Category: News & Updates

The Painter who catches every drop.

Kirti

7^th March 13

Save every drop or drop dead. That’s all Aabid Surti has to say to each one of us. The National Award winning septuagenarian author and artist, along with a partner, plugs drips in homes in a Mumbai suburb, free.

Aabid Surti is a National Award winning author, artist, cartoonist and playwright. But ask him what his proudest achievement is and he will tell you he has saved more than 1.5 million litres water from going down the drain, literally!

The 77-year-old celebrates Sunday like none else, picking a building in Mumbai’s far-flung suburb Mira Road and, with his plumber and a volunteer in tow, searching it for leaking taps to plug. Free of charge.

His reward? “A lot of water saved. And sometimes, an offer for lunch,” he says simply. Surti’s non-governmental organisation, Drop Dead, has just one employee – him.

Surti learnt the value of water young. “I was brought up on Mumbai pavements, where every drop of water counts. There are fights over water there, sometimes very violent ones. So I can’t tolerate the thought of even a drop being wasted.”

Thought turned into action when, while visiting a friend’s house, he heard the annoying drip of a tap and asked his friend why he hadn’t fixed it yet. The reply was one we have all heard before – “I will get it done”.

The action was again what most of us have done before – nothing.

Surti’s friend justified his inaction by saying no plumber was ready to come for such a small job. It was then that Surti decided to bring home the plumber.

“I read an article that if one drop of water is wasted every second, 1,000 litres goes down the drain every month. An image of 1,000 bottles of 1-litre Bisleri bottles flashed before my eyes,” Surti recalls. He couldn’t ignore that image.

The year was 2007, the international year of water. Surti used the Rs 100,000 prize money of the Hindi Sahitya Sansthan Award he received for his literature from the Uttar Pradesh government to kick off his mission.

Every Sunday, Surti spends about Rs 600 on visit homes and fix taps. To raise money to take this initiative to other places, he prints T-shirts with his NGO’s logos and sets up stalls at exhibitions and fairs. “I spend Rs 100 to get a T-shirt made. I ask the buyers to pay me anything above Rs 100.” Some pay Rs 110, some Rs 1,000!

All it takes to fix a leak is a washer, which costs a piddly 50 paise – 25 paise if bought in wholesale. The plumber’s charges and the commute are the real cost of the social service.

Annually, Surti visits an average of 1,600 homes and fixes around 400+ leaky taps, saving around 414,000 litres water.

He takes the permission of building secretaries before approaching the households. The response is always positive. “The only time I was refused was when I took the permission of the  building secretary but the president did not let me enter because of some ego issues between the two.”

Now, Surti wants the Drop Dead movement to go to other parts of the country, courtesy local volunteers. “I am looking for people who are interested in this. I am ready to give them my logo and everything else. I don’t even want my name on their material. All  I want them to do is help save water,” he says.

Also on his wish-list are an office to hire more staff and a two-wheeler for his plumber to respond to emergency leaks.

The Gujarat-born author’s mission has attracted the attention of not just local but also international media. A crew from Germany accompanied him to homes and shot footage of the taps being repaired. Later, this was aired across Europe in a documentary called ‘Wasserknappheit in Bombay: Kampf um den letzten Tropfen’ (Water shortage in Bombay: Struggle for the Last Drop).

Not one to preach, Surti has a short message for every Indian.

“You may not be able to save the Ganges or the Yamuna from where you are but you can save a few drops here and there, and those few drops count.”

Stop the drip or drop dead!

(Catch Every Drop is a campaign on sustainable water conservation by The Alternative, sponsored by Arghyam, with partners India Water Portal and Biome Environmental Solutions.)

Link : http://thealternative.in/environment/abid-surti-the-painter-who-catches-every-drop/

• Sharmila Dixit

13^th Jan  2012

Dear Aabid uncle…

Lots of best wishes and my support to your cause. I start small and from myself by ensuring that in my house – my taps are not leaking..noone leaves any taps running or wastes any water. Boond boond se..

• Respected Sir,

My name is Ms Vijaya Kale. I stay in Vashi, Navi Mumbai. I read an article on internet about your work on water conservation. I have taken a community project called “Boond Boond Se Pani Bachao”. It is water conservation project by repairing tap leakages in my area.

