(Here are memorable excerpts from the meeting of WOWAF #24)

“Water is like blood. We can’t say the quality of it by just looking at it. The clarity of water is determined by the turbidity of water. There are various elements in water like fluoride, alkalines, sulphites, nitrates and more. But they must be in a limit and in between certain numbers. Dealing with bacteria in water is easier compared to mineral contaminations. Government confirms that 63% of all borewells have bacterial contamination. Arsenic is a big issue in Sikkim and those regions. People get skin spots and other issues because of this. People still don’t know how to address this issue. I have been speaking to environmentalists in that area. Organic contamination is higher during rainy seasons. In HSR layout sector 2 and 3, we saw the sewerage water getting mixed with municipal water supply. The issue was excess rainwater that led to mixing with clean water. I have made this presentation to builders as they fix a standard STP in apartments. They have to understand the behaviour of water every season and provide fixtures accordingly.”

- Vikas Brahmavar. Chairperson, Water Recovery Action Group, WOW Action Forum.  

“We need more people to do this on the ground. There should be more people actively involved in building STP systems and other treatment options, so it spreads like a chain reaction in Bangalore. I got in touch with Devi through social media as I wrote many blogs and posts. Devi stays in an apartment called Victory Harmony, Hebbal in north Bengaluru. She has been persuading the welfare association to implement RWH in her apartment for quiet for a while. She led an all-women committee to take over. They implemented the whole RWH system and groundwater recharging and brought back ‘dead’ borewells to life. Their monthly consumption with import of 150 tankers of water has fallen in November 2022 to a mere 20-plus tankers. They have much to do. I encourage her to spread this news to other apartments and showcase this as a model apartment in her City ward near Hebbal, and help some more apartments achieve this.”

- Ganesh Shanbhag  

“It’s an 11 year old apartment. We have 5 borewells here. But only 1 borewell is working. ‘Reboring’ has been done for other borewells as well but it still failed… for 11 years we lived with tanker water. As a ladies committee we started in March 2021. We tried telling people to use water cautiously, reduce usage etc. But nothing worked out. To attract all 100 apartments owners to accept the ideAa, we adopted a small trick. Nine of us women collaborated and we took over 10 apartments each. We called ourselves ‘adopted mothers’ for these families. We went and spoke to these houses and convinced them logically with maintenance calculations including water which we are not being provided with. When it comes to money every one starts to think. For that reason we convinced them to have RWH in the apartment. It took us 3 months to convince everyone. Last month we successfully installed it. This November month I installed a meter to know how much we are harvesting and how much we reduced as import of water by tankers. In November alone, we harvested 3.5 lakh litres of water from the RWH systems. We also got to rejuvenating the borewells by recharging them with surface water from rains. Our water table has increased a little bit. So our borewell has also started giving us water. We draw about 3500 litres per day. We used to buy water in a month from about 150 tankers every month. In November it has reduced to a mere 20 tankers. We hope to do more in the months to come – waste water treatment and reuse, IOT meters in every home, better monitoring of RWH systems, better and more efficient water taps and showers in our homes…”

- Devi Gopalan  

“The first thing that Vikas’s presentation showed was “colour does not mean contamination”. What you see is not what you get. It is beyond all this as water purity is concerned. An important aspect is that there are so many contaminants today and they are invisible. The world has changed dramatically in several ways in the last few decades and contaminants come from various sources. We let rainwater run into the sea in Chennai, and we are forcing ourselves to go deeper and deeper to tap groundwater which is also energy-intensive. From Devi’s talk I know that such a big transformation is possible. In my apartment in Chennai. I have been living here for 3-4 years. When I took over as CEO of the International Council for Clean Water I didn’t have much to do with water. I found water hardness in the apartment that I live in was at 8000 ppm. Iron content was over 10 and it was going up to 26 in the months after rains, and the water was sometimes red. Two years ago, residents started depending on bottled water and there was a huge demand for it. People started using it to take a bath as well because they were suffering from hair fall and rashes. We were planning to implement an RO plant. In fact that was suggested by the apartment department. It shocked me. I put my foot down and said, No way we will have RO. Where are we going to throw contaminated concentrated rejects from the RO System? There was no answer. We stopped using brown water immediately because the water level was very low. There was rainwater harvesting but that was not maintained properly. We started using tanker water and the people gladly paid more for it. This made me nervous and started thinking, How are we going to sustain if we use water like this? We studied why RWH didn’t work for us, and found a lot of mistakes we were making. Our bore wells were deeply dug–over 30ft more than was needed. It had more salt content. We rectified things, one after another, and soon we had water quality improved. This opened my eyes to the fact that for centuries we have done things that were good but because of lack of knowledge and our herd mentality, we have taken to ways that destroy the environment. We need to reverse this.”

- Nandakumar Ethirajulu, CEO of ICCW  

“I live in Canada but I’m originally from the Netherlands. In the Netherlands there is a lot of work being done on water storage. Because the country is 75% below sea level, when there are big rain events we need to put the water somewhere as a nation. So to prevent flooding they have come up with water storage capabilities under the roads, under sidewalks, … wherever they can store water, even on roofs. They do this to avoid any flooding from happening. I always look around to see what happens in other places and try to think along and come up with ideas.”

- Marius Bauer, Ontario, Member of GlobalWaterWorks.