious.” They use the same water for drinking purposes after boiling.
Monica saves water one whole week to be able to wash clothes the following week. “It means a huge pile of soiled clothes but there is no other way.”
The soapy water is re-used by washing bathrooms and mopping floors.
They even fill up the kitchen sink with detergent and water and put the used dishes there before rinsing them with clean water. “We can never think of washing dishes under tap water!”
According to her husband, Zahid Farooq, who has for as long as he can remember bathed in half a bucket of water, use less water.
“We keep a bucket under a shower and while water is being mixed that clean water is saved.”
But now, after 20 years, Simi has realized that people sermonizing does not help. People don’t have the time to listen. So she talks to them about how this will help them save. “Talk to them about savings they can make, and hopefully they will buy your line.”
According to her calculations, if you make the little changes that she advocates, you can make do with a quarter of the water you use. So for all those who buy a 9,000-litre tanker for Rs1,000 every week (this excludes the bottled mineral water being bought for drinking), by judicious use, can make it last for three weeks, specially if Monica is making do with nine times less quantity.
And she practises all that she advocates, literally. Wasting water is the biggest sin anyone can commit, if you ask her.
Her modern kitchen has two plastic tubs in the sink, just like Monica’s, one filled with soapy water and the other clean water for rinsing the utensils.
“When the washing machine is used, we don’t run the entire cycle but use the ‘wash only’ option. The soapy water is re-used to wash bathroom floors and terraces,” she adds. Again like Monica.
While Simi finds that bringing about a change of mindset is the biggest impediment, for Monica, it was something that was enforced due to her circumstances.
“Nowhere in the world does water come for free. Unfortunately, it’s cheap here so people consider nothing about wasting and then there are evaders who will willingly pay any amount to buy water but will cry fowl if it’s billed by the government-operated water supply system.”
She has also found like-minded people and formed a group –- the Karachi Water Partnership – that has actively begun campaigning for the conservation of water. On the one hand it has government officials, water experts, specialists, urban planners and economists as its members, on the other, it has ordinary citizens like Tofiq Pasha Mooraj, already observing conservation practices at home.
Instead of the latest cricket score and the wheeling dealing going on the political front, he may well start his conversation with: “Did you know you can set your flush tank on a setting so that it discharges less water?”
“But if you can’t do that, just place two plastic half-litre bottles of water in the flush tank and you will be saving 45 litres or more water,” he goes on.
Hosting a weekly gardening show on television, Mooraj makes sure he always ends on a ‘use water carefully’ note.
Till a year back Zohair Ashir, a management consultant, thought he was leading a fairly comfortable life in the metropolis. He never thought of water as an expensive commodity till he made a few calculations.
“I knew I had to change my lifestyle.” On his way back home, after meeting Simi, he bought five 45-litre plastic jerry cans and a few yards of rubber pipe. “I got down to connecting the pipes to the air-conditioners with the other end going into can.” He realized that for every air-conditioner that ran for a minimum of six hours he was able to collect almost 45 litres of water. “And we usually run three ACs at home! He even got the water tested and swears ‘it is far safer than tap water’!”
Now a true convert, he feels, “water must be given the same reverence as food, something that is not to be wasted.”
But when he tried to convince the dozen or so office owners to adopt the same water harvesting practices and use that water to clean the cars for which these same people were buying a water tanker daily, his suggestion simply “fell on deaf ears”. According to him, all that precious liquid from homes and offices can be collected and transported to squatters where there is an acute shortage of water.
In his house, the driver now cleans the cars with just half a bucket of water and a piece of cloth. “Although changing bad habits are difficult and we keep slipping back,” he keeps at it.
“It’s a long haul and our work is still at an embryonic stage,” says Zohair, adding: “It’s no breaking story as changing attitudes does not happen overnight.”