I would kindly request you sir, to provide me some suggestions and guidance for my project. I would be highly obliged if you accept my request. You can also visit my facebook page :  https://www.facebook.com/BundhBundhSePaniBachao

Thanks and Regards

Vijaya Kale

11/11/13

• Kitec Industries (India) Limited

Dear Shri Aabid Ji,

It was indeed my good luck that I got an opportunity to meet you. Since I read your write up in Times Of India I was admiring you and your mission as I myself believe that water will be more precious than oil in the years to come and generations next will be cursing all our dead souls for having abundantly wasting this precious resource. I am sure in the white paper on water your name will appear in gold letters.

I will surely look forward to work for you in what ever way I can.

I seek ypur tee shirt design and your permission to use the same with KiTEC logo.

With warm personal regards

Avinash

11/20/13

The Alternative

(Similar Initiative : 22^nd Mar 2013)

Help us catch every drop

We city dwellers have a tap-and-flush relationship with water. We turn on the tap, water flows, we use it. We press our flush, all our waste is gone, and we forget about it.  Water shortage feels like a summer problem.  We look at the city administration and wonder why our taps have to run dry.  We look at our overflowing drains during rains and wonder when our flailing infrastructure will keep up with growth.

For us at The Alternative, working on a water conservation campaign and wondering if there is any way we can contribute to solving the problem has been a watershed experience, no less!

We realized just how much there is to water supply and management in a city that is bursting at its seams, like ours is. We live in a city that has been pumping 1,150 million litres per day of water from a 100 kms away, using technology and power to bring it over a height of 500 mts, which is huge technological innovation.  Every conceivable sewage treatment plant has been set up and used in Bangalore, 14 of them, to combat the 1.1 billion litres of sewage we produce out of our homes every day.

Each one of us consumes over 250 litres on an average every day, but cities can only plan supply for 150 litres per capita. We don’t treat our sewage, we let it pollute our ground water even as we suck up groundwater dry through bore wells.  We treat our lakes and tanks that are great freshwater sources with scant respect – we see garbage, we add to it. At the centre of the water problem in this city is us. And the solution? Us.

Through Catch Every Drop, our water conservation campaign, we have discovered just how much we can do as individuals – in our kitchens, showers, gardens, rooftops, in public spaces and while we travel.

Scores of apartments, homes and layouts in the city have implemented pioneering water conservation measures – rain water harvesting, sewage treatment, ground recharge, individual metering and more, that we can learn from.

There is frenetic activity going on in the city to conserve our proud heritage of lakes and tanks – 262 of them at one point. Our involvement will only mean more freshwater bodies, better water tables, more rain and beautiful birds and trees in our own backyards!

We invite you this World Water Day, to take a pledge to save water – harvest, reuse, recycle and refresh this life giving source. And we have placed all that we have discovered in a neat downloadable package of everyday tips and ideas, posters to motivate our communities, stories of how people have done it, nifty calculation sheets, infographics and expert pieces, quizzes for the daring and more.

Catch Every Drop is becoming the start of a big movement for water conservation in Bangalore – from print newspapers to campuses, schools, corporates and homes, many have come forward to further this initiative in their institutions.

World Water Day, 22nd and 23rd of March, we are starting off with an array of exciting events – panel discussions with water experts, apartment open houses, guided tours in water parks, lake photo walks and activities, photo exhibitions and more. www.thealternative.in/ worldwaterday has a detailed schedule of everything that is happening in the city.

We look forward to your invaluable support in sustaining this into a participative movement that can transform our city into a water wise one.

Catch Every Drop is a campaign on water conservation in Bengaluru, run by The Alternative, a media platform for sustainable living. The campaign is sponsored by Arghyam, with partners India Water Portal and Biome Environmental Solutions. More at www.thealternative.in/ catcheverydrop

Warm Regards,
The Alternative Team

Saving The Planet,

One Drop At A Time

26^th Jan 2013

Aalif  writes an inspiring true story that shows just how simple it can be for one person with an idea to make a difference.

Aabid Surti is an odd character. A few years ago, the angular, bearded author was invited to meet the President of India to receive a national award for literature at a ceremony in the capital, New Delhi. He politely declined. Absorbed in writing the first draft of his new novel, he cited the reason that he did not have time. But what he has made time for every Sunday for seven years now, is going door-to-door in Mira Road, a non-descript suburb of Mumbai, with a plumber in tow, asking residents if they need their tap fixed for free!

As a distinguished Indian painter and author, Aabid has written around 80 books but no story so moved him as the truth about water scarcity on the planet. “I read an interview of the former UN chief Boutros Boutros Ghali,” he recalls, “who said that by 2025 more than 40 countries are expected to experience water crisis. I remembered my childhood in a ghetto fighting for each bucket of water. I knew that shortage of water is the end of civilized life.”

