Had the Coronavirus not spread to more than 188 countries within three months and taken the lives of more than 13 thousand people, the world would be celebrating World Water Day today – the 22nd of March –with much fanfare. The theme for WWD this year is ‘’water and climate change’’, which hopes to emphasize the crucial connection between water and climate change and how climate change has already started to impact water resources around the world.
The other day I wrote an op-ed for The Kathmandu Post after visiting Janakpur, where I had the opportunity to participate in the evening prayer at the Ganga Sagar. The prayer, called the Aarti, has become a ritual at the Sagar in the last decade to worship the water body by offering lights. I was encouraged to write the piece after listening to the following message that the priest delivered during the prayer:‘’ If you want to keep clean, keep the water clean.’’
After I heard him tell this to a small group of devotees who had come to observe the Aarti, I immediately tweeted it and decided to write a small piece based on the message. Keeping oneself clean requires clean water that couldn’t have been more appropriate given the current global pandemic we’re combating. Handwashing has become a mantra in recent months to keep oneself safe from the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, in the past decades, we have abused water bodies, be it ponds or rivers or streams, without any hesitation. Clean water has become a luxury.
In all our formal teaching in schools and universities, we were told, since forever, that we are the second richest country in water resources in the world. There is plenty of water. This knowledge perhaps did not help us realize that the same water sources would become one of the scarcest natural resources and only those who could afford it would have access to it. The rest would have to depend on limited amounts of water that too often of low quality and polluted to survive. Amidst this situation comes the COVID-19 pandemic, which is wreaking havoc globally and has already taken the lives of 13,671 people as of today; the death toll continues to rise at an alarming rate. There is no cure or treatment available yet. The only way to contend it is to stop its spread, by limiting contact among people, but more importantly by keeping one’s hand-washed and sanitized.
However, this raises an equally important question: does everyone have access to as much water as is required to keep their hands clean, in places where it is needed. It is a question for city dwellers like those of Kathmandu, where a massive amount of water is already supplied by the market in jars and bottles or tankers. The municipal supply only comes once a week and that too at a limited capacity. The unfolding situation has revealed how poor have we become to make water available to all.
Massive amounts of public resources are spent in building infrastructures to transfer water from one place to another and made available to people. But water is vanishing from many of the sources – thanks to the faulty policies of the state that encouraged damaging land use for decades and the changing rainfall pattern caused primarily by climate change. What good would the expensive infrastructure do if there is no water in the first place? Where there is water, it is surrounded by people who have never been found to be serious about keeping the water clean – because they were taught that there is a planet full of water.
Time has come to invest in keeping our water clean. Keeping water clean, as instructed by the priest in Janakpur, is not difficult. We just need to change our poor habit of abusing water, which we’ve acquired over the decades; this change in behavior would be an investment each individual makes in protecting and maintaining our water resources. If a clean hand can save humanity from the havoc of COVID-19 and if clean water is needed by all (the rich, the poor, the educated, the uneducated, the urban elites, the rural folks, …), why don’t we start talking about how can we keep our water clean. Thanks to the priest who coined a simple yet powerful message for us to ponder upon. In the coming days and months, we will have less and less water available as the impact of climate changes deepens. If one can really get to the core of the message from the Janakpur priest as well as the theme of World Water Day 2020 – water and climate change – it is not difficult to see enough justification to save and keep the water clean. After all, ‘’Everyone has a role to play.’’
Until next
Madhukar