Around the same time, in 2007, he was sitting in a friend’s house and noticed a leaky tap. It bothered him. When he pointed it out, his friend, like others, dismissed it casually: it was too expensive and inconvenient to call a plumber for such a minor job – even plumbers resisted coming to only replace old gaskets.

A few days later, he came across a statistic in the newspaper: a tap that drips once every second wastes a thousand litres of water in a month. That triggered an idea. He would take a plumber from door to door and fix taps for free – one apartment complex every weekend.

As a creative artist, he had earned more goodwill than money and the first challenge was funding. “But,” he says, “if you have a noble thought, nature takes care of it.” Within a few days, he got a message that he was unexpectedly being awarded Rs.1,00,000 ($2,000) by the Hindi Sahitya Sansthan (UP) for his contribution to Hindi literature. And one Sunday morning in 2007, the International Year of Water, he set out with a plumber to fix the problem for his neighbors.

He began by simply replacing old O-ring rubber gaskets with new ones, buying new fixtures from the wholesale market. He named his one-man NGO ‘Drop Dead’ and created a tagline: save every drop… or drop dead.

Every Sunday, the Drop Dead team – which consisted of Aabid himself, Riyaaz the plumber and a female volunteer Tejal – picked the apartment blocks, got permission from the housing societies, and got to work. A day before, Tejal would hand out pamphlets explaining their mission and paste posters in elevators and apartment lobbies spreading awareness on the looming water crisis. And by Sunday afternoon, they would ensure the buildings were drip-dry.

By the end of the first year, they had visited 1533 homes and fixed around 400 taps. Slowly, the news began to spread.
http://superaalifragilistic.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/saving-the-planet-one-drop-at-a-time/

Hamsa Iyer

6^th  February 13

Drop Dead, a foundation started by Aabid Surti that offers free plumbing services to residents of Mumbai, saves water one drop at a time.

Aabid Surti who lives in Mira Road, a Mumbai suburb, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from Hindi Sahitya Sansthan by the Uttar Pradesh Government in 2007. He has multiple creative talents. He is a painter, cartoonist, author, playwright and water warrior.

Water warrior?!

In 2007, Aabid Surti read an article in the newspaper that mentioned how much water was lost for every drop wasted. “1 drop wasted in every second implies a 1000 litres of water being wasted on average”. That’s quite a count! I grew up in shanties in Mumbai when I came from Gujrat and I know the value of water. That led me to set up Drop Dead Foundation”, he told me. The aim of the Foundation is to fix leaky taps and help save water. Every Sunday, Surti goes door to door doing just this.

Tejal Shah, the chief co-ordinator of the Foundation, joined Surti five years ago. She goes door-to-door to various apartment complexes to get permission  from secretaries of the housing societies to enter their premises come Sunday. Many apartments have already called them. “We don’t enter the premises without permission. We understand that people are hesitant to open their doors”. But getting prior permission doesn’t imply that everybody allows them to fix their leaky taps.

The most common problem is that the washer has gone bad. Aabid says, “But it costs me Rs.35 to just buy the spindle. The expensive component of the repair is the plumber’s labor cost and we provide that. But even then, we find people who don’t want to fix it”. Rather than get bogged down by such responses, they just go and save the next drop. Once they’re done with the apartment, they make arrangements for their next visit and also drop off a poster the following Monday.

Plumber Riyaz Ahmed also joined Surti three years ago. He found the painter’s work and perspective of saving water drop by drop very interesting. So he offered his services just for Rs.150. But over a time, people have come forward to fund the foundation, so he takes away Rs. 500 every Sunday for his services. These funds come from philanthropists and people who see Surti at various conferences and want to support this simple but effective task.

Together, the trio manage to spread awareness on saving water. Once the leaky pipes are fixed, they stick a sticker right next to the wash basin.

The sticker reads: ‘Save ever

y drop or drop dead’, a message Aabid Surti has carried on. After it sticker is stuck, they take the name and address of the person whose tap they have fixed. Till date, the trio has visited more than 6000 homes in Mira Road. Surti says, “What I am doing is not unachievable. It is simple. You can take up this cause too”.

He has inspired a few people. They write to the painter, who promptly sends off his material- the poster, stcker, plamplete via mail. He says, “One only needs to be determined to continue this. You can join the team on any Sunday. Just call us on 09820184964 and save every drop or drop dead”.

Link : India Water Portal